Photo La Art Fair Sales Were Up This Year

I've covered art fairs for years, traversing more custom-built tents, colorfully dressed crowds and hive-like mazes of mini-exhibitions than I care to remember. Only never have I witnessed an actual sale take place, permit alone one involving a major Los Angeles creative person at a mega gallery.

The Frieze Los Angeles art off-white opened on Thursday for previews, and among the exhibitors, Gagosian was showing a large-scale sculptural installation by Chris Brunt, "Dreamer's Folly" (2010). It'southward the outset time the piece of work, a bandage-iron, gazebo-similar structure with benches within that visitors can sit on, has been shown in the U.Southward. Burden sourced architectural components in the piece from the same person he purchased the street lamps from for his "Urban Calorie-free" sculpture, which sits in front of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Gagosian Beverly Hills Senior Director Deborah McLeod was telling me all this when, suddenly, she stopped mid-sentence, making urgent eye contact with two passersby who'd been lingering nearby waiting to conversation with her.

"I'll be right back," she said, and darted over to them.

They huddled. There was a round of hushed whispers, then a few caput nods. Seconds later she reappeared, light-headed. "We sold it, nosotros just sold it!" she said of the Burden work, stamping her Gucci sneakers on the floor. She wouldn't say who the buyers were or how much information technology sold for, exactly, but the piece will go to "a major European institution," she said, "so anybody tin can meet it! So heady."

Welcome to an energized, eager edition of Frieze Los Angeles 2022.

The fine art off-white — which relocated from its one-time home at Paramount Pictures Studios to a tent adjacent to the Beverly Hilton — felt less celebrity-studded and Hollwoody this yr. James Corden and Owen Wilson were among those roaming the tent floor when the fair opened, but there appeared to be fewer celebrities in omnipresence compared to previous years as the fair got underway. (Kendall Jenner, Will Ferrell, Gwyneth Paltrow, Leonardo DiCaprio and Pierce Brosnan showed up afterward.)

There was, nonetheless, a celebratory vibe, an eagerness, to the event. A new crop of East Coast galleries is expanding into L.A., for one, many of them having announced their debuts or opened new spaces within the final few weeks. And the outcome was a reawakening of sorts for the L.A. art fair scene, which was in full swing for the first time since spring 2020.

Opening day at Frieze Los Angeles 2022.

(Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times)

"It's lovely, it's fantastic, it's wonderful," said James Corden at a VIP breakfast before the fair opened. "It'southward just nice to be looking at people again. I hope the trajectory continues."

The VIP breakfast — for artists, exhibitors, museum world leaders, collectors and others — took place in the Beverly Hilton's Wilshire Garden. The event had an elegant, garden party vibe, with its smattering of cocktail tables, mini-quiches and arrangements of white roses, all under a translucent tent with piano music playing in the background.

"Nosotros're a perfect fit for Frieze," Beverly Hills Mayor Robert Wunderlich said at the breakfast. "Arts and civilisation is part of our Deoxyribonucleic acid."

But non everyone agreed. "I wish it was on the Paramount lot, that they'd do something as expansive as 50.A. itself," Paul Schimmel, former MOCA chief curator, told The Times.

Speaking of expansive: The Frieze tent itself — actually 3 connected tents, again this year designed past Why Architecture's Kulapat Yantrasast — is 40% bigger than in previous years. It houses 100 exhibitors representing 17 countries (there were 77 final time, in 2020). Frieze expects near 35,000 attendees over the full of iv days.

All the expected blue-bit galleries were there, including Blum & Poe, David Kordansky, Sprüth Magers and Hauser & Wirth. But the East Coast galleries moving into L.A. were generating much of the buzz. At that place are at least ix of them, including Sean Kelly, Lisson Gallery, Pace, the Pigsty, Karma, Albertz Benda, David Zwirner, Danziger and Sargent'southward Daughters in collaboration with Shrine. (There goes parking in Hollywood.) (Even more then.)

"It's incredibly exciting," individual dealer Graham Steele, formerly a partner at Hauser & Wirth, said over breakfast. "There'southward a unique mix in the Fifty.A. landscape amongst artists, collectors and the museum infrastructure, which is a depict — plus, the weather's prissy."

When New York'due south Sean Kelly debuts on Highland Artery in Hollywood this spring, the gallery will feature a solo exhibition past British artist Idris Khan. The creative person'southward work was on view in Sean Kelly'due south Frieze booth. One piece of work was every bit ink-stamped painting on three, layered glass panels, transparent all the way through, so that the text radiates outward in a starburst-like effect. They speak to collapsing moments of time.

"I retrieve L.A. is gaining disquisitional mass," Kelly said. "Not simply equally a community of artists simply as a major destination museologically and from a gallery perspective. It just seems like it'south the right moment."

