Sun-soaked and stylish, Felix Art Fair returned for its eighth edition on February 25, 2026, once again taking over the iconic Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.
Founded in 2018 by collector and television executive Dean Valentine alongside Al and Mills Morán of local gallery Morán Morán, the fair has become a cornerstone of L.A. Art Week thanks in no small part to its storied setting and sharp eye for tastemaking exhibitors.
Few venues capture old Hollywood glamour quite like the Roosevelt. This year, blessed with warmer-than-expected weather (a welcome reprieve for blizzard-weary New Yorkers), the hotel felt especially inviting. From the David Hockney–designed pool that anchors the fair’s social scene to the guest rooms—replete with rich textures, hardwood floors, and the occasional sliding barn door—Felix balances conviviality with discovery, with artworks tucked inventively into the hotel’s intimate interiors.
And with this year’s edition featuring 57 galleries (more than 20 of which are participating for the first time) there is plenty to unearth. Nearly a third hail from Los Angeles, joined by exhibitors from as far afield as Tokyo and Seoul. That said, artworks across the fair regularly referenced its locale: Many highlighted the iconography and influences of the City of Angels, as well as Hollywood heritage and Californian culture.
Felix is also permeated by a remarkable sense of communality and collective spirit. That ethos was especially palpable at Felix’s 2025 edition, when organizers forged ahead in the wake of devastating fires across the city. Now, with renewed resilience, Felix—and L.A.’s art scene at large—continues to look forward.
Below, we spotlight five artists we discovered in the rooms, cabanas, and even the occasional bathroom at Felix Art Fair 2026.
Maddy Inez
B. 1993, Los Angeles. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Showing with Megan Mulrooney
Among the greenery on the deck of L.A. gallery Megan Mulrooney’s elegant cabana presentation, a gentle trickle can be heard. Its source is The Sower (2023), a fountain by local artist Maddy Inez. Lurching and biomorphic, the ceramic form seems to rise from the ground itself, its shimmering surface evoking bubbling earth or calcified organic matter. What could sound foreboding instead feels hypnotic: water flows calmly through the sculpture, giving the shaded installation a meditative calm.
Inez is the daughter of Alison Saar and granddaughter of Betye Saar, two major artists who are towering figures in L.A.’s history, and her practice carries that legacy. Working primarily in ceramics, she creates forms that echo plant and animal life, often threading in personal references. Her ongoing series “Memory Jugs,” for instance, pays direct homage to her grandmother Betye’s references to African American folk art tradition. They function as intimate vessels that honor her family histories.
Julien Lischka
B. 1986, France. Lives and works in Paris.
Showing with sobering
Mustang, 2025
Julien Lischka
sobering
Le Bouquet , 2025
Julien Lischka
sobering
At a fair teeming with references to California, some of the sharpest takes on the state come from much farther afield. French painter Julien Lischka, represented by Paris gallery sobering, is “obsessed” with California, according to co-founder Patricia Kishishian—and it shows. In the gallery’s densely hung room, his paintings cut through with a cool precision and emotional weight.
Lischka cites West Coast movies like Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011), and his canvases have the visual impact of film stills. In Mustang (2025), a gas station’s red canopy casts a harsh, artificial glow that slices through inky darkness, catching the chrome and curves of the car below. The result is high-contrast images simmering with tension, which wouldn’t look out of place in either film.
Initially trained as a mathematician, Lischka brings a rigorous compositional logic to even his quietest scenes. Le Bouquet (2025), for instance, a meticulously rendered still life of flowers in a glass vase, reveals that same exactitude, with order and atmosphere held in taut balance.
Seo Hyun Kim
B. 1991, South Korea. Lives and works in Seoul.
Showing with Gallery Playlist
Dancing fossil, 2026
Seo Hyun Kim
Gallery Playlist
South Korean artist Seo Hyun Kim makes her U.S. debut with Gallery Playlist, presenting a suite of paintings made with traditional materials and oil paint to evoke geological and historical depth.
Working with pigment and oil on fabric-layered canvas, Kim builds up skin-like surfaces. The embedded fabric creates subtle ridges and valleys that catch the light of the hotel suite, creating a tactile presence. In Dancing Fossil (2026), a mythic, horse-like figure emerges from a swirl of pale pigment that cuts through a murky ground of indigo and charcoal. It’s like a ribbon of smoke, at once animated and frozen.
Kim joins several other rising South Korean artists in the gallery’s presentation, such as Park Yunji and Heejo Kim, who are deftly bridging inherited traditions and contemporary abstraction.
Sacha Ingber
B. 1987, Rio de Janeiro. Lives and works in New York.
Showing with Uffner & Liu
Stolen Document 3, 2022
Sacha Ingber
Uffner & Liu
Part painting, part ceramic, part architectural fragment, Stolen Document 3 (2022), on view at Felix 2026, distills Brazilian artist Sacha Ingber’s ongoing exploration of bureaucracy and craft.
The work consists of two irregular fragments of glazed ceramic mounted inside a thick, curving cast frame with a red inner edge. They’re presented like archaeological fragments, with sections of cane webbing—more commonly found in chair seats or backs—filling parts of the ceramic.
The wall sculpture belongs to a larger body of work inspired by a visit to the Victoria & Albert Museum, according to Uffner & Liu director Lucy Liu. There, Ingber began reflecting on how, as children, we are trained to see and organize the world in grids. Across the surface of the ceramic, loose, gestural marks echo the rhythm of handwriting without yielding legible information. At the same time, green-blue inkjet-transferred grids and administrative symbols impose a sense of rigid formatting. This tension between improvisation and order animates the work: it’s surprising, fragile, and beautiful.
Ingber, who previously exhibited with the gallery under its former name, Rachel Uffner Gallery, will mount a solo presentation at the gallery next month.
Keisuke Tada
B. 1986, Aichi, Japan. Lives and works in Aichi, Japan.
Showing with Chilli Gallery and Slip House
Painting of Incomplete Remains #302, 2025
Keisuke Tada
Chilli Gallery
Painting of Incomplete Remains #306, 2025
Keisuke Tada
Chilli Gallery
Deeply researched and painstakingly rendered, Keisuke Tada’s paintings can take up to two years to complete. At the shared booth of London’s Chilli Gallery and New York’s Slip House, the Japanese artist presents a series of fictional historical landscapes built from as many as 20 layers of acrylic and modeling paste. The dense surfaces convincingly mimic weighty materials such as rusted chains or wooden doors before being subjected to an artificial aging process. Through chemical reactions and physical force, Tada cracks, peels, and distresses the paint, giving the impression of a relic from an imagined past.
Up close, the works resemble 19th-century landscapes or Dutch still lifes salvaged from a damp basement after two centuries. Paint flakes and curls; entire passages appear to have fallen away. Yet the exposed “wood” beneath is itself meticulously painted. “Everything you see is hand-painted, and it has this very digital feel—it’s kind of uncanny,” said Chilli director Aubrey Higgin.
That play between reality and fiction lies at the heart of Tada’s practice. Having previously exhibited with Tokyo galleries, including Gallery Common, the artist made his New York debut late last year with Slip House.
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