The 2026 edition of Frieze Los Angeles opened once again at the Santa Monica Airport on Thursday, February 26, with a mood befitting the city’s art scene: relaxed, convivial, and spirited.
If there were any opening-day anxieties, they centered more on missed celebrity sightings than on sales. From 10 a.m., VIPs streamed steadily into the tent, and by late afternoon, the aisles were bustling.
For its seventh L.A. edition, the fair brings together 95 galleries from 22 countries and has settled into the rhythm of its host city—most visibly in its commitment to the local arts community. “Los Angeles thrives on experimentation and artist-led practice, yet its defining strength is the enduring, interconnected community of artists, curators, collectors, and institutions who show up for one another across generations,” said Frieze Americas director Christine Messineo.
That civic focus carried particular weight in the wake of last year’s devastating wildfires. This year saw the debut of the Frieze Library, a response to the 2025 Palisades fire that invites galleries to donate publications to the newly reopened Pacific Palisades Library.
Across the fair, works by Los Angeles–based artists and presentations mined the region’s histories, geographies, and iconography. And in true L.A. fashion, celebrities were never far from view. Actors Christoph Waltz, Emma Watson, and François Arnaud, as well as NFL legend Joe Montana, were spotted browsing the art. “It’s just fun,” Montana told Artsy. “I’m just starting to see everybody’s iterations of what they love and what they love to do.”
Initial sales reports from galleries appeared to confirm a solid start to proceedings. Transactions on the day were led by a mixed-media work by Njideka Akunyili Crosby for $2.8 million at David Zwirner’s booth. Those sales are available in our first-day sales report from the fair—check back on Monday for our more extensive recap.
Here, we present our 10 best booths from the fair.
Superposition
Booth F2
With works by Greg Ito
Home is a Feeling, 2026
Greg Ito
Superposition
Radiating from its corner in the Frieze Focus section—reserved for galleries 12 years old or younger—nomadic gallery Superposition’s presentation of Los Angeles artist Greg Ito drew sustained crowds throughout VIP day.
A fourth-generation Japanese American who grew up minutes from the fairgrounds, Ito centers the booth with a vintage black trunk bearing his great-grandfather’s initials. Used to carry family belongings during their forced incarceration in World War II, that trunk serves as the emotional and conceptual core of the installation, titled “A Cautionary Tale.” Vermilion suitcases cluster against vivid yellow walls and carpeting, accompanied by crisp, graphic paintings of similar cases. Some can be opened, revealing small paintings alongside intimate objects—childhood rock collections, inherited keepsakes, drawings made with his daughter. Each becomes a portable treasure chest, assembling a sense of identity through personal touchstones.
“‘A Cautionary Tale’ directly aligns with the gallery’s nomadic model and its ongoing focus on stories shaped by displacement,” said Superposition founder Storm Ascher. “The project centers objects designed to move—suitcases, trunks, containers—as structural parallels to the gallery’s own mobility across cities and contexts. Rather than presenting the booth as a fixed display, the installation operates as a temporary site, emphasizing how histories formed through migration and rupture surface most clearly in spaces that are temporary.”
Southern Guild
Booth A12
With works by Shane Keisuke Berkery, Kamyar Bineshtarigh, Sandra Brewster, Chloe Chiasson, Jozua Gerrard, Anique Jordan, Bonolo Kavula, Lebohang Kganye, Manyaku Mashilo, Roméo Mivekannin, Gus Monday, Zanele Muholi, Mmangaliso Nzuza, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Zizipho Poswa, Marcus Leslie Singleton, Jasmine Thomas-Girvan, and Chidy Wayne.
Vika II, small, The Decks, Cape Town, 2019
Zanele Muholi
Southern Guild
Mam'uNoSayini, 2023
Zizipho Poswa
Southern Guild
Abidjan In Golden Evening Air, 2025
Marcus Leslie Singleton
Southern Guild
Lonesome Lonestar, 2024
Chloe Chiasson
Southern Guild
Khat-Khati XV, 2025
Kamyar Bineshtarigh
Southern Guild
Mise-en-scène at Canyon de Chelly', 2025
Shane Keisuke Berkery
Southern Guild
South African gallery Southern Guild presents a multigenerational, cross-continental booth at a pivotal moment, as it prepares to open a New York space later this year—an emphatic display of the range of its tastemaking artists.
