History, Land and Identity | Highlights at Frieze Los Angeles 2023
Ranging from reflective portraiture by Hana Ward to abstract painting exploring indigenous cultures by Helen Evans Ramsaran, artists at this year’s fair engage with historical pathways of migration, the legacy of colonialism and forced displacement to inspire their work
Ranging from reflective portraiture by Hana Ward to abstract painting exploring indigenous cultures by Helen Evans Ramsaran, artists at this year’s fair engage with historical pathways of migration, the legacy of colonialism and forced displacement to inspire their work
Taking place 16-19 February 2023, Frieze Los Angeles will be hosted at Santa Monica Airport, alongside events, installations and museum exhibitions throughout the city.
At the fair, gallery booths will feature artists from communities historically impacted by forced migration, displacement and neo-colonialism. Pulling from their ancestry and a retrospect of the self, these artworks offer new and engaging ways of understanding identity. Highlights include:
Born in Eritrea during their War of Independence, Ficre Ghebreyesus left as a teenage refugee and ultimately settled in New Haven, Connecticut. His vibrant works meld figuration and abstraction, suggesting non-linear forms of dreams, memories, and storytelling (Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, Main).
Influenced by anti-colonial histories and spiritual texts, Hana Ward’s paintings depict Black and Brown feminine figures who reflect and dream as they build their own sovereign worlds from the inside out (OCHI, Los Angeles, Focus).
‘Seen and Unseen’ is a presentation of work by Chris Watts and Helen Evans Ramsaran that builds on their interest in exploring the representation of the Black body and indigenous cultures, through abstract painting and bronze sculpture (Welancora Gallery, New York, Main).
In Lakota artist Dana Claxton’s work, past, present and future fold into one another, speaking of the encounters, exchanges and violent conflicts that continue to shape North American Indigenous experiences to the present day (Donald Ellis Gallery, New York, Barker Hangar Main).
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum's boundary-crossing practice centers Black female identity in the discourse of postcolonialism and neo-colonialism, and draws inspiration from a broad range of fields, from ecology to physics to art history (Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, Main, Group).
Ta-coumba T. Aiken’s work is rooted in a deep engagement with Black history and culture; a vessel for the collective memory of his community, the artist begins each painting with intuitive freeform underpaintings which he calls ‘Spirit Writing’ (Dreamsong, Minneapolis, Focus).
A new installation by Los Angeles-based artist Hanna Hur consisting of two parts – a large floor sculpture made of copper chainmail and clay, and a diptych of two large paintings – will function as a site for ritual and a symbolic altar for Hur’s Korean ancestors (Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles, Focus).
A group installation interplaying the work of Iranian artists Mamali Shafahi, Peyman Barabadi and Babak Alebrahim Dehkordi, whose practices draw on the ancestral Persian traditions and imagery absorbed through their upbringing, to create new worlds of the uncanny (Dastan Gallery, Tehran, Main).
Outside the fair, a highlight of Frieze Week is a monograph presentation by William Kentridge showcased at The Broad Museum. Many recent drawings that will be shown were created for Kentridge’s monumental performance project The Head & the Load (2018), which unearths the neglected histories of Africans and Africa in World War I.
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Main image: Hana Ward, Like a long forgotten dream, 2022, Oil on canvas, 48 x 46 inches, Image credit: Courtesy of the Artist and OCHI. Photo by Ian Byers-Gamber.
