Frieze LA 2024 is underway. Just a few years ago, Frieze was a new player in town. Now, it’s the only place to be during ‘Freize Week’, a phrase that totally overlooks the fact that two other art fairs, Felix and Spring/Break, are happening simultaneously in other parts of Los Angeles.
Thursday’s Frieze VIP preview assigned timed entry to various tiers of who’s who. I learned just how high the ladder went by our time slot. I, the press, was allowed inside at 2pm, a local curator friend at 1pm, and an associate director of a pretty famous museum was granted access as early as 10am – and that’s not even considering the secretive pre-parties that took place on Wednesday night.
Regardless of what time the VIPs were allowed to step into the Barker Hangar at the Santa Monica Airport, Frieze was crowded. Almost every reflective artwork had a line for the obligatory selfie, and you’ll have to forget about posing for a shot in front of a classically Los Angeles Ed Rucha print without a crowded mass of passersby photobombing the Instagram.
While you squeeze through the tent, be on the lookout for the exceptional art on view in these ten booths, which are a fun mix of blue-chip stalwarts, artist-run spaces, and special installations.
What to see at Frieze LA 2024
Frieze Projects
Each year, Frieze curates a non-commercial component known as Frieze Projects. Without being beholden to art market trends, these artworks tend to be more political, conceptual, or just plain silly. One highlight from this year’s Frieze Projects is Sharif Farrag’s Rat Race (2024,) which lets fairgoers power RC car rodents decked out with flames and stars. Winners get trophies adorned with a ceramic orange pylon. Sign up for the next round of races on Saturday and make that trophy yours.
Sprüth Magers
Sprüth Magers has galleries all over the globe, but its Los Angeles location has mostly focused on the feminist artists on its roster. While this year’s booth includes men like Sterling Ruby (who just unveiled a Vans collaboration) and Robert Irwin, their best works on display are from women. Gretchen Bender’s tower of CRT monitors, Wild Dead I, II, III (Danceteria Version) (1984), flickers with CGI flowers and corporate logos, long anticipating the internet age. Nearby, Analia Saban’s Copper Tapestry (GeForce 8800 GTX, Nvidia, 2006) (2024) made with woven copper wire and linen thread, considers the extractive forces keeping our computer addictions afloat. Just make sure to avoid making eye contact with Anne Imhof’s deranged etched clown photographs – the gnarled face in Clown (maximum blue purple) (2023) is going to keep me up at night.
Commonwealth and Council
Against all odds, Commonwealth and Council has become the artist-run space that operates with the prestige of a blue-chip gallery. Its booth showcases a gorgeous, two-person exhibition with Lotus L Kang and Suki Seokyeong Kang (no relation). Lotus’ cast aluminum anchovies are strung to gridded canvasses and bundled into rope-like charms that dangle from the ceiling. Suki’s Mountain series builds wall-mounted landscapes with painted steel, chain, silk, and thread. Both artists pull from their heritage and show how tradition can be folded into a rapidly changing modern society.
VSF/Various Small Fires
The VSF booth unites five artists contemplating the havoc of climate change. Brandon Ballengée mourns extinct species like the Eastern Cougar and Passenger Pigeon by juxtaposing their bunt and cut-out above a small etched funerary urns. Nearby, in Drought (2023), Jesse Homer French paints Joshua trees aflame. It’s a bleak outlook, but VSF does do its part to promise a better future. There’s a giant bin full of dirt accompanied by a cheerful sign: ‘Free compost and worms… ask us!’ Offset Frieze’s carbon emissions with your small act of going green.
Kasmin
The New York gallery dedicates its entire booth to vanessa german, who builds Afrocentric busts, boomboxes, and skateboards from plaster, glass beads, rose quartz, and so much more. Notably, among her materials, are emotions like ‘love’ and ’disgust’. The self-taught artist may romanticise objects by adorning them in pink crystals, but the titles are activist anthems. For example, a skateboard adorned with a swan has a title that will not let a collector mistake it for passive viewing: skateboard memorial to tyre nichols who screamed out for his own mama to come for him while the police were jumping on his back and taking his name out of his soul and making him dead with their own looseness of being and in the brutality of this separation unaliving him for no reason other than _________. Well. Or, skateboard as grief. (2023).
The Pit
The Pit is part of Frieze Focus, a programme that gives upstart galleries booths at the fair. I’m not sure why The Pit was selected for Focus, because it has been around for a decade, but I won’t question it because its presentation of Allison Shulnick’s ceramic pots and flower paintings was fantastic. Her glazed porcelain sculptures come alive with hand-built moths, snakes, and unicorns. On mint green walls, more porcelain woodland critters float around dreamy oil paintings of palo verde and sea lavender.
Nazarian/Curcio (formerly Shulamit Nazarian)
Another gallery in the Focus programme, Nazarian/Curcio, still referred to by its old name of Shulamit Nazarian, enriches Wildine Cadet’s solo exhibition with shades of lavender and ultraviolet. The Haitian photographer, who will have a solo exhibition at the gallery later this year, casts her family in shadow, nearly blending their features into the night sky. At times, she hides portraits behind wood panels, playing with the fuzzy reconstruction of memory.
Anthony Meier
This Bay Area gallery based in Mill Valley, CA, is dedicated to showing post-Second World War contemporary masters. At Frieze, it gives multidisciplinary artist Jesse Schlesinger an opportunity to show minimalist, wooden sculptures carved into round forms or precise cubes. Much of the wood is in its natural state, but some is painted in bright cyan or magenta. One piece, Untitled (2023), looks like the cross between a grandfather clock and a guillotine. Much of the material, like redwood and cedar, has been salvaged, showing the artist’s fondness for sustainability and memory.
OMR
The gallery from Mexico City features numerous works by Mexican-American artist Eduardo Sarabia, including The Sun (2023), a psychedelic stained glass window that features a large mushroom floating in front of a brown hand. Sarabia’s mushroom motif repeats in ceramic tiles, surrounding pin-up girls rendered in the refined blue-on-porcelain style. Another surrealist work is, Gabriel Rico’s No penny no paternoster (2023) in which an enormous fibreglass serpent engulfs its head in a gold-plated beehive that is speared with knives and bones.
Gary Tyler
The once incarcerated artist is a 2024 Right to Return Fellow and the winner of the 2024 Frieze Los Angeles Impact prize. Tyler was wrongfully convicted of murder and spent 42 years in prison; now, he turns to art for healing. He creates quilted works with appliqué to depict personal memories and the stories of other incarcerated people. In Memoriam of an Ashanti Warrior (2024), an old man sits in a chair, holding a long silver staff for support. The city of Santa Monica purchased this work for their annual Art Bank acquisition, which brings art into public spaces.
Frieze Los Angeles 2024 is on from until 4 March