Spanning figuration, sculpture, photography, and material experimentation, the presentation unites artists across continents and eras through shared concerns including identity, inheritance, spirituality, visibility, and the body. “These are people located on different continents and from different eras, and yet there’s this coming together of common themes,” said founder Trevyn Gowan.
Standouts include Zanele Muholi’s rigorously composed portraits confronting race and gender, and Zizipho Poswa’s ceramic and bronze sculptures that translate Xhosa adornment into commanding, totemic forms. Relief works by Chloe Chiasson and narrative paintings by Marcus Leslie Singleton probe intimacy and queer identity, while Kamyar Bineshtarigh reframes a former studio wall as a historical record. The booth also introduces artists the gallery has recently begun working with, such as Gus Monday and Shane Keisuke Berkery, whose surreal visions of the Wild West resonated with Angelenos in attendance.
Casemore Gallery and Yancey Richardson Gallery
Booth A27
With works by Larry Sultan
Boxers, Mission Hills, 1999
Larry Sultan
Yancey Richardson Gallery
Sharon Wild, 2001
Larry Sultan
Casemore Gallery
Woman in Curlers, 2002
Larry Sultan
Yancey Richardson Gallery
Tasha's Third Film, 1998
Larry Sultan
Casemore Gallery
Pool, Calabasas, 2002
Larry Sultan
Yancey Richardson Gallery
Kitchen, Santa Clarita, 2001
Larry Sultan
Casemore Gallery
San Francisco’s Casemore Gallery and New York’s Yancey Richardson Gallery present a distinctly Californian booth focusing on Larry Sultan’s 1998–2003 series “The Valley (1998–2003),” his meditation on the undercurrents in American suburbia at the turn of the millennium.
The photographs displayed here examine the unexpected overlap between California’s adult film industry and the manicured neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. This marks the first time the body of work has been shown in Los Angeles since Sultan’s 2014 retrospective at LACMA.
“Larry is considered more and more an important figure in the history of photography, and incredibly influential on a younger generation of photographers,” said Yancey Richardson. “We felt like it would be a good time to show it at Frieze. There’s a connection between this body of work and reality TV, celebrity, and social media.”
Raised in the Valley, Sultan later returned to explore the lesser-known uses of its cookie-cutter homes and sunlit neighborhoods. In his photos, he documents the rented domestic interiors—complete with family portraits, plush sofas, and backyard patio furniture—that become temporary pornographic film sets. Rather than foregrounding the spectacle shown in these films, Sultan lingers on the moments before and after, allowing architecture and atmosphere to take center stage.
David Zwirner
Booth D3
With works by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Noah Davis, Roy DeCarava, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Louis Fratino, Martin Kippenberger, Emma McIntyre, Raymond Pettibon, Walter Price, Steven Shearer, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Lisa Yuskavage.
Ale in Liguria, 2025
Louis Fratino
David Zwirner
Manchurian lilac, 2025
Louis Fratino
David Zwirner
Ralph Smith, 21 years old, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, $25, 1990-1992
Philip-Lorca diCorcia
David Zwirner
Major Tom, 20 years old, Kansas City, Kansas, $20, 1990-1992
Philip-Lorca diCorcia
David Zwirner
In one of the year’s most talked-about new artist representations, painter Louis Fratino joined David Zwirner earlier this month. And here, the artist debuts a new suite of paintings with his new gallery. The canvases dwell on moments of solitude and intimacy: male figures at rest or embracing one another, rendered in dusty aquas, terracottas, and softened greens that infuse the scenes with warmth and vulnerability.
Set within a tightly curated selection of historical and contemporary voices, Fratino’s works form the emotional core of the gallery’s presentation, which brings together many of its leading names.
Highlights include Noah Davis’s tender figurative works and Walter Price’s psychologically charged interior scenes, alongside Roy DeCarava’s moody photographs of Los Angeles and a characteristically irreverent Martin Kippenberger painting of a rabid guitarist. Standout works by Njideka Akunyili Crosby,
Emma McIntyre, and Lisa Yuskavage round out this cohesive and expansive presentation.
