Frieze Los Angeles and Felix Art Fair, 2025

A much-needed tonic after the fires laid us low, Frieze art week did take place, the city’s art community showed up and visitors poured in from across the globe. Although one of the four participating fairs (Spring Break) chose not to open, the unexpectedly charming Post-Fair, staged in a post office, did

Alex Israel, Movie Theatres, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 137.2 x 354.3 cm at Gagosian, Los Angeles, 2025. Photo: Jill Spalding.

Felix Art Fair: Hollywood Roosevelt hotel
19-23 February 2025
Frieze: Santa Monica Airport, Los Angeles
20-23 February 2025

The Felix Art Fair filled three floors of the venerable Hollywood Roosevelt hotel with art that spilled into the bathrooms and out to the patios lining the David Hockney-painted pool. Scrappy no more, it offered museum-quality paintings, prodigious ceramics and elaborate mixed-media assemblage that spoke to gravitas while remaining affordable. Available in the same booth (Sow & Tailor), a work on paper by artist-of-the-moment Shaniqwa Jarvis for $950 and an oil on canvas by Aspen artist Sabrina Piersol for $18,000.

Christy Gast at Nina Johnson. Photo: Jill Spalding.

Work by local artists predominated, ranging across media and disciplines. At Nina Johnson, a disembodied sculpture by Christy Gast, dressed in denim, sex indeterminate; at Charlie James, Luke Butler’s acrylic and gouache paintings of backwater Los Angeles; at Nicodim, by Isabelle Albuquerque (yes, Lita’s daughter), a bronze flower sprung from a slab of Pacific live oak.

Design featured strongly with luminous, tendrilled resin and hemp lamps by Ross Hansen at Volume, and feats in stoneware abounded; commanding two booths were majestic Hellenic vases by local artist, Jasmine Little.

Lamps by Ross Hansen at Volume. Photo: Jill Spalding.

Trending and clearly here to stay was art burnished by multiple careers. Still in memory are the dexterous works on paper by Mark Gonzales, a Los Angeles artist whose obsession with motion has shaped a career leading from the “most influential skateboarder of all time” to poetry, film-making, acting, design and a solo show at the Städtisches Museum.

Weakest were efforts that begged attention by piling it on. Autumn Wallace loaded a convoluted steel armature titled Antenna Theory with quartz, pelts, brass, tourmaline thread, foam, jade and faux eyelashes.

Frieze weighed in the day after Felix started. Having navigated the access through Santa Monica airport to the massive tent erected for the 101 participants, a collector observed of the visitors crowding the aisles: “It’s so social.” In fact, the clustering was communal, the first in-person encounter of friends and colleagues distanced for so long by the fires and anxious for the artists who had lost close to everything. They soon got down to business though, judging from reports of robust sales. My overall impression was of the strong contributions by artists deeply rooted in the Los Angeles culture and of eye-catching work – fierce colours, large canvases, and bold assemblage engaging a counterintuitive plurality of materials. The quality was high – even the modestly priced emerging art was accomplished. And, whether because stir-crazy or financially hurting or a new paradigm, braving the advice of art cognoscenti to absolutely not attend art fairs, Tariku Shiferaw, Xin Liu, Lauren Halsey and even icons such as Catherine Opie (showing at Regen Projects), were happily – and productively – milling about.

Xin Liu at Make Room. Photo: Jill Spalding.

The happy fluorescence of local artists headlined Claire Chambless with Player, Non-Player (2025), an interactive across-the-fair hunt for golden eggs enfolding miniature sculptures referencing foraging and togetherness. Bahamian Angeleno April Bey took over the Vielmetter booth with wall-length, dyed fur and puffed textile portraits of her community’s bid for diversity recognition and peace. Ozzie Juarez popped at the Charlie James space with vivid acrylics painted on gates and, outdoors, with a recreation of a neighbourhood swap meet, Pásale! Pásale! Todo Barato (2025), where he invited visitors to bargain with him for free items. Quintessential LA, Jackie Amézquita’s installation, Trazos de Energía Entre Trayectorias Fugaces (2025), deployed long strips of lava rocks, agave-fibre mats and a ziggurat built of fossil shell powder, biochar, grass, soil and ocean water to convey how the Tongva tribe shaped and navigated the land.

Colour-charged painting swallowed the most wall space; at Regen Projects, Barrier (2023) in powder-coated aluminium by Sable Elyse Smith and at LA Louver, Now Everything’s Easy (2024), by Rebecca Campbell. Even the ubiquitous ceramics were so florid that Liz Larner’s Frondescent (2025), flourished with glaze, copper, bronze, enamel and leather, read as restrained.

Alake Shilling with Dino’s Fine Feast, 2025 at Jeffrey Deitch. Photo: Jill Spalding.

