Frieze Los Angeles

Material tactility, its possibilities, limitations, and transformation form the core of Kelly Akashi's practice. Originally trained in analog photography, traditional processes and the materiality of documents continue to inform and fuel her sculptural explorations. Working in a variety of media, such as wax, bronze, fire, glass, silicone, copper, and rope, Akashi investigates the capacity and boundaries of these elements and their ability to construct and challenge conventional concepts of form.

This work is exemplary of Uta Barth’s career long exploration of visual perception. While her influences span the history of painting, sculpture and installation art, particularly that of Minimalism and the Light and Space movement native to her adopted home of Los Angeles, she has primarily employed the medium of photography as she continues to be fascinated by the strong similarities and differences between camera vision and that of human eye and mind.

This image is part of Barth’s recent series entitled In the Light & Shadow of Morandi. Inspired by Giorgio Morandi's practice of repeatedly rendering the same scene as well as his detailed attention to changes in light and form, Barth continues her evolving practice of capturing light, but now intervening in the scene and actively ‘drawing with light.’ She strategically manipulates quotidian glassware to refract and reflect, allowing colored light to spill onto the surface of the photograph as if it were paint. The unconventional shape of the image is the result of photographing these shadow tableaus from extreme angles and then restoring a frontal view after the fact. Here, Barth embraces the oddities of camera vision that human perception so elegantly compensates for.

Since the early 1990s, Sandra Cinto has explored the potential of drawing to create intricate images and immersive environments, often using the line as gesture to deconstruct physical and spiritual boundaries. In Night with Stars III, Cinto renders a mesmerizing nightscape that evokes a sense of weightlessness like that of the sea and the sky. In all her work, Cinto conjures great tensions and contradictions: formally, between surface and depth, abstraction and representation, but also thematically, between joy and sadness, fear and comfort, utopia and reality.

Endlessly happy visible endings features a double ring of crystal- glass spheres, mounted on a wall, to form a complete rainbow.

Each sphere presents a step, relative to its neighbors, in a progression through the full spectrum of visible light. These vivid colors - which seem to emanate from within the glass - were created by applying a reflective layer of colored chrome to the back third of each sphere. When viewed from the front, the entire sphere is permeated by the bright color of this layer. The concave reflective surface also produces an inverted image of the viewer and their surroundings within each sphere, a dynamic image that disappears when the ring is approached from an angle; viewed obliquely, the clarity of the glass re-emerges.

Eliasson will have a major solo exhibition at MOCA Los Angeles, opening in September 2024.

Since 2009, Olafur Eliasson has been engaged in a project involving a new color theory based on the prismatic colors and explored through a series of painted artworks. He began these experiments by working with a color chemist to mix in paint an exact color for each nanometre of light in the visible spectrum, which ranges in frequency from approximately 390 to 700 nanometers. Since the initial experiments, Eliasson has used this palette to make paintings on circular canvases, known collectively as the Colour experiment paintings.

Using this system, Eliasson has also created compositions that range from simple explorations of the spectrum to more complex efforts to capture the color in a specific source image. They are comprised of multiple layers of very thinly applied paint to create a seamless transition between colors. In Colour experiment no. 115 (Jökullsalon), Eliasson captures and interprets the intersection of color and light within a specific photograph of an Icelandic glacial lake bearing that name.

Using this largely grayscale color gradient as the background, Eliasson then places a piece of Icelandic sea ice harvested from waters near his Reykjavik studio, at the center of the canvas in an intentional gesture of experimentation. As the ice melts, the artist adds small quantities of pure pigment which are carried across the canvas to create a new landscape of color fields. Formless blue and gray explosions spread out from the center of the canvas, contrasting starkly with the even background. Metaphorically, the dematerialization of the ice and its interaction with the color pigments, illustrate the infinitely transitory nature of natural phenomena, as well as both the beauty and fragility of the landscape.

Laura Lima’s Levianes series have a deep connection to the history of Brazil and concretism, but also an interesting relationship with the light and space movement in California. The Leviane works in particular have an ethereal and atmospheric quality that evokes similar perceptual phenomenas through the use of dry ice. Referencing the history of landscape painting, Lima uses the smoke as a painting tool to blur the color and details of the pieces, creating shadows akin to how one creates painterly atmospheric qualities. In a domestic setting, the dry ice is optional and can be added whenever desired.

