Every week, Artnet News brings you Wet Paint, a gossip column of original scoops. This week, the column takes us to Los Angeles, for Tinsel Town’s annual art week.
I think I’ll remember this Frieze Week in Los Angeles for the disoriented, woolly feeling I got when I touched down at LAX. Thoughts I hadn’t had since the tail end of the pandemic clouded my mind: Should I be wearing a mask? How much small talk about the fires is appropriate? If I’m having fun at a party, should I keep it off Instagram? The conflict over whether to come at all was still at the top of mind for many interlopers, who only experienced the disaster via news stories and social media.
A lot of this inner dialogue seemed rather dramatic to locals, but I can’t pretend that the week felt normal. There was an optimistic spirit, but it did feel forced at times. The devastation of the fires was pretty much invisible to those touring art spaces, but it could still be palpably felt everywhere. Burned-off areas are blocked by red tape, and a rainstorm last week cleared the air enough so that it could be classified as “moderate-good” in the air quality index. One dealer told me that a recurring line from art advisors trying to cajole their clients into visiting the fair has been: “Hey look, the air quality is actually pretty good!” Arty Nelson, the owner the One Trick Pony gallery, put it well: “Three weeks ago, it was too hard to know what to do. The tragedy highlight reel was being broadcast around the world.”
The community did rise to the occasion. One of the busiest events I went to was the afterparty for Kelly Akashi’s show at Lisson. Akashi lost her home and studio in the fires, as well as the work she had created for the show, which had been set to open on January 31. She got right back in the saddle and put together a gangbuster presentation in just three weeks. “I’m really grateful to everyone who came together to make the exhibition happen,” she said.
Michelle Pobar, a Lisson director, told me that the response to Akashi’s show was “extraordinary,” and that “Kelly’s resilience throughout this journey has been nothing short of inspiring, and we couldn’t be prouder of the outcome.”
Places felt crowded all week, though many lamented that the fairs saw more foot traffic from advisors than collectors. Still, the requisite celebrity collectors/hangers-on were out in droves. “Brat summer” alums Troye Sivan and Julia Fox were spotted poolside at Felix’s opening at the Hollywood Roosevelt. Artist Matthew Tully Dugan, whose work was on view at One Trick Pony’s cabana booth, said that actor-director Henry Winkler had come by and told him that his black leather jacket was just like his own. (Naturally, he was beaming to hear this from The Fonz.) Actors John C. Reilly and James Franco (in tow with with art-market pundit Magnus Resch) also came to Felix’s opening, and I spied Franco and Resch at Karma’s raucous party at Genghis Cohen later that night, as well as producer Scooter Braun. Quite a group.
At Frieze’s VIP opening at the Santa Monica Airport, the crowd included actor Gwyneth Paltrow, filmmaker Oliver Stone, right-wing conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson, restaurateur (and artist) Michael Chow, and pop star Halsey. Ari Emmanuel, the CEO of Endeavor (which is attempting to sell Frieze) was also there, and bought a painting by local artist Brandon Landers (priced between $16,000 to $54,000) from Carlye Packer’s booth. Packer was having a good week. “I knew that I would sell the booth out to begin with,” she said, explaining that she “just had to wait” for Emmanuel “to confirm that this morning.” She also had a presentation at Felix, which she didn’t pre-sell. It “went extremely well, considering that I wasn’t sure how it would go,” she said. “I was very surprised by how much business I did.”
Early chatter on the airport’s tarmac was that dealers were playing it safe this year, pre-selling material and keeping major works off of the floor. Painter Brittany Fanning sized up the bulk of the art at the fair as “PPP”—“peaceful, pleasant paintings.” To be fair, though, that’s usually the case at these things, and there were enough outliers to create a worthwhile fair.
Betye Saar, 98 years young, was at the Roberts Projects booth, sipping a Dr. Pepper while the sales team swanned around her piece Sanctified Visions, a recreation of Zora Neale Hurston’s childhood home that was originally installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles in 1990. Another highlight came from the grand tradition of Gagosian bringing a large-scale Chris Burden piece into the fair. This year it was Nomadic Folly (2001), the artist’s vision of an ideal tent for a nomadic lifestyle. “The audience is meant to find respite as reality quite literally dissolves from view,” an accompanying text explains.
