Highlights of Frieze Los Angeles 2025: A Celebration of Creative Resilience and Community Building

 Betye Saar installation view. Critter Chair: The Seat of the Spirit ( 1990) and Fragments of Fall ( 1989/1999). Courtesy of Roberts Projects.

By LITA BARRIE March 5, 2025  

The phenomenal success of this year’s Frieze Los Angeles is another sign of the city’s resilience only six weeks after the devastating wildfires that heavily impacted the art community. Art collectors, artists, art aficionados, and Hollywood celebrities flocked to support the sixth edition of the fair, which featured more than 95 galleries from more than 20 countries. In the wake of heartbreaking losses of homes and art collections in the firestorm tragedy, art devotees embraced and hugged one another and relished such a conducive environment for morale building. 

 Frieze actually provided a cultural, financial and social stimulus to the L.A art world which needs it now - more than ever before. Frieze addressed the disaster by donating 10 percent of ticket sales to the L.A Arts Community Fire Relief Fund. A number of participating galleries like Perrotin donated part of their proceeds to benefit fire relief. L.A Louver created limited-edition prints by Alison Saar and Gajin Fujita with proceeds going to fire relief. Victoria Miro gave her booth to various galleries with sale funds going to fire-relief. In a citywide fire-relief effort many galleries like Anat Ebgi, Craig Krull, Douglas Marshall, Arcane Space and Gattopardo artist run gallery, held group exhibitions in their gallery spaces concurrent with Frieze week and donated portions of their proceeds. Top art collectors attended: including Larry and Allison Berg, Lauren Taschen, Komal Shah, Ric Whitney and Tina Perry-Whitney. The star-studded crowd included celebrities: Katie Couric, Gwyneth Paltrow, Oliver Stone, James Franco, Justine Bateman, Brit Marling, Kid Cudi and Gunna.   

A joyful inflatable sculpture by Greg Ito, A Time to Blossom ( 2025) was commissioned to greet visitors as they approach the fair, like a beacon of hope outside the entrance. Ito created the giant alarm clock crowned with flowers - in collaboration with the Art Production Fund - as a metaphor for a time of healing and transformation. The timepiece was set to 3:33 which is a number of regeneration. The blooms drew on Ito’s Japanese heritage and he used orange wildflower poppies that bloom all over Southern California in the spring as a powerful metaphor for a time of healing, growth and transformation.  

Lita Albuquerque, Turbulence, 2025 Photo by Casey Kelbaugh. Courtesy of Frieze and CKA.

Lita Albuquerque’s outdoor sculpture, Turbulence ( 2025) was one of the most memorable high points of Frieze. This monumental boulder is coated in ultramarine pigment that shimmers when the light hits the changing surfaces and seems to float atop decomposed granite. Albuquerque told me the idea behind this sculpture occurred to her when she visited a quarry four hours north east of L.A. She climbed down “ a huge cavity in the earth and thought about how heavy the planet is although the planet is in space and seems weightless.”  Albuquerque took the six thousand pound boulder out of the cavity that was filled with huge rocks and transported it to her studio. She simply poured pigment on the bolder, that transformed the physical heaviness  of the boulder and made it look weightless  - almost like the planet floating in space. Only an artist at the top of her game, who has spent decades working with carefully mixed pigments could conceive of something so beautifully simple that raises such profound questions about weight and weightlessness. Nothing has felt stable in L.A since the firestorms which made Albuquerque’s  work particularly timely: as a locus for deep contemplation on the impermanence inherent in everything. 

 The fair was housed in a structure designed by Kulapat Yantrasast’s architectural studio  WHY. Along with world’s top mega-galleries the fair included  a “Focus” section - curated by Essence Harden - to spotlight 12 emerging L.A galleries and give a platform to the next generation of artists. The booths were all exceptionally high quality, featuring super-star artists like Chris Burden, Barbara Kruger and Anish Kapoor. Dealers reported strong sales with the highest priced sales in David Zwirner’s booth: an Elizabeth Peyton for $2.8 million, a Noah Davis work for $2.5 million, An Alice Neel painting for $1.8 million and a Lisa Yuskavage painting for $1.6 million. Other dealers reported sold-out booths which shows the high level of financial support for art in the wake of the firestorm. 

