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Frieze Los Angeles

Past
Feb 16 – Feb 19, 2023

Art Fair Details:

Frieze Los Angeles
Santa Monica Airport
Booth D8
Feb 16 – 19, 2023

Connect:

(opens in a new window) @friezeofficial
(opens in a new window) @pacegallery

Above: Yoshitomo Nara, Remember BTB, 2020 © Yoshitomo Nara

Pace Gallery is pleased to announce details of its presentation at the 2023 edition of Frieze Los Angeles.

The gallery’s booth (D8) will spotlight its contemporary program, with works by Yoshitomo Nara, Robert Longo, Alexander Calder, Adrian Ghenie, John Wesley, Maysha Mohamedi, Mary Corse, Beatriz Milhazes, and Fred Wilson among the highlights. For the first time since Frieze Los Angeles was launched in 2019, Pace is operating a permanent space in the city—an exhibition of works by Calder, selected and installed by artist Richard Tuttle, is on view at its West Coast flagship on South La Brea Avenue during the run of the fair.

Works by Los Angeles-based artists Maysha Mohamedi, Mary Corse, and Glenn Kaino will figure prominently on the gallery’s booth. Mohamedi’s new painting The Afterlife II (2023) exudes a sense of freedom and illimitability, pointing toward a new mode of atmospheric abstraction that registers certain conditions specific to LA—and American life as a whole—in the early 21st century. A recent painting by Corse reflects the artist’s ability to infuse her canvases with light. A mixed media sculpture by Kaino will be exhibited on the booth along with a work by Los Angeles-born photographer Richard Misrach.

Two artworks by Yoshitomo Nara—whose first international retrospective was mounted at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2021—will be showcased as part of Pace’s Frieze Los Angeles presentation. Among them is the artist’s playful work on paper Remember BTB (2020), which was exhibited in his 2022 solo exhibition with Pace in London and his 2021 solo show at Dallas Contemporary in Texas. This work incorporates acrylic and colored pencil on collaged paper and cardboard. Nara will soon open his first solo exhibition in Australia, on view at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth from February 26 to June 25.

The booth will feature a 1960 standing mobile by Alexander Calder. Transforming the modern conception of sculpture with his mobiles, Calder is widely regarded as one of the most important artists of the 20th century. In the small-scale untitled sculpture in Pace’s Frieze Los Angeles presentation, Calder engages his lyrical abstractions in a playful choreography. Calder/Tuttle:Tentative, presented in collaboration with the Calder Foundation, is on view at Pace’s Los Angeles gallery through February 25. The exhibition focuses on Calder’s artistic output in 1939, with small- and medium-scale sculptures, as well as works on paper by the artist, selected and installed by Richard Tuttle.

Highly detailed, hyperrealistic works on paper by Robert Longo, who presented a solo exhibition titled Sea of Change at Pace’s Los Angeles gallery last year, will also be on display in the gallery’s booth at Frieze Los Angeles.

Among these works is the artist’s intimately scaled Study of Gun Protest (2022), which captures the emotional dimensions of the movement for gun control in the United States. Throughout his career, Longo has drawn inspiration for his work from art historical sources as well as enactments of protest and civil unrest, violence and war, and other social and political happenings around the world culled from news photography and the Internet. As evinced by Study of Gun Protest, Longo has, over the past decade, increasingly turned his focus to images from American media.

A new, large-scale canvas by Adrian Ghenie will be exhibited in conversation with paintings by Matthew Day Jackson—who will open his first solo exhibition with Pace in New York in May—and Beatriz Milhazes on the booth.

Featured Works

Agnes Martin

1912, Macklin, Saskatchewan, Canada
d. 2004, Taos, New Mexico

Composed of broad bands of yellow, blue, and orange, Agnes Martin’s Untitled #4 (1996) appears sun-bleached, as though it were exposed to the high-desert sun of Taos, New Mexico, where the artist lived and worked from 1993 until her death in 2004. In her late eighties, the 1990s were a period of prolific output for Martin, whose life in Taos toed the line between ascetic and indulgent: she did not eat dinner, listen to the radio, or watch television, but drove herself to her studio each day in her white BMW. Untitled #4 is a distinguished example of the body of colorful paintings the artist produced while in Taos, following a nearly 20-year period during which Martin worked in dark greys. The present work exemplifies her triumphant return to color, and underscores her mastery of light, as explained by art historian Ned Rifkin: “Because the paint is diluted acrylic and combines with the chalky whites of her gesso, Martin’s colors both absorb and reflect light. This unusual way of handling color, as if to impart a feel or an ‘aroma’ rather than to create a temperature or to mimic naturalistic color, characterizes much of Martin’s work over the past several years.” Martin’s dexterity with color and light, as well as her judicious precision, exemplified in this masterful late-career pièce de résistance, have endowed her work with global recognition and renown.