Fifteen minutes down the road, toward the beach, was the newly minted Post-Fair, which satisfied the urge for experimental and conceptual generated by (its absence at) the main fair. For a while now, I’ve heard that conceptual art is “so back” in Los Angeles, and I think the success of Post-Fair may prove that.
Chris Sharp, who runs an eponymous gallery in Mid-City, created the event as an affordable, collegial alternative to the bigger fairs. Sharp brought a presentation of bronze sculptures and wall work by German sculptor Lin May Saeed. “My intention with this fair was to try to create a context that encouraged experimentation and risk-taking,” Sharp told me. “My presentation is kind of a perfect example. This is an incredible European artist who has a great deal of visibility in Europe, but is virtually unknown here, therefore doesn’t have a market. I can show this kind of work here and if I don’t sell, that’s not the end of the world.” Certain Los Angeles galleries are important for creating “auras,” rather than for making markets, a local artist told me—a dynamic that perhaps applies to Post-Fair.
Only 29 galleries participated in Post-Fair, showing work in an open-floor plan at an old post office in Santa Monica. The opening day was humming with activity. I clocked photographer Catherine Opie checking out the paintings by Joseph Jones at Ehrlich Steinberg’s booth. “This feels like a special fair,” said Ace Ehrlich, the co-owner of the gallery, which focuses on research-based art practices. He was enthusiastic about taking part in fair that emphasizes “not only conceptual art but considered and specific installations and presentations,” as he put it. “It’s pretty curated. Chris wanted a certain amount of harmony. That’s necessary in a one-room fair.”
But enough about the fairs. The galleries were also staying very busy. Lisa Yuskavage’s show of new paintings at David Zwirner was a marquee event. The artist gave a walkthrough of the show, which features some works smaller than a slice of paper and others that are sweeping and grand, more than 8 feet tall and 7 feet wide. The larger ones are newer. “I didn’t tell you this, David,” she joked, gesturing to her longtime dealer. “But after our last show, I said enough with the small paintings.” At that show, back in 2021, the tiny ones were the most sought after (proving my colleague Kate Brown’s point about the rise of minute work). She returned to large-scale works “because I’m a little bit ornery,” she said. The 5-by-7-inch paintings were priced at $180,000, while the larger works went up to $2.2 million. (An average of those figures puts the price of a new Yuskavage at about $2,715 per square inch.)
Another much-discussed show was Issy Wood‘s presentation of new paintings at Michael Werner Gallery. The notoriously press-averse artist gave a talk at the gallery with New Yorker critic Naomi Fry to a crowd of thirsty collectors and fans of her music. It offered something for both. “My experience of the music industry makes the art world feel . . . ethical,” she quipped, eliciting laughter from the art buyers on hand. She said that her concerts during Frieze New York last year were the final ones she ever plans to give, alarming the music fans. Her larger works were priced by the gallery between $100,000 to $190,000, and smaller pieces are in a range of $24,000 to $55,000.
Also in Beverly Hills was perhaps the most-buzzed-about show of the week: a mysterious exhibition of 16 photographs from Mike Kelley’s “Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction” series on the fourth floor of a Charlie Kaufman-esque office park on Wilshire Boulevard. They re-stage scenes in found photographs of Halloweens, carnivals, and school plays, and debuted in the artist’s legendary 2005 show at Gagosian in New York, “Day Is Done.” The show was put together (in collaboration with the Mike Kelley Foundation) by Alex Perweiler, a cofounder of the erstwhile New York artist-collective Still House Group, who now runs an advisory called Art and Acquisition in New York with former Christie’s staffer Vivian Brodie. The show is relaunching Perweiler’s project space, Manual Arts.
As the week comes to a close, the city’s 70-degree weather is melting away any remaining skepticism about whether the fairs should have proceeded. To end with another quote from Arty Nelson, the One Trick Pony dealer: “Los Angeles is a city that is vast and wild—we’ve gone through riots, earthquakes, and fires. But the people really showed up, and that’s been so meaningful.”