Anthony Gallery
Booth F03
With works by Andrew J. Park
Anthony Gallery’s Frieze debut with Andrew J. Park is a sharp meditation on memory, media, and the instability of perception. Titled “Almost Real,” the presentation features airbrushed paintings that channel the hazy glow of 1990s television and early analog gaming into intimate yet estranged images.
Park begins with these nostalgic references, then filters them through AI image generators. The machine-made outputs become scaffolding for his compositions, subtly warping perspective, anatomy, and atmosphere.
“I can generate the exact kind of reference I’m looking for,” the artist told Artsy. “[But] there are a lot of happy accidents that happen.”
The resulting works are distorted yet recognizable. Familiar fragments—eyes, noses, machine parts—are layered until they dissolve into off-kilter yet still faintly legible images: a face, for instance, emerges from an amalgamation of blurry imagery.
Carvalho
Booth C03
With works by Élise Peroi
Les reflets de janvier, 2026
Elise Peroi
Carvalho
Au seuil du printemps II, 2026
Elise Peroi
Carvalho
Au seuil du printemps I, 2026
Elise Peroi
Carvalho
Onde fleurie, 2025
Elise Peroi
Carvalho
L'ocre du vent VI, 2025-26
Elise Peroi
Carvalho
This presentation is a major moment for Artsy Vanguard 2026 alum Élise Peroi and her New York gallery Carvalho, marking both Peroi’s first exhibition in Los Angeles and the gallery’s debut at Frieze L.A.
It’s a striking introduction. Anchored by a monumental textile installation, the booth demonstrates Peroi’s poetic inquiry into landscape, language, and impermanence through a practice that fuses painting, weaving, and architecture.
Built on wooden frames and woven with strips cut from her own silk paintings, the panels create architectural dividers. Light passes through their translucent surfaces, evoking a forest-like atmosphere of sun through branches.
“For this seminal installation, Peroi depicts the flora and fauna of the Southern California landscape before meticulously deconstructing her gouache-on-silk paintings,” said gallery founder Jennifer Carvalho. “She then reconfigures them on the loom, creating translucent veils through which light and air pass. The work not only harnesses the atmosphere of Frieze’s tent, but is also deeply tied to time and place.”
Hauser & Wirth
Booth C11
With works by Conny Maier
Blaue Schale mit Orangen (Citrus Greening), 2025
Conny Maier
Hauser & Wirth
Vogel mit Mensch, 2025
Conny Maier
Hauser & Wirth
Orangenernte, 2025
Conny Maier
Hauser & Wirth
California Dreaming, 2025
Conny Maier
Hauser & Wirth
Harvesting, 2025
Conny Maier
Hauser & Wirth
Hauser & Wirth’s solo presentation of new paintings by German artist Conny Maier, entitled “Dust Bowl” is an exceptional body of work depicting scenes of orange farming and agricultural life.
The title evokes the ecological disaster of the 1930s, when dust storms displaced hundreds of thousands across the American West. Rather than illustrating this history directly, Maier depicts its moral and emotional layers. Her depictions of these figures harvesting are set in strangely dystopian environments.
The canvases pulse with saturated color and lush detail, yet carry a quiet tension. In California Dreaming (2025), three figures are pressed into a mound of oversized, cloudlike blue forms that might be sacks of fruit, their arms pushing through the piles that cover them. The shapes appear plush and plentiful, but the bodies seem compressed, suggesting a world where labor and landscape are physically and inextricably entwined.
The works were clearly making an impression on those in attendance: “The welcome on this first day has been incredibly warm: all the works in her solo presentation on our stand were placed,” said the gallery’s president, Marc Payot.
Nara Roesler
Booth C2
With works by Carlos Bunga, Maria Klabin, Lucia Koch, Karin Lambrecht, Vik Muniz, Tomie Ohtake, and Sérgio Sister, Amelia Toledo, Laura Vinci.
After 2, 2025
Maria Klabin
Nara Roesler
Yesterday, 2023
Maria Klabin
Nara Roesler
Branch of Lemons, after Claude Monet, 2025
Vik Muniz
Nara Roesler
Botanical garden, 2025
Maria Klabin
Nara Roesler
Loose leaves # 06, 2025
Laura Vinci
Nara Roesler
Nara Roesler’s excellent presentation presents a multigenerational dialogue between Brazil’s modernist legacy and contemporary voices.
