Today marks the beginning of Frieze Los Angeles, one of the largest art events on the West Coast. The annual fair, staged inside a custom-built structure in the Santa Monica Airport, attracts collectors, patrons, and artists from around the world, showcasing 95 galleries from 22 countries.
Frieze is the anchor piece of L.A. Art Week: a four-day event offering programming—including panels, exhibitions, and additional fairs—across the city, sometimes in unusual settings. Post-Fair, which debuted last year, exhibited inside the historic old Santa Monica Post Office, trades the conventional fair grid for an open floor plan. Across town at the Felix Art Fair, located in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, curators have transformed hotel rooms into gallery spaces. Visitors wander through intimate exhibition spaces before retiring by the pool for drinks after a wearying day of art gazing.
Many compelling presentations can be found at Focus, a section of the fair dedicated to emerging galleries. These tightly curated booths often foreground new voices and experimental artists. Three-time Focus curator Essence Harden, who recently cocurated the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. 2025 biennial, consistently shows a sharp instinct for exciting work coming out of Los Angeles.
With almost 100 galleries to navigate at Frieze, much like driving around the city, it helps to have a road map. The following booths are noteworthy for their representation of ambitious and emergent artists from around the world. Some are established heavyweights exhibiting museum-quality works; others are younger establishments taking risks. All are worth a look.
Sea View
Artist: Zenobia Lee
Last year, Sara Lee Hantman relocated Sea View, her Mount Washington gallery, to a charming 1930s Hollywood château that she personally restored. Her booth at Frieze presents the work of local sculpture artist Zenobia Lee, whose practice draws inspiration from the Caribbean diaspora and portrays narratives of queerness through uncanny shifts in scale—like oversize domino sculptures hand-carved in ebony wood. Additional work by Lee is also on display at the Hollywood gallery.
Bel Ami
Artist: Soshiro Matsubara
Los Angeles gallery Bel Ami presents a solo exhibition of works by Japanese artist Soshiro Matsubara. Taking inspiration from his home in Vienna, a city known for its ornate architecture and interiors, Matsubara creates warped figures and theatrical interiors that feel pulled from a colorful nightmare. Through drawings, paintings, and sculpture, his works often combine ornate detail with absurd, cartoonish distortion.
Company Gallery
Artist: Sergio Miguel
Manhattan’s Company Gallery delivers a solo exhibition by painter Sergio Miguel. Born in Mexico and now based in New York, Miguel derives his work from colonial and modern Mexican visual traditions. His oil paintings feature wide-eyed figures rendered with layered religious symbolism and charged imagery. The overall mood is dark and dramatic, with an intensity that recalls Francisco Goya.
Jeffrey Deitch
Artist: Sharif Farrag
Jeffrey Deitch is known to lean avant-garde—and the gallery’s solo exhibition of work by Sharif Farrag is no exception. The ceramic sculptor, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, makes colorfully glazed figures decorated with Cartoon Network–style imagery. Farrag’s work is a bit jazz, a bit acid trip, with nods to his Arab heritage and the pop culture of his youth.
Murmurs
Artist: Y. Malik Jalal
The downtown L.A. gallery—another Focus feature—will showcase works by Manhattan artist Y. Malik Jalal, who uses craft and collage to address histories of inequality, particularly within the Black community. Jalal’s new work incorporates salvaged materials, like car parts from junkyards, that effectively serve as frames for found imagery—including family photos and paper advertisements—each referencing ideas of lineage, place, and value.
Monique Meloche
Artist: Ebony G. Patterson
The Chicago gallery presents Ebony G. Patterson’s multimedia work—including video, photography, sculpture, and installation—which addresses her ongoing exploration of loss. The booth’s centerpiece, a tapestry diptych, introduces viewers to the Jamaican artist’s signature maximalist, ornate style. Florals, colors, textures, and patterns burst from every angle of Patterson’s installations, though framed works offer quieter, more-intimate meditations.
Night Gallery
Artist: Clare Woods
Known for elevating the work of emerging artists, the South Los Angeles gallery offers a new body of work by British painter Clare Woods. Applying paint to aluminum panels using a wet-on-wet technique, the artist produces incandescent imagery partially inspired by her visits to the Huntington Botanical Gardens. Presented on multimeter-long canvases, Woods’s floral still lifes capture the spontaneous beauty of nature.
Sebastian Gladstone Gallery
Artists: Nevine Mahmoud and Emma Soucek
A departure from the solo presentations or group-show format typical of most galleries at Frieze, Sebastian Gladstone Gallery will present a two-person exhibition featuring works by Nevine Mahmoud and Emma Soucek. At the fair, Mahmoud, known for her lifelike sculptures, debuts a new series of hand-carved Carrara-marble figures. Soucek, a painter, presents paper pulp abstractions made through a process of layering and pressing wet paper, resulting in richly textured works. Viewed together, the two artists’ productions play off one another in color and form. •
Shaquille Heath is a writer and essayist who explores the intricacies of Blackness and identity, specifically in the visual arts. Her work has appeared in Juxtapoz, the New York Times, The Cut, the San Francisco Chronicle, Elephant, and elsewhere.