Robert Longo

b. 1953, Brooklyn, New York

85309 — Maysha Mohamedi, *The Afterlife II*, 2023, oil on canvas, 33" × 28" (83.8 cm × 71.1 cm)

Maysha Mohamedi

b. 1980, Los Angeles

John Wesley

b. 1928, Los Angeles
d. 2022, New York

Yoshitomo Nara

b. 1959, Hirosaki, Aomori, Japan

Yoshitomo Nara’s drawing practice has remained a fundamental component of his oeuvre throughout his career. The artist often repurposes discarded materials as drawing surfaces, from used cardboard to envelopes, a practice rooted in his childhood, a time during which he recalls paper was a precious commodity and products were reused many times: “Wrapping paper from department stores would be carefully folded up and put away in the drawer to await a new life. And when I came home from school, I would make drawings on the unprinted backsides of newspaper inserts.” His drawings function as vehicles for depicting the artist’s ephemeral mind while at once reactivating found objects, creating palimpsests of thought and form. Comprised of collaged paper and cardboard, Remember BTB (2020) appears as a vinyl album cover, referencing the Japanese punk band Bloodthirsty Butchers (1987–2013), whom Nara worked closely with on cover art for several albums. Imagery and language related to the band have been recurring motifs in Nara’s paintings and drawings, such as the present work’s disembodied head with an eye patch—featured on the Bloodthirsty Butchers’ 2007 album, Gitarisuto wo Korosanaide. Nara has also created album cover art for other bands, including The Birdy Num Nums, The Busy Signals, R.E.M., Shonen Knife, and The Star Club, among others. Through these collaborations and the proliferation of Nara’s drawings, replete with imagery related to his relationship with music, it is apparent that music and art are one for the artist. As stated by Nara, “When I’m working on drawings, music just comes into my ear and goes straight out of my hand.”

Beatriz Milhazes

b.1960, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Mary Corse

b. 1945, Berkeley, California

Matthew Day Jackson

b. 1974, Panorama City, California

Bristlecone pine trees, the eponymous subject of Matthew Day Jackson’s large-scale painting Bristlecone Pine (after CDF) (2022), are recognized as the world’s longest-living organism; one of these trees, growing on a hillside in Northern California, has been dated to over 4,700 years old, roughly the same age as the Pyramids of Giza. Jackson’s painting characterizes the hallowed longevity of this species, capturing its gnarled, barren structure in a style that recalls the gothic forests of German Romanticism. The title refers to Caspar David Friedrich, the 19th century German Romantic period’s most enduring painter, lionized for his depictions of both isolation and the sublime in his landscapes; Jackson’s nominal tree recalls Friedrich’s eerie woods, and the foreboding sky of Bristlecone Pine (after CDF) is in the genealogy of intense atmospheres characteristic of Friedrich’s oeuvre. The dramatic gestures drawn from Friedrich’s paintings heighten the theatricality and potential energy of the painting, implying the immediacy of implicit events—whether meteorological, terrestrial, or metaphysical—to come.

Notably, Jackson’s subject has lost its needles and cones, prophetic of its age and the threat of death, which for this species could take thousands of years. Jackson’s textural layers build upon one another, as do the concentric rings that signify years in the life of trees. Illuminating the central tree, overlapping moons awash in traditionally sunset hues crowd the sky, all of which is rendered in Jackson’s signature topographical lunar texture, resembling the peaks and craters of the moon’s surface. Born and raised in California, Jackson bridges his varied interests, from the fraught history of the American West to the Apollo 11 moon landing, creating a science-fantasy-historical narrative in Bristlecone Pine (after CDF) that engages in dialogue with Friedrich, masterfully bridging the German Romantic period, and 20th century Surrealism. Jackson’s resonant, otherworldly paintings marry celestial, terrestrial, and fantastic elements, culminating in the dreamlike scientific fantasy of Bristlecone Pine (after CDF).