Maria Klabin foregrounds the presentation with a suite of recent oils, ranging from intimate canvases to the expansive Blue (2025), a large, luminous depiction of a sleeping figure.
Material transformation emerges as a central thread to the practices on view here. Manoela Medeiros’s textured still lifes incorporate mineral pigment and excavation, while Laura Vinci’s brass and steel sculptures, including the monumental Quebra-Galho (2025), balance industrial weight with organic delicacy. Vik Muniz, one of Brazil’s best-known artists, presents two art-historical reconfigurations—Branch of Lemons, after Claude Monet (2025) and Mahana no Atua (Day of the Gods), after Gauguin (2006)—transforming canonical motifs into richly textured compositions.
Nearby, works by Tomie Ohtake and Sérgio Sister underscore the enduring vitality of geometric abstraction, while Karin Lambrecht’s resin- and copper-inflected surface introduces a spiritual chromatic intensity
Taken together, the booth affirms the gallery’s commitment to cross-generational exchange within its program.
El Apartamento
Booth D11
With works by Miki Leal
Spanish artist Miki Leal’s exuberant large-scale paintings at Havana and Madrid gallery El Apartamento draw on pop culture, design, and art history. Immediately grabbing attention is a large canvas that portrays Henri Matisse’s iconic La Danse (1910) displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the foreground, elegantly dressed gallery-goers stand before the iconic scene, contemplating it. This painting-within-a-painting questions how we look at historical masterpieces.
This interplay between past and present runs throughout Leal’s work. Elsewhere, figures inhabit airy interiors and balconies overlooking the sea; a pair of men in tennis whites lingers courtside; domestic spaces open onto lush, tessellated landscapes. Leal renders them in a flattened, graphic style that recalls David Hockney’s crisp depictions, while remaining rooted in his own visual language.
Pattern and geometry structure the compositions, drawing on Andalusian tiles, mosaics, and the graphics of Iberian modernism, to create a vivid sense of place that is color-drenched and unmistakably Spanish. “He turns them into something unique, mixing it with abstractionism and also incorporating part of Spanish culture and architecture,” a gallery staffer said.
At the center of the booth stands a ceramic urn in stark black-and-white, its handles formed by sculpted animal heads. Evoking ancient Greek pottery, it introduces another art-historical thread. With paintings that quote Matisse and evoke modern leisure, the booth shows the artist’s interest in creating an artistic dialogue across centuries.
Olney Gleason
Booth A9
With works by Kour Pour and Bosco Sodi
Blue Traveler, 2025-2026
Kour Pour
Olney Gleason
Untitled, 2023
Bosco Sodi
Olney Gleason
Misty Mountain, 2025-2026
Kour Pour
Olney Gleason
Untitled, 2016
Bosco Sodi
Olney Gleason
Sunscald, 2026
Kour Pour
Olney Gleason
New York’s Olney Gleason stages a compelling dialogue between English artist Kour Pour and Mexican heavyweight Bosco Sodi, a smart pairing of two artists who reinterpret ceramic traditions with their own distinct approach.
Spanning painting, printmaking, and sculpture, the booth traces the layered histories of global exchange embedded in material and form. It also marks the gallery’s first fair presentation with Los Angeles–based Pour ahead of his 2027 solo exhibition with the gallery.
Pour debuts a new series of “erasure paintings” inspired by traditional Chinese porcelain. Here, he silkscreens historical motifs—miniature houses, animals—in cobalt blue onto canvas, then reworks these intricate scenes by wiping and washing away the image. “I’m using Chinese landscape and Persian miniature architecture to sort of ground the works in a place, and then populating the rest of the painting with other imagery that speaks to that exchange,” Pour told Artsy.
By contrast, Sodi presents five clay sculptures finished in luminous gold glaze, including monumental spheres and a stacked cubic form. Shaped by sun, air, and fire before being sealed in gold, the works bring an ancient craft approach to the artist’s refined minimalist sensibility.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/X02DUVy
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