L.A. STRONG
FEBRUARY 2025
In the heart of a city recently scarred by wildfires yet pulsing with creative determination, Fair week in Los Angeles emerged as a beacon of cultural renewal. Despite the devastation wrought by recent wildfires that have left indelible marks on communities and cultural institutions alike, the organizers of Frieze LA, Felix and the new small but mighty Post Fair chose to forge ahead. With robust support from local stakeholders and generous contributions to various Arts Community Fire Relief Funds, the fairs were not merely an art market event—they were a rallying cry for resilience and renewal. Local artists, whose works were deeply affected by the wildfires, were in the spotlight; several galleries adjusted their presentations to include works that spoke directly to themes of loss, memory, and rebirth; and for many, the fairs were more than a commercial venture -- they were a personal statement of survival and hope.
Below are some highlights from the three fairs we visited throughout the week.
ALEC EGAN
Alec Egan’s oil paintings of quiet, cockeyed scenes lead viewers to the razor’s edge of idylls. In January of this year, Egan lost his home and studio full of artwork in the Palisades Fire. For Frieze LA, Egan’s painting depicted a burning car on a coastal highway with heavily impastoed flames curling up the canvas, a site he saw when he was evacuating. A slender palm tree is silhouetted against a calm, cloudless ultramarine blue sky fading to night. It is a melancholic ode to the grief and hope experienced by many in our city during the past month, while revisiting motifs from previous works depicting cars, the open road, palms, and coastal landscapes.
Alec Egan was born in 1984 in Los Angeles. He obtained an MFA from Otis College in 2013 and a BA from Kenyon College in 2007.
ROSS CALIENDO
Ross Caliendo rethinks landscape traditions and the relationships between painting and printmaking. He created diptychs for Frieze Los Angeles that featured two landscape images with surreal color palettes, textured surfaces, and slight variation. The works appear digitally manipulated, though they are in fact oil and acrylic. With his vibrant, textured paintings, Caliendo constructs a surrealistic depiction of the natural world and investigates the powerful tension created by the use of rich color in combination with thick impasto.
Born in 1988, Caliendo earned his BFA at Columbus College of Art and Design, Ohio and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
AUSTYN WEINER
Working in oil on linen at a heroic scale, Austyn Weiner brings a bounding athleticism to her lyrical abstraction, seen here in her piece presented at Frieze, using brushes and oil sticks to draw her signature glyphs and characters into washes of brilliant color. Drawn from her own life and family history, her work calls on female postwar abstraction and the Jewish-American experience to bear a painterly grammar that is very much her own, and in the very present tense. Her process of repeated painting-in and rubbing-out gives her work a distinctive tempo that speeds up and slows down from work to work. Her paintings are a record of time, place, and psychological agita.
Weiner was born in 1989 in Miami, FL and studied photography at the University of Michigan and Parsons School of Design prior to relocating to Los Angeles, where she currently lives and works. Her work has been featured in publications such as Artforum, Artnet, and Vogue, among others. Weiner will present a solo exhibition in New York later this Spring.
LUCIANO MAIA
Brazilian-born Luciano Maia is a visual artist, fashion designer and craftsman. He was born in Santarém, a small port town in the state of Pará. In his works featured at the Felix fair, the artist not only expresses his own story, but also the story of a mythical place, where situations that are hard to absorb are dressed up as folklore. Children's games are colorful parties full of masks, and reality is made up, masked, and delivered back in the form of new myths created by the artist. Navigating through these stories of forbidden desires and mystical enchantment, Maia is exploring the deep connections between Brazil’s diasporic histories and ancestral legacies through painting. His work reflects on the ongoing negotiation of identity, memory, and belonging—using art as a space for healing and reimagining the past.
