Frieze LA: Highs & Lows

Frieze LA is something Angelenos look forward to year after year. The fair, which has had a well-established home at the Santa Monica Airport since 2023, returned last week (February 20-23). As usual, VIP preview days were Thursday and Friday before the fair opened to the ticket-buying public for the weekend. With seven years in the making, fair-goers have come to expect a particular experience: cutting-edge contemporary art from up-and-coming names, classic works by modern icons, lively, constant conversation among art-loving strangers, booths designed with the spirit of Installation Art, and big-name brands whose commitment to installation lets consumerism take a backseat to experience. It’s not as if Frieze did none of those things this year, but it certainly didn’t do all, and in the areas that moved beyond good intention to rise to the occasion, it was overall, in a word, lackluster. But for all that Frieze lacked this year, the silver lining is that a generally underwhelming fair emphasizes the moments that meet and surpass expectations.

Installation view of Sadie Barnette’s How to, Vol. 3, 2024. Photo courtesy of Maya Garabedian.

Critically speaking, the quality of art and its presentation, in terms of quantity, entered a downward trajectory last year. This is partly due to the resurgence of tired themes reminiscent of the social justice and cultural literacy of nearly a decade ago. In the graphic design and text-art space, there was a lot of pseudo-empowering binary messaging to the tune of, “Women can do anything men can.” With generic milquetoast language that ranged from puzzling (“Some leaders are born women”) to exhaustedly overplayed (“The wage gap exists”), it’s hard to believe those quotes were pulled directly off the walls of Frieze in 2025. Walking by the Jessica Silverman booth restored my dwindling faith in Pop Art-style text, eliciting my once-a-fair tribute to André Leon Talley – “My eyes are starving for beauty!” – this year, out loud. With works like How to, Vol 3, Sadie Barnette cleverly plays with the idea of a self-actualization manual without being too on the nose.

Chris Burden, Nomadic Folly, 2001, wood platform, 4 cloth and metal umbrellas, woven carpets, braided ropes, pillows, silken fabrics, glass and metal lamps, iPod, and speakers. Courtesy of Gagosian.

Other styles of graphic messaging returned to the spotlight, including neon LED handwriting-style fixtures, which were featured overwhelmingly despite their propensity for catching on fire, an ironic oversight considering the tragic LA fires of late and how much of the show was dedicated to that. Some booths opt to include these vibrant lights to bring life to a fairly plain space, which, while effective, runs the risk of overpowering the installation. The most memorable booths tend to uplift their pieces with creative use of the space that results in a cohesive vision, blurring the lines between art and presentation. Gagosian’s presentation of Chris Burden’s work never fails to make an impression, with this year’s Nomadic Folly, the most exciting and likely popular to date, as visitors can become a part of the work themselves. One of the most memorable booths of the fair was from Almine Rech, whose Tomokazu Matsuyama solo booth was so well-attended that his works, priced from $100,000 to $600,000, had almost sold out by Thursday afternoon, with four pieces joining institutional collections – a marker of resounding opening day success.

Installation view of Tomokazu Matsuyama’s solo show at Almine Rech. Photo by Dan Bradica.

Another standout with viewers flocking was the Frieze LA Impact Prize booth, which offers the recipient a $25,000 cash prize and a solo exhibition space at the fair. This year’s award went to Victor “Marka 27” Quiñonez, whose debut presentation was a striking, layered examination of immigrant experiences – namely Latin communities from his neighborhood in Queens – where migrant workers and street vendors participate in economies of survival in more ways than one. His ICE SCREAM series makes tension and distress accessible through a playful, bright approach that honors his “neo-Indigenous” style. The prominent sociopolitical presence of his work was refreshingly topical, at odds with the outdated approach to body positivity that was surprisingly prevalent. In a regression that deserves its own article, we’re back to showing fuller bodies in the nude, reminiscent of the Old Masters, and symbolically personified lumpiness in more abstract work, all somehow drawing from a collapsed, homogenous understanding of white womanhood.

Installation view of Victor “Marka 27” Quiñonez’s solo show ICE SCREAM series with close-up. Photos by Maya Garabedian.

This year's most prominent social and environmental themes were related to the recent LA fires. One staff member attributed the lack of branded booths to the space required for disaster-related showcases. In the past, there were usually two brand rooms, one belonging to a skincare brand, and another by Breguet, the luxury watchmaker. Their reliable presence is admittedly one of my favorite holistic experiences of Frieze week: the performance element of watchmakers working live, the mixed media visual art that typically includes film, sculpture, even antiquities, like old machinery, and the bubbly energy that comes with complimentary champagne and European salesmen. Replacing what are often the liveliest spaces of the fair with reminders of a very fresh local disaster inevitably brings a different energy to the table. The most memorable included LAND MEMORIES: VOICES OF ALTADENA, an ongoing project from the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums that honors the culturally rich and historically Black city devastated by the fires. In a nearby booth supporting LA Arts Community Fire Relief, many thematically relevant pieces were on view, including Sand Writing Crater – a sandbed manipulated through robotic arm training that uses a magnetic ball to draw symbols and site readings related to catastrophic events in LA (past fires, car crashes, etc.), with a spiraling reset mode.

Left: LAND MEMORIES: VOICES OF ALTADENA film. Right: Max Hooper Schneider, Sand Writing Crater, 2024, kinetic sand crater. Photos by Maya Garabedian.

2025 was the perfect storm for a lackluster Frieze. Several fairs occurred simultaneously this year, and Frieze no longer imposes any regulations – in the past, galleries and dealers couldn’t show at Frieze if they were also showing at Felix Art Fair, for instance – so participation is spread thinly on all fronts. As a result, Frieze can’t have all the best pieces, galleries don’t have the time to make the most creative booths, and visitors have to decide between no less than four fairs with an hour’s drive between each. But, sales show that while it wasn’t a visitor’s fair, buyers weren’t too deterred, with pieces sold at up to 2.8 million dollars. Hopefully, as the community recovers from recent tragedy, Frieze LA will get its energy back.

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