黑料不打烊

The fifth edition of Frieze Los Angeles wrapped up this past weekend, and while the entire week has come to be known as “Frieze Week” – seven full days of parties and events around the city – the official fair runs only at the tail-end, opening Thursday, February 29 (the VIP preview day) and closing on Sunday, March 3. Returning to its 2023 location, the Santa Monica Airport, Frieze LA 2024 was of comparable size in terms of visitors and galleries, albeit a slightly smaller turnout – some 35,000 visitors attended in 2023, with 120 galleries featured, whereas this year’s edition saw 32,000 visitors and 95 galleries. While the rainy weather, a continuation of LA’s uncharacteristic gloom this year, may have dissuaded some additional attendees, the visibly lighter turnout may have something to do with the shifting focus toward Frieze Week events. LA is becoming increasingly serious about art, but the scale hasn’t tipped comfortably in favor of art appreciation, and still succumbs quite often to the weight of its longstanding reputation: a place where social currency, image and status, reigns supreme. However, this tendency does support the arts financially. Many celebrities and collectors, or staff on their behalf, attended the fair, making purchases that exceeded past prices and estimates.

Tomás Seraceno’s mosaic (2024). Photo by Maya Garabedian.

After a robust preview day, galleries continued to report booths that were sold out, sales reaching seven figures, and significant acquisitions by museums throughout the weekend. Noteworthy transactions include the largest purchase of the fair, Gladstone Gallery’s sale of Richard Serra's 2009 drawing, Pamuk, for $2 million, and an Alex Katz painting for $650,000. Thaddeus Ropac sold a Robert Longo drawing for $1.6 million and a piece by Anselm Kiefer for €1.3 million. At Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, Beauford Delaney and Norman Lewis paintings fetched between $1 million and $2 million. Operating in both LA and New York City, David Kordansky Gallery catered to its LA audience, selling all pieces by pop-culture and celebrity-inspired painter Sam McKinniss. Victoria Miro and Pilar Corrias, based in London, sold out their respective collections by artists Hernan Bas and Sabine Moritz. Gallery Hyundai in South Korea also saw a sell-out of Kim Sung Yoon’s impressive still-life paintings, while Kaufmann Repetto in Milan and New York City managed to sell all the pieces in their group presentation of varied mediums featuring Andrea Bowers, Katherine Bradford, and Pae White.

Tomás Saraceno’s iridescent flexiglass mobile. Photo by Maya Garabedian

While more traditional mediums like large-scale paintings proved popular and profitable, works with unique hands-on craftsmanship were the stars of the show by my standards – captivating for fair-goers looking to experience something different and exciting, and fetching an impressive price for a newer name. One of the first pieces visible when entering the fair was Tomás Saraceno’s Foam SB 82/45p (2024) from Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, which reflects the overhead lights with ever-changing iridescence. In an energetically similar section of the fair, stunning rose quartz busts and reimagined objects from vanessa german constantly turned heads, as did her charming and emotionally-charged descriptions that were iconic in their own right. Over the course of the fair, Kasmin, which was representing german, sold seventeen of her works priced in the range of $25,000 to $65,000. 

Rose quartz busts, boombox, and skateboard (2023-24) by vanessa german in Kasmin booth at Frieze LA. Photo by Maya Garabedian

Other works that stopped people in their tracks followed a similar theme of fine craftsmanship across creative mediums: a large-scale hand-cut mosaic of glass and twenty-four carat gold from the mind of Latino artist Eamon Ore-Giron was facing attendees as they walked by the James Cohan booth, causing many to stop and stare. Elsewhere, passersby stood beneath a colorful stained glass window that applied modern imagery to a canonical medium. Represented by OMR, Eduardo Sarabia is not only making a subtle nod to religion, but offers a contemporary approach to the style, with inspiration, one can assume, stemming from Mexico, where he lives and works. Both artists, through their return to ancient artistic practices, bring us back to the roots of culturally significant artisanship, which offered a welcomed counterbalance to the surprising number of found objects and ultra-contemporary works of art throughout the fair.

Eduardo Sarabia’s The Sun (2023). Photo by Maya Garabedian

Similarly, the mesmerizing work of hand-embroidered, textile-based artists like Jordan Nassar and Gary Tyler, who are Arab and Black, respectively, draw on their cultural roots to tell their stories too. Nassar has been an up-and-coming name for some time now, and his pieces being tucked away in the corner of the Anat Ebgi booth was no match for the magnetism of his painstakingly stitched cotton over canvas. Tyler, on the other hand, was honored as the 2024 Right of Return Fellow and Frieze Impact Prize Winner, and was the subject of promotional materials featuring his name, photo, and biography, immediately garnering attention. His quilting fabric and thread help tell his story. At the age of sixteen, he was sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit, and spent forty-two years in a Louisiana penitentiary before being released. He later went on to win the Right of Return Fellowship, which offered up to $20,000 and mentorship to formerly incarcerated artists.  The Frieze Impact Prize then selects someone from the cohort of a given year’s fellowship and offers them an additional $25,000 along with the opportunity to showcase their work at Frieze LA – this year, that someone was also Gary Tyler. The Santa Monica Art Bank acquired one of his pieces, In Memoriam of an Ashanti Warrior (2024), to expand their collection and represent local artists.

Jordan Nassar’s Sleeps the sun (2024). Photo by Maya Garabedian

Gary Tyler’s In Memoriam of an Ashanti Warrior (2024). Photo by Maya Garabedian.

Beyond art, artisanship seemed to be a key component of many of the stand-out works and experiences this year. Even in the Breguet room, watch specialist Peter showed, under extreme magnification, the innermost workings of perpetual watches, a special kind of watch that coincides with leap year. In the space for skincare and beauty collaborations, luxury Korean brand Poiret and artist Laure Prouvost built an installation experience that adapts with time. For instance, when the same sort of event happened in London several weeks ago, the plants were simply seeds. While the intersection of labor and art has always been meaningful and fascinating, it’s something that the LA art world could benefit from experiencing more often, and this year, Frieze offered us that opportunity.

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