FRIEZE AND FELIX MAKE A SPLASH IN LA
MARCH 2024
Los Angeles was abuzz last week due to two inspiring art fairs that have solidified their place in the Sunshine State. Hosted in a custom structure crafted by Kulapat Yantrasast’s architectural studio WHY near the Santa Monica Airport, Frieze Los Angeles showcased 95 galleries representing 21 countries. Although the showing was a bit smaller than last year, the artwork was strong and sales were continuous throughout the weekend, reaffirming Frieze LA's position as a pivotal event in the global art calendar.
Felix is LA's edgier art and design fair that took place once again at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Artists presented work in a variety of media and forms from more than 60 exhibitors from around the world in the cabanas surrounding the famous David Hockney-painted pool and in the more expansive rooms on the 11th and 12th floors of the hotel above. It always feels like a throwback experience from the early days of art fairs but the intimate room settings make for interesting and creative displays of work.
Below are some of our favorite picks ....
LUIZ ZERBINI
Luiz Zerbini’s painting ‘Siamo Foresta’ (featured here) is inspired by an installation the artist made for an exhibition of the same name at Trienalle Milano in 2023. Combining organic pattern with figurative depictions of lush tropical flora, the work conveys the seductive and immersive quality of the Brazilian landscape. Natural elements such as leaves, seeds and feathers frequently appear in Zerbini's work, with bamboo, leaves and seed pods layered over one another in this painting, creating an effect similar to collage.
Employing a technique used in many of his recent works, Zerbini uses the quadrangular grid as the primary structuring device. By incorporating sweeping curves and expressive patterns derived from flora and fauna, Zerbini transforms the grid’s tight squares into lenses in a kaleidoscopic vision. This dizzying combination captures the intoxicating sights and sounds of the Brazilian city, the mosaic pavements and façades of tower blocks, lending the composition a natural rhythm that recalls the movement of water or trees swaying in the breeze.
Luiz Zerbini was born in 1959 in São Paulo, Brazil and graduated with a Fine Arts degree from the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, São Paulo, in 1982. His most recent major solo exhibition was presented at Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), Brazil in Spring 2022. Zerbini lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.
CORYDON COWANSAGE
Corydon Cowansage’s work explores both the psychology of space and the relationship between abstraction, architecture, biomorphic forms and the body itself. The artist uses geometry and vibrant color to manipulate light and shadow, distorting our perceptions of physical space—while reconstructing the viewer’s point of access to the painting. Cowansage’s meditative compositions reflect on the speed of the world and feature invented forms that are simultaneously recognizable and slightly removed from reality.
Cowansage received an MFA from RISD and a BA from Vassar College. She has participated in residencies at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Yale Norfolk School of Art. Her work has been shown internationally with recent solo and group exhibitions in Belgium, Italy, the US, and the UK. She lives and works in New York.
KIM SUNG YOON
Kim Sung Yoon collects and rearranges digital images of flowers from different regions and seasons, using graphic tools to place these flora within a single vase, generating still lifes that transcend dimensions of time and space. Creating discrete layers on the canvas with dissonant images such as two-dimensional animation, flower petals shedding, and splashes of paint, the artist endeavors to overcome the flatness of the surface plane.
The ceramic vases that hold the bouquets of flowers in Kim’s works are painstaking depictions of existing works by his fellow artist and ceramicist Yoo Eui Jeong, who uses traditional techniques to structure the ceramics, but then applies contemporary references including modern patterns, images, and at times commercial logos. By incorporating Yoo’s ceramic works into his own paintings, Kim’s canvases embody rich cultural diversity and the convergence of multiple contexts, creating unfamiliar, yet at the same time, eerily recognizable landscapes.
Kim was born in Korea in 1985 and received a BFA from Kookmin University in South Korea.
VANESSA GERMAN
Vanessa German's use of rose quartz as a primary medium in her sculptural practice was on full display at Frieze. In this body of work, which included a dozen sculpted heads adorned with crystals alongside a larger assemblage figure, german draws on the material’s symbolic associations to powerfully invoke themes of love, healing, resistance, and redemption. Rose quartz gives these sculptures their distinctive translucent pink color and light-reflective qualities. With documented use in ancient Mesopotamia through the present day, these crystals are representative of both the material nature of our existence as well as the unbounded nature of time and space.
German’s works are spiritual activations and inquiries that embrace love as an original and infinite human technology, an ethos that the artist affirms as a vital way of being. Through her materials and imagery, german summons a transformation akin to the power of healing. This dimension of spirituality has defined the artist’s career for over a decade.
She is a self-taught citizen artist working across sculpture, performance, communal rituals, immersive installation, and photography, in order to repair and reshape disrupted systems, spaces, and connections. The artist’s practice proposes new models for social healing, utilizing creativity and tenderness as vital forces to reckon with the historical and ongoing catastrophes of structural racism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, resource extraction, and misogynoir.
Her work is held in private and public collections including the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH; and Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA, among others.
CARRIE MOYER
Carrie Moyer’s sumptuous paintings on canvas explore and extend the legacy of American Abstraction while paying homage to many of its seminal female figures, among them Helen Frankenthaler, Elizabeth Murray, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Rife with visual precedents, Moyer’s compositions reference Color Field, Pop Art and 1970s Feminist art - while proposing a new approach to fusing history, research and experimentation in painting. In addition, Moyer’s work, influenced by a background in design and queer activism, intricately weaves together concept, research, and lived experience with a range of stylistic and physical references.
Alluding to the natural world, her approach in Spores, Orbs & Flagella (featured at Frieze and seen here) centers on feminist ideologies while simultaneously recalling the unexpected juxtapositions of Surrealists. In this work, the layered biomorphic shapes and flat, fluid, and textured forms resemble plantlike elements or biological cells, like “spores” as the title insinuates.