The more-is-more bid to stand out encouraged works stitched, glued and assembled from disparate materials; from Kevin Beasley, at Regen Projects, Site XLI (2025), composed of resin, raw cotton, altered pillowcases, Guinea fowl feathers, confetti, shoelaces and fibreglass. At Rele, Shinique Smith’s paintings conversed with totems sculpted and patterned with fabrics, objects and jewellery, and at Jeffrey Deitch emergent artist Alake Shilling showed Dino’s Fine Feast (2025), a faux-naif painting of a plaster-crusted, two-panel dinosaur – “I couldn’t afford a large canvas” – embedded with whimsical objects.

As at Felix, there were nods to the classics, with California artist Laeh Glenn’s hauntingly beautiful portraits of single flowers sourced from jpegs (Rose, 2025) and painted with a technique evoking the Dutch masters.

Confirming that Black artists are now mainstream, they sold fast – though mainly those who have “made it” such as Shiferaw, Amoako Boafo, Bonolo Kavula, Zanele Muholi, Manyaku Mashilo and Akinsanya Kambon. And it spoke to street art as bona fide collectibles that the Mexican-born Victor Quiñonez, (AKA Marka 27) earned a solo stand and this year’s prestigious $25,000 Impact Prize.

There was an equally strong Asian presence – Make Room sold all the delicately tendrilled works by Xin Liu. Artists from the Philippines (most notably Kawayan de Guia) are having a moment and, energised by the new Frieze Seoul, all three South Korean galleries filled with bejewelled collectors buying up the work of Kim Yong-Ik, Kim Yun Shin, Suki Seokyeong Kang and Park Seo-Bo.

With a few notable exceptions, photography took a back seat, and video will go extinct unless it goes fourth dimensional as it seemingly did at Focus, with Ken-Tonio Yamamoto’s Prototype Research Series 05 built of a mysterious “copper nanotech on Raso”.

Chris Burden. Nomadic Folly, 2001. at Gagosian. Photo: Jill Spalding.

Max Hooper Schneider, Sand Writing Crater, 2024 at Maureen Paley. Photo: Jill Spalding.

The showstoppers? At Gagosian, Nomadic Folly (2001), Chris Burden’s curtained, remove-shoes-and-enter harem room, filled with buyers taking a break. At Maureen Paley, a kinetic floor sculpture by Max Hooper Schneider (Sand Writing Crater (2024) circled a steel ball imprinting patterns into sand. At Anthony Meier, the inevitable nod to migration informed a 17-ft-long wall installation by Libyan Yurok artist Saif Azzuz, assembled of found miscellanea – seashells, beer cans, splintered wood, newly brave (think “Protect Trans People”) buttons.

Wael Shawky. The Gulf Project Camp: Carved wood (after 'Nighttime in a City' by Mir Sayyid Ali, c1540), 2019. Oil on carved wood, 210.8 x 243.8 x 25.4 cm (83 x 96 x 10 in). Photo: Jill Spalding.

At Lisson, a roughly hewn and painted, marquetry wood miniature – one section framed – of a Safavid city, The Gulf Project Camp: Carved Wood (after “Nighttime in a City” by Mir Sayyid Ali, c1540), by Venice Biennale 2024 star Wael Shawky. At Pace, the work all would have taken home – James Turrell’s pulsing, tri-colour, 2½-hour run-time, light piece, Yus-Asaph (2021). Most poignant and talked about, at Anat Ebgi, the painting of his flamed childhood home and the palm that likely sparked it, by Alec Egan, who lost both the house and and the studio filled with the art awaiting his upcoming solo show.

Alec Egan. Guard Rail, 2025 at Anat Ebgi. Acrylic and flashe on canvas, 72 x 60 in. Photo: Jill Spalding.

Extending Frieze Week to the galleries, what stands out? Crowds flocked to the opening for monolithic flamed paintings at David Zwirner by art star Lisa Yuskavage (until 12 April). In 1996, in the face of excoriating reviews, she came out of the gate running with subversive, colour-saturated, skilfully painted girlie magazine takes on the pubescent female figure that were credited with resurrecting figurative painting and skewing the cultural aesthetic to a normalisation of sexual frisson that still subliminally colours ours.

Mr. at Perrotin. Photo: Jill Spalding.

It was inevitable, given the pull of AI, that art would fall into it. Less expected was the rapidity of its crowning (at Gagosian, until 22 March), with Alex Israel’s formulaic takes on “iconic” LA (gas station, movie house, Hollywood eatery) all processed like packaged foods from actual photographs given over to AI to artificially colour as paintings. If intentionally sterile, they are inadvertently slick and, as such, sure to be snapped up to irradiate such as Elon Musk’s just-bought mansion across from Mar-a-Lago. And such is the saleability of Mr. that, to keep up with demand, on the eve of his solo show at Perrotin, the artist was up a ladder finishing off another of his wall-length childlike, slice-of-life updates of Japan’s still super-cool flat-movement Manga aesthetic.

To end on a high note, an exhibition at the Bergamot Arts Center featuring works created by fire victims, such as Michael Deyermond’s Fireproof Print #1, You Forgot to Burn Me (2025), sold out, with 100% of the profits going to the artists.