A few minutes after opening its doors this Thursday, the halls of Frieze began to be sighted celebrities.
The Weekend browsed between sculptures from the Otani workshop and the iconic happy flowers of Takashi Murakami.
Pierce Brosnan wandered with a vaguely lost look between the works of Pace, one of the most important galleries in the world.
Will Ferrell and his wife, Viveca Paulin, spoke at length with various exhibit managers.
In the art world, the comedian has a reputation as a connoisseur and collector with initiative.
The start of this fair marks the starting signal for dozens of cultural activities in Los Angeles, a city with a short focus capacity in which four days are enough to be called "art week".
Frieze enjoyed this Thursday all the attention of a city always in search of a new phenomenon.
The fair has a presence in London, New York and Seoul, but this year it has made its edition on the west coast its first of 2022, which has generated great expectations.
It is only the third to be organized in Los Angeles after the debut in 2019 and the stoppage forced by the coronavirus in 2021. Sixty galleries were there the first year.
Today there are almost 100. Only one Korean, Kukje, canceled after the shipping prices of the works skyrocketed.
Still, it's a minor inconvenience compared to other art fairs that have been held during the pandemic, which makes organizers think there's a willingness to turn the page.
Reality derailed other plans.
Actor Will Ferrell attends the Frieze contemporary art fair in Los Angeles on February 17. CASEY KELBAUGH @caseykelbaugh (FRIEZE)
"It's an exciting time to be here," said Beatrice Shen, one of the directors of Hauser & Wirth, located in a huge building in the downtown Los Angeles art district, on Wednesday night.
The gallery has opened shows by English artist Phyllida Barlow and Gary Simmons, a black painter originally from New York who recently moved to the city.
Remembering Tomorrow
(Remembering tomorrow) is his presentation to Los Angeles society.
She does so with large-format works in which he comments on racism throughout American popular culture.
Another of the gallery's big events, which will open a new location to the west of the city this year, is the first edition in 60 years of Marcel Duchamp's influential catalog raisonné, published in 1959. Artist and film director Miranda July will read some of the texts this Saturday.
California keeps alive its reputation as a land of opportunity for those who come from the East.
It is happening with several artists, which has caused an increase in the number of galleries in the city.
Western collectors don't yet have the renown of those in New York, but the tech and crypto industries help make it a thriving market.
Shen explains that a great generation of artists, many of them graduates of Cal Arts (the art institute), who in turn influence other younger ones, has consolidated Los Angeles as the great reference site in this part of the United States. .
This despite the fact that some galleries and fairs erroneously predicted that the epicenter would be near Palo Alto, near the fortunes of Silicon Valley.
Led by Christine Messineo, who has been in the director's post for less than 90 days, Frieze left the Paramount Studios lot and moved into a space across from the Beverly Hilton, a Beverly Hills location that highlights her most glamorous profile.
This year the fair has given 39 spaces to local galleries, a gesture that aims to give visibility to local artists in a city that is looking for its own voice and shake off the label of eternal rival of the East Coast.
The gallery owner Luis de Jesús attended the event for the first time in the LA Focus section.
José Rojas, director of the Mexican House of Gaga, also present at the fair, has also opened a Los Angeles location.
He considers it a natural movement due to the increase in Los Angeles artists whom he represents and due to the dialogue between the Mexican and Californian scenes.
The boom is not exclusive to independent businesses.
The large transnational galleries have also taken advantage of these days to confirm that they are setting foot in the city.
Pace, founded in 1960 and with the work of 113 artists including Alxander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Mark Rothko and Agnes Martin, a master of abstract art, bought a smaller gallery to have representation in the city since April.
It will be the tenth space that it opens.
The important New York gallery owner David Zwirner confirmed this Thursday that in January 2023 he will open a new site in a three-story building east of Hollywood.
It is the second project in the United States for a gallery that has a presence in New York, London, Paris and Hong Kong.
"This is fertile ground...there's a very strong local scene and we want to be a part of it," Zwirner told
The New York Times
, who broke the news.
In total there have been eight, including Sean Kelly and Lisson, who have made similar decisions.
Two men look at a painting at the Frieze art fair in Los Angeles on February 17. CASEY KELBAUGH @caseykelbaugh (FRIEZE)
On Thursday, one of the busiest spaces at Frieze was Gagosian, a gallery founded in Los Angeles in 1980. It only showed one work,
Dreamer's Folly
, a garden pavilion sculpture by Chris Burden, an artist who died in 2015. who left an influential work.
One of his most recognized works is
Urban Light
(2008), the 202 restored lamp posts from the 1920s that decorate the entrance of the Los Angeles County Museum (LACMA), the most important museum in the city.
Burden was the first artist represented by Gagosian, in 1978. The gallery was showing the sculpture for the first time in the United States.
This was sold, before lunchtime, to a leading European art institution that has not been disclosed.
A perfect circle and an unmistakable sign of the hot market in the area.
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