Charles Long explores the possibilities of sculpture through a rich vocabulary of materials, colors, images and shapes. His work incorporates references to history, popular culture, nature and his own experiences as a means of connecting inner and outer realities, forming pathways between one’s mental and bodily experiences and the surrounding environment. Over the years, the artist has consistently confronted formal parameters associated with sculpture as obstacles to push beyond, seeing modernism’s trajectory as unfinished and full of possibility.

Tableta Verde was made using a clay waste mold, in which the entire form was created first as a negative space in clay and then gypsum was cast into the void. After drying, the clay was carved away to reveal the final form.

Lisa Oppenheim’s starting point for Goldener Apfelbaum 1903/2023 is an image of a painting by the same title published in Gustav Klimt’s catalogue raisonné. The painting was seized from the collection of August and Serena Pulitzer Lederer by the Gestapo and later destroyed in a fire set by retreating German troops in Schloss Immendorf in Lower Austria in 1945. Oppenheim uses firelight to solarize the only known documentation image of Goldener Apfelbaum and then silver tones the image to create a new artwork that reimagines the painting through the element of its destruction.

Over the last three decades, Amalia Pica has examined relationships and how we communicate. Often using seemingly simple materials and found objects, she investigates human modes of interaction, especially our desire to learn and to be understood as we try to make sense of the world around us, and the accompanying pleasures and failures. Her work has an intentional lightness of touch and playfulness, which Pica prioritizes for its power to draw viewers into a conversation. Pica began her career as a primary school art teacher, an experience that continually informs much of her work.

In Aula grande (en partes), everyday objects have been turned into chalkboards, a seeming invitation to draw, write, or scribble on the surfaces. Spanish for large classroom (in parts), here Pica examines the role school plays in imparting a common visual language in our cultural imaginary, and how this way of seeing and thinking accompanies us through the rest of our lives. The work proposes that we rewrite, redraw, and reimagine alternative narrative possibilities from an expansion of knowledge centered on daily life.

Dana Powell's small-scale oil paintings depict moments of transition and anticipation. They take the shape of night drives, full moons, swimming pools, elevator doors, still lifes with fruit, explosions, and peep holes. Unrelated at first look, these subjects prove malleable apparatus in demonstrating the unsettling power of the ordinary, and emotive potential of small shifts in formal painting strategies. Considered austerity is applied to Powell’s tableaus of the everyday, offering a window to the familiar and its undertow.

Analia Saban dissects and reconfigures traditional notions of painting, often using the medium of paint as the subject itself. This body of work continues Saban's investigations into the relationship between paint, pigment and canvas. In this work, thin layers of dried acrylic paint is woven through the linen, physically embedded into the fabric of the painting.

Informed by the worlds of art, architecture, natural sciences, and engineering, Saraceno's work invites viewers to consider geometries and phenomena of the natural world as adaptable models for the ways we live and interact. The piece is comprised of a complex geometric structure of translucent iridescent plexiglas that suggests the cell-like membranes of bubbles that emerge when oil is shaken with water. As in an organic system, this work is composed of many parts all similar but all different from one another, whose interconnected elements capture the iconic and intricate complexity of Saraceno's oeuvre.

Tomás Saraceno has an upcoming solo exhibition at our Los Angeles Gallery, which will be on view during Frieze LA.

For more than four decades, Haim Steinbach has explored the psychological, aesthetic, cultural and ritualistic aspects of collecting and arranging existing objects. His work engages the concept of “display” as a form that foregrounds objects, raising consciousness to the play of presentation. Presented on handmade shelves or freestanding cases so as to avoid the pressure of personal sentiment or anecdote, the objects - which can range from ethnic artifacts and pre-christian clay vessels to hobby horses and dildos, or in this case, a figurine of Bart Simpson beside a dog chew toy - generate a tension between consumerist popular culture, desire, and value in the critical context of the art world.

Gillian Wearing has long investigated public personas and private lives. In AI Imagined mask of Joan Crawford as Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Wearing has employed AI technology (specifically, DALL-E 2) to morph the profiles of the two protagonists in the 1962 film, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, played by stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, a macabre film that redefines sibling rivalry.

The mask - generated by AI but seamlessly harmonized with Wearing’s portrait beneath - calls on the historical Muse of Tragedy and Muse of Comedy tropes, forming a witty parody of mortality, suffering and beauty while calling into question the nature of masks and what they say about our public and private selves.