Booth Highlights:

David Zwirner,  Booth EO3

The focus of this meticulously curated booth is upon single-sitter portraits from 1995 to 2000 by  five culturally important artists: Lisa Yuskavage, John Currin, Karen Kilimnik, Elizabeth Peyton and Luc Tuymans. This historic selection highlights the way these prominent artists pioneered a new mode of figuration in the 1990s that has continued to be important  today. This incisive presentation of the continuation of the figurative impulse also includes paintings from the early 2000s by Nicole Eisenman and Dana Schutz along with LA artists, Laura Owens and Noah Davis. Of these influential painters Yuskavage’s paintings are the highlight because they are the most radical challenge to traditional genre categories. Her paintings use nuanced color to create empathetic meaning in an entirely new way.

Jesse Mockrin, Natural Order, 2025. Oil on linen. &0x52in. Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery , Los Angeles

Night Gallery, Booth A7

The highlight of this thoughtfully curated booth was a series of stunning Jesse Mockrin paintings presented along with paintings by Reza Aramesh, Sterling Wells, and Ross Callendo which all re-examine art history through a contemporary cultural lens. Two powerful paintings by Mockrin  reference the current war on women’s rights to control their own bodies by taking inspiration from European Old Master compositions, to depict the age-old use of plants to either help or terminate pregnancies in ancient magic. These luminous paintings are a powerful reminder that birth control and prenatal care are an ancient feminine tradition of bodily autonomy passed down through the ages when women’s right to choose was indisputable - unlike today. Mockrin’s female figures carry themselves with an unmistakable personal sovereignty and look at each other or out at the viewer with a direct gaze.

Robert Projects. Booth E9

The highlight of this booth was an installation of  Betye Saar’s mixed-media assemblagesCritter Chair: The Seat of the Spirit ( 1990) and Fragments of Fall ( 1989/1999) and Fragments of Fall ( 1989/1999). These works explore the mythic significance of tangible forces of nature and draw inspiration from folklorist Zora Neale Hurston. Using moss and corrugated sheet metal to recreate parts of Hurston’s childhood home. In the center a tiny motorized, child’s rocking chair carved with animals. Both Saar and Hurston shared an anthropological agenda of recording traditional rituals from their African American cultural legacy. It is 35 years since this groundbreaking installation was first shown in Sanctified Visions at MOCA in 1990 and today it is still culturally relevant.   

Alison Saar. Frieze installation, Five L.A Artists. 2025. Courtesy of L.A Louver , Venice, CA.

 L.A. Louver,  Booth C12 

This booth was a beautifully calibrated presentation of five artists who currently live and work in  L.A : Rebecca Campbell, Gajin Fujita, Ben Jackel, Heather Gwen Martin and Alison Saar. Seen together the  differences in medium, size, subject matter and technique, show the diversity, strength and vibrancy of LA art through their different ways of responding to a shared urban environment. Fujita draws on his heritage as a Japanese -American by combining traditional Eastern iconography and intricate craft skills with American street art. Jackel’s sculptures are made from military paraphernalia and use technology in stylistic interventions that play with scale. Campbell has masterful painting skills and fluidly moves from figuration to abstraction in dream-like  landscapes and portraits which are so emotionally charged they seem like memories. Martin draws on west coast abstract classicism in lyrical compositions which use color to create spatial depth. The highlight of this booth was a series of commanding works by Saar that continue her exploration of empowered black female identity. Saar’s work is always painstakingly crafted in an almost devotional way weaving mythological references together with powerful cultural subtexts. 

 Frieze Impact Prize Booth, next to A18 

This year’s Frieze Los Angeles Impact Prize, in recognition of an artist whose work has a significant social impact was awarded to Brooklyn-based street artist Victor “Marka27” Quinonez who received $25,000 prize money and a solo stand at Frieze. The artist’s presentation focused on his I.C.E Scream series of popsicle paintings and sculptures. This work is a commentary on the nativistic rhetoric around immigration and increasing threats in the Trump era. WM

Frieze Los Angeles, Santa Monica Airport was February 20 through February 23, 2025