Lisson Gallery, which has outposts in New York, London and Shanghai, will open up a 8,000-square-foot-plus space in Hollywood this fall in a old nightclub. The gallery'due south move to L.A., Chief Executive Alex Logsdail said, was driven past its artists, many of whom want shows on the West Coast. "There are so many artists here," he said. "Artists want other artists to see their shows — information technology's important for dialogue and community."

Mega-gallery Pace (with several locations internationally) earlier this calendar month announced it was merging with L.A.'s Kayne Griffin gallery on La Brea Avenue in Mid-City — the two share a love of the Southern California Low-cal and Infinite movement besides as representation of artists such as Mary Corse, Robert Irwin and James Turrell. In April, the 15,000-square-human foot 50.A. space, with elements designed by Turrell, will become Pace's main West Coast abode (there'southward besides a gallery in Palo Alto). Founding partners Bill Griffin and Maggie Kayne will be managing partners at Pace.

Stride'due south April opening will characteristic a solo exhibition of new paintings by filmmaker and artist Julian Schnabel. Merely for Frieze, Pace showed Jeff Koons' "Gazing Brawl (Antinous-Dionysus)" (2013), a classical bust made from plaster with a bluish orb on its head, new works on newspaper by David Byrne and a sculptural piece by French street artist and photographer JR, among other work.

"We come in peace!" joked Pace CEO Marc Glimcher of the move into 50.A. "And whatever I did, I'm sad!" And then: "Seriously, partnership and collaboration is the path frontwards in the art globe."

Attendees factory around booths at Frieze Los Angeles.

(Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times)

The art fair itself is expanding. Frieze Seoul will debut in September. The motility, said Tina Kim of Tina Kim Gallery, will likely galvanize a small but "hungry" collector base there. "Seoul has get a big destination, a global capital for art," she said. "There'due south a small number of private collectors and they're eager to see and learn more."

Last month, Frieze canceled its free, outdoor sculpture exhibition that was to be held in a nearby Beverly Hills park due to Omicron-related delays. An area of the fair called the BIPOC Substitution, organized past Fifty.A. creative person Tanya Aguiñiga and situated in the hotel's Wilshire Garden, is now Frieze'southward "forward-facing" offer, free to members of the public who wouldn't necessarily splurge on a fair ticket ($75-$95 each day for weekend full general access). It features 10 L.A. nonprofits led by or serving BIPOC communities. The organizations span creative disciplines.

The expanse had potted plants delineating berth spaces instead of walls and with a makeshift stage, outlined on the ground with fresh flowers, for performances and workshops. The skid row nonprofit Urban Voices Project will host a singing performance at that place; Tierra Del Sol, which works with individuals with disabilities, will stage poetry readings.

"I wanted to build a space that's communal," Aguiñiga said, "where we could testify to ane another'due south work."

The BIPOC Exchange is part of Frieze Projects, which also includes near half of the works from the canceled sculpture exhibition. The works appear throughout the fair tent as well as in public areas of the hotel.

Glenn Kaino'southward "Revolutions" is one of them, on view in the tent. It's a round enclosure made of metal bars that, when tapped, plays the melody from U2'south "Lord's day Bloody Sunday." A large-scale sculpture by Woody De Othello, "Fountain," appears outside, by the tent archway. It'due south a faded-blueish, bronze work of three metal pipes that appear melted and intertwined. It speaks to ecology issues such as drought and make clean h2o as well as pandemic-era hand washing, the artist said.

The Focus L.A. section of the tent, curated past Lucas Museum of Narrative Art's Amanda Hunt, features 11 galleries that accept been in operation for 15 years or less.

"I wanted to privilege galleries and shows — and story lines — that are lesser known," Hunt said. "Like Rodrigo Valenzuela'south work, in that location's a through-line well-nigh labor, and 84-year-erstwhile artist Ben Sakoguchi'due south work is almost being in a Japanese internment camp, his lived experience."

A work by 95-year-old Betye Saar, at Roberts Projects, may take summed upwardly the off-white-wide sense of optimism and expansion best. It's a reinterpretation of the Fifty.A. aggregation creative person's Los Angeles public mural, "Fifty.A. Free energy," a metropolis-commissioned work that occupied a 5^th Street wall downtown from 1983 to 1987.

Saar painted a new version of the mural on the exterior of the gallery'southward booth. The scattering of symbols — a sun, a moon, fans, the artist's hand, along with the messages 50 and A, all in brilliant colors over a nude backdrop — are rendered in the verbal color palette of the original mural.

It's at once soothing and invigorating.

"It'southward 39 years after," said gallery co-owner Julie Roberts. "And what she's maxim — she feels like the energy has actually come up back to the city, mail service-COVID."

And, perhaps, to the art fair scene too.

Updates

3:35 p.m. Feb. eighteen, 2022: This commodity has been updated to reflect the annunciation of the David Zwirner gallery's Los Angeles expansion.

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Source: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-02-17/frieze-los-angeles-returns-2022-art-fair-scene

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