MEGAN BOGONOVICH
Protruding in a meandering fashion like tree branches or the sprawling overgrowth of flowering vines, the flamboyant whimsical botanical sculptures created by Megan Bogonovich embody the delicate relationship between humans and the environment. Fascinated by nature’s ability to adapt to human presence, she sculpts cylindrical structures that twist and turn in different directions, perhaps implying the irregularity of the landscapes that her superempirical organisms might thrive in. Spiky and bumpy textures cover vibrant surfaces, emphasizing the idiosyncrasies of repetition and pattern that are so prevalent in organic forms. Each piece that was shown at Felix this year was imbued with a playful spirit, inviting viewers to explore the enchanting world she has created.
Bogonovich earned a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the University of Montana, Missoula.
KATE LEWIS
Kate Lewis' work is deeply inspired by the Bloomsbury Group, an association of London-based writers, artists and intellectuals around at the beginning of the 20th century. Their creativity and unconventionality influenced Lewis' luminous and timeless interiors. The decorative elements recall the acute sense for interior design found in most of the homes, with their impressive libraries and ornamental patterns. Lewis also draws inspiration from other modern American artists like Wayne Thiebaud, Loïs Dodd, and Milton Avery, as well as early 20th century French masters like Matisse and Vuillard.
Her paintings, showcased at Felix, were a celebration of color and pattern inspired by everyday moments around the home and in the garden. They are thoughtfully curated, reflecting Kate's observant nature paired with her uninhibited brushstroke and color choice. She currently lives and works in Tennessee.
CHRIS BURDEN
Frieze fairgoers seeking a moment of respite from the packed aisles were able to lounge in this dramatic installation by the late Californian artist Chris Burden. Nomadic Folly (2001), which was initially created for the seventh Istanbul Biennale, is a four-room structure adorned with colorful handmade carpets, embroidered wedding fabrics, plush pillows, braided ropes, and jewel-toned glass and metal lamps. These materials were set on a platform of Turkish cypress beneath large umbrellas, complemented by traditional music.
Burden had initially created the piece when he traveled to Istanbul on September 9, 2001, just days before 9/11, and immersed himself in the local markets, selecting silk panels, carpets, and lanterns to construct the architectural installation. The work felt relevant today as an “homage to cultural relativism,” given our current global hardships. This work was thought to have healing powers at the time, so here, in this devastating moment in Los Angeles, there was a collective hope it would do the same now...
HARRY GOULD HARVEY IV
Drawing inspiration from the ecological fabric of his native South Coast Region, Harvey deconstructs the building blocks of empire and illuminates the weight of anonymous labor. Foraging materials from downed or cut trees, destroyed Gilded Age mansions, dilapidated factories, gutted Gothic churches, and his subconscious, Harvey creates mystical and diagrammatic drawings housed inside hand-built wood frames akin to large-scale sculptural installations that evoke lost histories of marginalized artisanship and backbreaking toil in the name of American industry and luxury. A presentation of intricate drawings and hand-carved wooden artist frames were shown at the inaugural Post Fair in Santa Monica. Consistently questioning assumptions relating to the organization and dissemination of information, Harvey manifests a speculative system of image-based metamorphosis through exchange, diffusion, and deconstruction.
Harvey's works are in the permanent collections of the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, WA as well as the RISD Museum, Providence, RI. Harvey is the founder of the curatorial project Pretty Days and co-founder of the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art, Fall River, MA.
ANGELA ANH NGUYEN
Angela Anh Nguyen is a Los Angeles based fiber artist whose work satirizes the mayhem of America’s culture wars. Working primarily in gun-tufted textiles, Nguyen’s art, presented at the Post Fair, narrates the contemporary relationship Americans share with popular culture. Her pieces are a tongue-in-cheek ode to the convoluted rhythm of life, often exaggerated and never serious on the surface.
Angela is a self-taught textile artist and academic. She received a B.A. in Communication from UCLA and an M.A. in Communication from CSULA. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Southern California.
LIANG HAO
Liang Hao's painting practice focuses on the dynamics between the hand, gaze and mind, reconsidering the technicality of the hand and the affects that flow through it by constructing illusions of technical production and making references to images in art history or texts. For his Frieze presentation this year, Liang muses on the human hand as both a technical and expressive extension of the mind. He deploys these hands to explore surreal tablescapes made of abstract materials and found objects. These wandering hands are not aimed at concrete production but instead caress or confront objects with gestures that evoke a mysterious, seductive tension. A blanket of laboratory light bathes the artist’s hands as they move amongst mirrors, pearls, and bones, evoking infinite associations in the reflective labyrinth of these illusionary spaces. Liang’s canvasses teem with suspense and allude to the many paradoxes that the hand beholds - power and submission, discovery and manipulation, creation and destruction.