Moyer’s work has been exhibited widely in both the United States and Europe. Her paintings were recently featured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial Exhibition. Moyer earned a BFA from Pratt Institute (1985), an MA in Computer Graphics from New York Institute of Technology (1990) and an MFA from Bard College (2000). She is a Professor in the Art and Art History Department and Director of the Graduate Program at Hunter College and Vice Chair of the Board of Governors at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.
CLAUDIO PARMIGGIANI
Claudio Parmiggiani occupies a singular and fundamental position in post-war Italian art history. For the past five decades, in line with the tenets of Arte Povera, he has produced artwork with an almost absolute scarcity of materials. His ongoing and celebrated series, Delocazione, (Italian for de-location or displacement), begun in the 1970s, is composed of panels created solely with fire and the traces it produces. Parmiggiani organizes objects on the face of two-dimensional surfaces, subjecting them to a controlled blaze. Once the fire is extinguished, a gray soot settles and outlines the artist’s tableaus, fixing what was once present by their hollowed absence.
Claudio Parmiggiani was born in Luzzara, Italy in 1943 and lives and works in Parma, Italy. Parmiggiani’s work has been shown six times at the Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy (1972, 1982, 1984, 1986, 1995 and 2015). His work is part of the collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Museo de Bellas Artes of Havana, Cuba; The National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland; Mamco - Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland; Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, France; Francois Pinault Foundation, Venice, Italy and Museo del Novecento, Milan, Italy.
VERONIKA PAUSOVA
Veronika Pausova’s oil paintings are theatrical assemblages played out by a cast of unexpected characters: lacquered fruit flies and spiders, powdery moths, drooping flowers, disembodied toes, fingers, and ears. The unique actors populating her paintings are each rendered with exceptional skill and control, as she combines hyper-realistic precision with experimental paint applications like soaking the canvas with imbibed sponges and fabric. Pulling and leaping across the canvases, Pausova’s human and non-human entities are united by trajectories of their own making—hands grasping their own frame, gangly legs galloping away—which together illustrate an ensnaring story unfolding before us. Pausova ultimately creates graphic paintings that marry nonsense and narrative, offsetting her skill and precision with her sense of humor to create surreal compositions that are uniquely hers.
Veronika Pausova was born in Prague, Czech Republic and is currently based in Montreal. She received her BFA from Glasgow School of Art in 2009 and her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2013.
RIDLEY HOWARD
Ridley Howard’s recent paintings continue his investigation of color and shape, as well as the reciprocal relationship between figuration and abstraction. This body of work dives deeper into the Pop aesthetic that has infused Howard’s work in recent years, combining a geometric and cinematic sensibility with his signature, delicate painterliness.
The invented characters in Howard’s pictures are adrift in various states of mind. Abstract shapes often operate as environment, though feel connected to the psychology of his subjects. Color alludes to inner states— bright reds and yellows hint at energy and emotion, muted grays and pinks as reflection and solitude. The paintings also emphasize the idea of image. Aesthetics of photography and film blend with his developed painting language, and a cinematic sense of time permeates the work. He often uses shape to crop the scene, drawing attention to areas of emptiness or the edges of the canvas itself. Absence becomes equally as important as areas inhabited by figures. Howard’s compositions and framing suggest a world that exists outside of the picture plane, one that may transcend the emotions or stories happening just inside the fictional landscape.
Howard was born in 1973 in Atlanta, GA and earned his MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston in 1999 and his BFA in Painting from the University of Georgia in 1996. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2000. His work can be found in the collections of Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; and Knoxville Museum of Art, TN. Howard currently lives and works in Athens, GA.
MIYA ANDO
This tondo, YUUGURE (EVENING) CLOUD JULY 1 2022 8:09PM SANTA CRUZ, captures the ephemeral, transient experience of watching clouds as they come and go in the evening light. The series to which this work belongs debuted in Ando’s exhibition Kumoji (Cloud Path / A Road Traversed By Birds And The Moon). The date stamp in the title illustrates the exact time and place that Ando observed the clouds on which she based the painting. As the title indicates, the Japanese word “yuugure” literally translates into “evening.”
A practicing Buddhist, Miya Ando works a lot with natural phenomena such as clouds and light to express the idea of impermanence. The ephemeral qualities of the clouds illustrate the sentiment behind the Japanese phrase “mono no aware,” roughly translated as “the pathos of things.” “Something becomes more beautiful and sublime the more impermanent it is,” Ando says. The image is painted on metal, a material Ando appreciates for its ability to reflect light under constantly changing conditions. The strength and permanence of the material is juxtaposed by the ephemerality of the subject matter.
Ando has been the recipient of several grants and awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant Award, and has produced numerous public commissions, most notably a thirty-foot-tall sculpture built from World Trade Center steel installed in Olympic Park in London to mark the ten-year anniversary of 9/11. Ando was also commissioned to create artwork for the historic Philip Johnson Glass House, in New Canaan, CT. The artist holds a bachelor’s degree in East Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, studied East Asian Studies at Yale University and Stanford University, and apprenticed with a Master Metalsmith in Japan.
ERICK MEDEL
Embroidering denim with an industrial sewing machine, Erick Medel’s works touch on everyday life in Los Angeles, particularly those living and working in Boyle Heights and the city’s East Side. The painstaking craft of his embroidery is slow and meticulous, a compliment to the snapshot-like scenes it depicts. Equal parts documentarian and synthesizer, Medel strings together his own experiences as well as those of his family and his community into stitched scenes of vibrant color, tactile textures, and labored surfaces which convey his strong sense of identification with and care for his environment.
Based in Los Angeles, Erick Medel was born in Puebla, Mexico in 1992. He holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. His work can be found in the permanent collection of the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento.