Frieze Los Angeles

Past
Feb 29 – Mar 3, 2024
Los Angeles

Art Fair Details

Frieze Los Angeles

Santa Monica Airport
Booth D10
February 29 – Mar 3, 2024

Press

Press Release

Connect

(opens in a new window) Frieze Los Angeles
(opens in a new window) @friezeofficial
(opens in a new window) @pacegallery

Above: Robert Longo, Untitled (Dry Palm), 2023 © Robert Longo / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Pace is pleased to announce details of its presentation at this year’s edition of Frieze Los Angeles.

The booth (#D10) will offer a snapshot of Pace’s 2024 program at its LA gallery, featuring artworks by Li Songsong, Alicja Kwade, Gordon Parks, Torkwase Dyson, and Loie Hollowell. In addition, the booth will spotlight California artists of various generations, including Robert Irwin, Mary Corse, Glenn Kaino, and Maysha Mohamedi. Pace’s Frieze LA presentation will also bring together sculptures by several women artists, including Lynda Benglis, Tara Donovan, and Louise Nevelson, alongside works on paper by Robert Longo and Pablo Picasso.

Anchoring the booth are works by five artists who will be the subjects of exhibitions at Pace in LA this year: A painting entitled Panda (2023) by Li Songsong, who will open his first-ever solo show in LA at Pace in March; Know-ledge (Immortality-Maximilian) (2023), a recent mixed-media sculpture by Alicja Kwade, who, in collaboration with Pace Founder and Chairman Arne Glimcher, will curate an exhibition of her own work and paintings by Agnes Martin at Pace’s LA gallery in May; a 1966 photograph by Gordon Parks, whose work will be the subject of a solo show at Pace in LA this summer; a new painting by Torkwase Dyson, who, in addition to her upcoming solo presentation at Pace in LA, will be the subject of a solo exhibition presented by Pace as part of the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide Participating Gallery Program this year; and a recent Split Orb painting by Loie Hollowell, who, in addition to her upcoming solo exhibitions at Pace’s New York and LA galleries, is presenting her first museum survey at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

Since opening its West Coast flagship in LA in 2022, Pace has renewed its commitment to the city’s art community, having first established ties to major LA artists—including key figures from the Southern California Light and Space movement—in the 1960s. Among those figures is Robert Irwin, a hugely influential and ceaselessly experimental artist who made use of light and space as key materials in his work across painting, sculpture, and installation. Irwin’s wall-mounted sculpture #3 x 6' D Four Fold (2016), which will be featured on Pace’s booth at Frieze LA, will be the first work by the artist that the gallery has put on public view since his passing last year at age 95.

Celebrating the city’s vibrant contemporary art scene, Pace’s booth will showcase new works by Glenn Kaino and Maysha Mohamedi, both of whom live and work in LA. Kaino, whose bronze and fabric sculpture Kabuto (LA) (2023) will be on view at Frieze LA, is presenting his first major solo show at Pace’s New York gallery—titled Walking with a Tiger and on view through February 24. His work was recently the subject of Glenn Kaino: Aki’s Market, a multifaceted installation centering on his grandfather’s life in East LA, at the Japanese American National Museum in LA. At the fair, the gallery will also show a 2024 painting by Mohamedi, a self-taught artist raised in San Luis Obispo known for her atmospheric abstractions. A large painting by Mary Corse, who lives and works in Southern California, will also figure prominently on the booth.

In the way of works on paper, a large-scale charcoal drawing of a palm tree—an enduring symbol of the Southern California landscape—by Robert Longo will be featured on Pace’s booth along with Pablo Picasso’s Le peintre et son modèle (1970). In his sketches and drawings, which were the subject of a major exhibition at Pace in New York last year, Picasso worked through ideas for his paintings and sculptures. The artist created Le peintre et son modèle, a composition in pen, ink, and wash, just three years before his death in 1973.

Sculptures by an intergenerational group of women artists—Lynda Benglis, Tara Donovan, and Louise Nevelson— will also figure prominently on the gallery’s booth at Frieze LA. New wall-mounted sculptures created by Benglis in 2023 will be exhibited alongside her 1968 work Shape Shifter, one of her early experimentations with poured, pigmented latex. Additionally, the booth will feature a black-painted wood sculpture made by Nevelson in 1985 and Stratagem I (2024), a new, never-before-seen work by Donovan composed entirely of CDs. Standing over seven feet tall, Stratagem I is part of a new body of work that Donovan will present in her upcoming solo exhibition at Pace in New York, opening in May. Mutable and seemingly alive, Donovan’s latest sculptures respond directly to the presence of the viewer’s body as it traverses space, reflecting her deep interest in the relationship between perceptual nuances and material transfigurations.

Robert Longo

b. 1953, Brooklyn, New York

Li Songsong

b. 1973, Beijing, China

Alicja Kwade

b. 1979, Katowice, Poland
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Alicja Kwade’s Know-ledge (Immortality-Maximilian) (2023) explores the dynamics between knowledge, history, and the endeavor to distill extensive information into its fundamental essence. Three volumes of Encyclopedia Brittanica—recording entries alphabetically from “Immortality” to “Maximilian”—support a slab of rock that appears like a growth, spilling out over the sides of the marble plinth. Penetrating this system is a wormhole; based on a solution to one of German-born theoretical physicist Albert Einstein’s field equations, a wormhole is a hypothetical tunnel-like structure in spacetime that connects disparate points in the universe. Kwade visualizes the wormhole with spherical, trumpet-like openings connected by a narrow channel, metaphorically constructing a conduit between stone— representing the ancient earth—and the book volumes, symbolizing the consolidation of human knowledge and time. When Encyclopedia Brittanica was first published in 1771, it was conceived as a framework to order and “diffuse the Knowledge of Science.”1 Across Kwade’s oeuvre, the artist takes up questions about the origins of information, her body of work acting as a kind of encyclopedia of ideas, or “sculptural attempts at understanding.”2

The juxtaposition of ancient stone and contemporary materials is characteristic of Kwade’s material explorations, which synthesize distinctive elements, from the Enlightenment-era aspirations of the Encyclopedia Britannica to speculative scientific inquiry in the form of the wormhole, bridging the temporal and conceptual gaps inherent in the progression of human understanding.

Encyclopedia Britannica, “Preface,” Ed. 1, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1771), v.
Alicja Kwade quoted in “ALICJA KWADE: ‘I’M TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT WE BELIEVE REALITY IS – WHO’S SAYING WHAT IT IS,’” Frame, 29 November 2020. https://frameweb.com/ article/alicja-kwade-im-trying-to-figure-out-what-we-believe-reality-is-whos-saying-what-it-is

Torkwase Dyson

b. 1973, Chicago, Illinois

Gordon Parks

On May 21, 1966, Muhammad Ali successfully defended his heavyweight boxing title against challenger Henry Cooper. It was during this year that Ali crossed paths with photographer Gordon Parks, who was working on a story on the iconic boxer for Life magazine; Untitled, London, England (1966/2020) was one of many photographs that came out of this prolific collaboration.

In this image, Ali is outside the ring, but still with boxing on his mind: he stands in the shadows, his right arm pulled into his chest, his hand curled into a fist, in a protective blocking position. Ali’s face, though visible, is covered by his tightly pulled hood, while the dramatic lighting hides his eyes and chin, highlighting his nose and cheekbones. The boxer appears caught off guard, even vulnerable. Parks, whose photographic practice was dedicated to documenting American life and culture with a focus on social justice and the African American experience, found the perfect subject in Ali. Untitled, London, England is psychological in nature, revealing the inner life of the heroic and, at the time, controversial, boxer. Two years earlier, Ali was making national headlines for his conversion to Islam and for changing his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali. He came under fire for his anti-white sentiments, and for his objections to the Vietnam War. ¹ For this Life magazine profile, Parks focused on more intimate scenes of the boxer—Ali lying on a table in the locker room or being embraced by a young fan—giving readers a more sympathetic look into the boxer’s psyche.

“Muhammad Ali, 1966/1970,” The Gordon Parks Foundation. https://www.gordonparksfoundation. org/gordon-parks/photography-archive/muhammad-ali-1966-1970/installations?view=slider#3

Loie Hollowell

b. 1983, raised in Woodland, CA
Lives in New York, NY

Robert Irwin

b. 1928, Long Beach, California

d. 2023, La Jolla, California

Hank Willis Thomas

b. 1976, Plainfield, New Jersey

Lynda Benglis

b. 1941, Lake Charles, Louisiana

Lynda Benglis’s Treble Bar (Minor) (2023) belongs to the artist’s recent series of Abaca paper sculptures. Beginning with a laborious process using the pulp of Abaca—a banana tree native to the Philippines—Benglis makes sheets of handmade paper that are used to enclose bamboo reeds. These forms are left to dry in the sun outside her studio in New Mexico, where this exposure to the elements helps to determine their final form; as it dries, the paper contracts and clings to itself, shrinking around the bamboo reeds like a skin stretched around a rib cage. In a 1973 issue of Artforum, critic Robert Pincus-Witten identified the “frozen gesture,” the artist’s term, as the crux of her practice, signifying her work’s embodiment of opposing qualities—both physical and psychological.1 Treble Bar (Minor) crystallizes a moment in time shaped both by the artist’s hand and the environment, a duality seen across her oeuvre. The artist assigns each of these sculptures a title after production that references a species of moth: the Treble-bar moth—indigenous to the British Isles and the Arctic—is characterized by its triangular wings and three distinctive bands of black on each forewing, giving the insect its name.2 Treble Bar (Minor) continues Benglis’s exploration of the dichotomy between hand-wrought objects and those shaped by natural forces, extending from her earlier works fashioned from paper and chicken wire, engaging the juxtaposition of the natural and inorganic that is central to her oeuvre.

Robert Pincus-Witten, “Lynda Benglis: The Frozen Gesture” Artforum, November 1974, Print, 54. https://www.artforum.com/features/lynda-benglis-the-frozen-gesture-213426/
“Treble-Bar,” UK Moths, https://www.ukmoths.org.uk/species/aplocera-plagiata/