He was born in 1988 and currently lives and works in Shanghai. Hao graduated from the Painting Department of the Academy of Arts and Design at Tsinghua University, Beijing, in 2012. His work is in the following prestigious collections: He Art Museum, China; White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney, Australia; Wemhöner Collection, Germany; East West Bank, US; DC Collection, Thailand; Song Art Museum, Beijing, China; and Start Museum, Shanghai, China.
LILY STOCKMAN
Lily Stockman's paintings reflect a wide range of references and inspirations, from natural phenomena—vernal pools, mineral licks, birdsong, black ice—to historical endeavors of the spirit—Shaker gift drawings, portable Renaissance altarpieces, poetry meter. Drawing from nature and its grammar of symmetry, camouflage, and repetition, Stockman plumbs her familiar landscapes (Los Angeles, the Mojave Desert, a remote island in Maine) for her distinctive palette of glowing, tertiary colors- crackling orange, red earth, Holbein brown, and Fra Angelico blue. Her biomorphic compositions, featured at Frieze LA, have been described as "both diagrammatic and vaporous....Although they're more lyrical, Stockman's nested shapes also have the meticulous magic of Josef Albers's squares."
Stockman was born in 1982 in Providence, Rhode Island but is currently based in Los Angeles and Yucca Valley, CA. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts; and the Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California, where she was included in the 2022 California Biennial: Pacific Gold.
JASMINE LITTLE
Jasmine Little’s ceramic sculptures take a variety of forms, drawing influence from both utilitarian and decorative pottery. As seen at the Felix fair this year, the artist incorporates iconography into her work from a range of sources, including Renaissance painting, Japanese woodblock prints and both Greek black-figure and red-figure pottery. The carvings Little inscribes on the surfaces of her works are dictated by the material itself—which is frequently clay sourced from a location close to where the artist is working.
Jasmine Little was born in 1984 and received a Bachelor's degree in art from UCLA in Los Angeles, California in 2007. Little’s work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Archive of American Art in Washington, D.C. and the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, Georgia. She currently lives and works between Los Angeles, California and Alamosa, Colorado.
HEATHER GUERTIN
Heather Guertin's paintings, featured at the Felix fair, are grounded in observation. At the heart of her painting process is the printed image. Driving around upstate New York, Guertin collects used books found in discarded piles in librairies and bookstores. She searches through their images with an open mind, allowing any subject matter the potential to become the source of inspiration. Guertin uses these collages as a guide, translating the colors, textures, and forms from these found images into a pictorial language. Her mark-making throughout the paintings can take the form of textured pointillism, with dabs of paint physically protruding from the surface; broad-brushed continuous strokes of thickly applied, opaque oil paint which create a sense of flatness; or squiggly zig-zags that feel almost like glitches on a digital screen. The compositions depict energetic shifts in tension, space, frequency, and rhythm.
Heather Guertin was born in 1981 in Worcester, Massachusetts. She currently lives and works in upstate New York. She received her Master of Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
GENESIS BELANGER
New sculptural work by Genesis Belanger was highlighted this year at the Frieze fair. Genesis stages idiosyncratic versions of everyday objects in psychologically charged tableaux. Working with a multitude of materials and with subject matter informed by centuries of visual culture from advertising to art history, her objects traffic in hyper-capitalist torment. In her wall-hanging mosaic works, depictions of the natural world are relegated to embellishments as video-game-like pixels merge with floral motifs to reflect our desire to commodify our environment.
Genesis was born in 1978 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received an MFA in Combined Media from Hunter College, New York, a BFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago and completed Bachelor of Fine Arts coursework at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; and the Pond Society, Shanghai, China.