Five Moments from Frieze Los Angeles
As the fair returns to Santa Monica in 2025, take a look back at standout works, performances and initiatives from its first five editions
As the fair returns to Santa Monica in 2025, take a look back at standout works, performances and initiatives from its first five editions
Frieze Los Angeles will open its sixth edition at the historic Santa Monica Airport on 20 February 2025. Its previous iterations have galvanized the LA art world, seen it take to the streets of the city and support social change. Here are five highlights.
2019: A ‘Psychic Art Advisor’ sets up shop
Frieze Los Angeles launched at Paramount Pictures Studios in 2019, creating a new 'art world' to inhabit the fake New York City movie set in the backlot. The debut Projects program played upon California's histories of visionaries, influencers and cranks, with a performance work by artist Lisa Anne Auerbach, Psychic Art Advisor, in which she dispensed astrologically informed art-buying advice to potential purchasers (though unfortunately failed to foresee a looming global pandemic). In the same year, Tino Seghal presented his ephemeral (and therefore undocumented) performance This is Competition – an amusing take on the relentless rivalries of the art market, featuring two directors from major international galleries.
These were the first in a succession of interactive artist-led projects at Frieze Los Angeles that have included Channing Hansen inviting audiences to play a game of chance inside the artist's sci-fi inspired woven installation (2020); Sharif Farrag’s fun-for-all-ages radio-controlled rodents in Rat Race (2024); and Alake Shilling’s Buggy Ball (2023), that welcomed fair audiences to play football with the city’s flagship team LAFC and ‘Buggy Bear’ – the artist’s embodiment of freedom of expression, who sat gigantically in his technical area throughout.
2020: Barbara Kruger asks some difficult questions
If any city in the world is defined by its signage, it’s Los Angeles (Hollywood even has its name written on a hill). In 2020, artist Barbara Kruger played 20 questions with her hometown in a very public way, with such posers as ‘Is there life without pain?’ and ‘Who do you think you are?’ confronting passers-by at street level in letters 15 feet high. Her Frieze Week project ‘Untitled (Questions)’ comprised banners, murals and digital signs, on landmarks, civic spaces and galleries. In a year that saw VIP visitors including Leonardo DiCaprio, Natalie Portman, The Weeknd, Ryan Beatty, Usher, Jeremy Scott, Travis Scott, and Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez (who bought a work by Genevieve Gangnard at Vielmetter), Kruger’s stark piece gave voice to more existential issues amid LA’s A-list hoopla.
Originally displayed as nine questions at MOCA in 1990, and reprised there in 2018, the series effectively bridged the pre- and post-internet eras, and its Frieze version also pierced the artworld’s private/public ring-fence. The work’s questions themselves range from the politically ageless (‘Whose justice?’) to the defiantly gnomic: there is perhaps no easy answer to ‘Who hustles vapor?’
2022: Gagosian brings a folly to the fair
There have been many memorable solo presentations of LA-based artists over the years: in 2019 Hauser & Wirth devoted its stand to Mike Kelley’s installation Unisex Love Nest, which sold for $1.8 million to a major European institution; in 2020, LA Louver’s solo by Alison Saar saw the artist added to the collection of a significant US arts foundation; and in 2023, David Kordansky Gallery’s presentation of Chase Hall’s paintings was a standout. But in this pantheon, a whimsical and monumental booth of West Coat artist Chris Burden really captured the aesthetic contradictions of Los Angeles.
Burden died of natural causes at his home in Topanga Canyon in 2015, having survived performance works in which he was shot, attempted to ‘breathe water’ and was nailed to a Volkswagen. Intrigued by the uncanny dislocations between reality and representation, he was already celebrated in Los Angeles for Urban Light (2008), an outdoor installation at LACMA consisting of 202 antique cast-iron lampposts that evokes a mysterious interbellum LA and which became a fixture on Instagrammers’ bucket-lists. An associated work, Dreamer’s Folly, was a star of the 2022 fair. This major piece consists of more cast iron: three ornate, Calamine-pink, Victorian garden gazebos, framing lacy net curtains. It was the first time that this large-format piece was exhibited in the US, and it was a fitting testament to the LA artist: simultaneously massively immovable and dancing on the breeze.
2023: John Cage joins the fun fair
Frieze Los Angeles returned in 2023 with ‘Against the Edge’, a projects programme curated by Westside local Jay Ezra Nayssan (who moved his Del Vaz Projects to Santa Monica in 2020), that looked at the seaside city’s liminal and coastal identity. A standout from the programme was Nicola L.’s takeover of Thomas Mann’s house, in which the story of one European émigré to the Pacific coast was overlaid with a very different feminist narrative of transplanted Old World modernism; another was ‘Merry Go Round’. This performance in the famous fairground ride on Santa Monica Pier (captured in the video above), was a homage to landmark 1955 group show ‘Action’, curated by the young Walter Hopps, which took place in the same location. In its honour, there was a performance of John Cage’s Speech, also composed in 1955. The work is scored for five untuned radios and a newsreader, and in this new context its fragments of information suggested not only an invisible world flying around us, but communications from nearly 70 years of Los Angeles’s past.
2024: Santa Monica Art Bank recognizes an artist who has overcome 42 years of injustice
Artist Gary Tyler has a remarkable life story. Sentenced to death for murder at 17, he spent 42 years in prison before his sentence was commuted in 2016. In gaol, he learned traditional fabric quilting while working in the prison hospice for terminally ill inmates. After his release, he used the technique to create art, and his tale of overcoming that life-destroying injustice was further recognized when he won the Frieze Impact Prize at Frieze Los Angeles 2024, with his work In Memoriam of an Ashanti Warrior subsequently acquired by the Santa Monica Art Bank for its collection.
Tyler’s story is a landmark moment in Frieze Los Angeles’s continuing commitment to supporting social justice within the fair. In its inaugural edition in 2019, artist Mark Bradford created the work Life Size, an image of a police body camera that appeared on billboards across the city, a comment on a surveillance state that also refuses accountability. Bradford asked that sales of the work’s print edition be donated to philanthropic ‘de-carceration fund’ Art for Justice. In 2020, Frieze formalized this arrangement, partnering with Art for Justice to create the Frieze Impact Prize – now presented in collaboration with The Center for Art & Advocacy, and awarded annually to a formerly incarcerated artist. The example of Gary Tyler shows that art can not only document social change, but effect it.
Further Information
Frieze Los Angeles returns for its sixth edition from 20 – 23 February 2025 at Santa Monica Airport. Early-bird tickets now available.
To keep up to date on all the latest news from Frieze, sign up to the newsletter at frieze.com, and follow @friezeofficial on Instagram, Twitter and Frieze Official on Facebook.
Frieze Los Angeles is supported by global lead partner Deutsche Bank, continuing its legacy of celebrating artistic excellence on an international scale.
Main image: John Cage, Speech, performance on Santa Monica Pier for ‘Against the Edge’, curated by Jay Ezra Nayssan, Frieze Los Angeles 2023. Photo: Frieze
