Lehmann Maupin returns to Frieze Los Angeles for the 7th time with a presentation that foregrounds our artists with strong ties to the city, celebrating the deeply-rooted cultural history of LA. Spanning photography, painting, and sculpture, the booth will feature works by LA-based artists Todd Gray, Liza Lou, Catherine Opie, Lari Pittman, Alex Prager, and Calida Rawles, who are known for their unique visual language that probes the limitations of their respective mediums, as well as works by David Salle, who was a fixture of the LA arts community in the 1970s while studying at California Institute of Arts (CalArts) under John Baldessari.
Additional highlights include works by Erwin Wurm, OSGEMEOS, Do Ho Suh, Teresita Fernández, Kim Yun Shin, Mr., and Loriel Beltrán, and Billie Zangewa. Wurm, OSGEMEOS, and Zangewa have concurrent museum shows on view at the Albertina Modern, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, respectively, and Suh will have a major survey exhibition at the Tate Modern in London in May of this year. Works by Fernández are currently on view in a group exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. This spring, Lehmann Maupin will present a two-part solo exhibition of work by pioneering Korean artist Kim Yun Shin, spanning the gallery’s London and New York locations.
New works by Todd Gray will be on view at the booth. Known for his photo-based works, Gray’s practice aims to destabilize assumptions about the veracity of photography and provoke reconsiderations of long-accepted norms and beliefs surrounding the medium. His lush photo-assemblages are composed of images ranging from imperial European gardens, West African landscapes, and architecture, to rock icons and portraits of the artist himself, all carefully arranged to create critical juxtapositions that examine ideas of African diaspora, colonialism, societal power structures, and dominant cultural beliefs. In Cosmic Journey (Brown) (2024), for example, Gray depicts an image of a ship in the foremost panel, which appears to sail out of an image of the cosmos captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. The ship is a model of a French slave ship from the Maison des Esclaves (House of Slaves) museum on Gorée Island, a UNESCO world heritage site and former center of slave trading on the African coast. Here, Gray’s use of cosmic imagery functions as a conceptual bridge and as such, condenses the time between the photograph and that of the ship. Concurrent to the fair, Gray’s exhibition While Angels Gaze is on view through March 22, 2025, at the gallery’s New York location, marking his first solo exhibition with Lehmann Maupin in the city.
A selection of photographs by Catherine Opie will be on view at the booth. Known for her powerfully dynamic photography that examines the ideals and norms surrounding the culturally constructed American dream and identity, Opie first gained recognition in the 1990s for her series of studio portraits, photographing gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals drawn from her circle of friends and artists. Using dramatic staging, Opie presents queer and trans bodies in intimate photographs that evoke traditional Renaissance portraiture—images of power and respect. In her portraits and landscapes, Opie establishes a level of ambiguity of both identity and place by exaggerating masculine or feminine characteristics, or by exaggerating distance, cropping, or blurring her landscapes. To create works such as Untitled #10 (From Your Shore to My Shore) (2009), Opie traveled on a container ship from South Korea to Long Beach, California, capturing the shifting sunrises and sunsets during her 10-day journey. The composition contains equal registers of water and sky, separated by the thin line of the horizon. For Opie, the horizon becomes both an equalizing line and a connective thread, and it functions as a feature of the landscape that is both immutable and shared. Works by Opie are currently included in a group exhibition on view at the Sun Valley Museum of Art, Idaho.
A selection of photographs from Alex Prager’s recent series Western Mechanics, as well as several new works, will be on view. Based in Los Angeles, Prager is known for her uncanny images and films that blur the line between artifice and reality to explore the human condition. Over the last two decades, she has honed her signature style, which draws on traditional movie-making techniques from golden-era period styles (like film noir and Technicolor), classical mythology, and the allegorical works of Dutch Renaissance painters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel. In the new work on view titled Santa Monica Airport (Departure) (2025), , Prager eschews linear narrative and instead focuses on the presentation of emotionally charged vignettes. She constructs her compositions as highly charged moments that feel like a fabricated memory or dream. Her distinctive use of archetypes, everyday objects, humor, and allegory—along with her signature technicolor facades—allows her to explore dark and complex topics, in which existential concerns are often central to her practice. Prager’s feature-length film debut, DreamQuil, will be released later this year. Works by the artist will also be included in two group exhibitions opening in Europe this year: Chromotherapy, opening February 28 at The French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici and Deep Beauty, opening May 25 at Mudec in Milan.
A new painting by Los Angeles-based artist Calida Rawles will debut at the fair. Known for merging hyper-realism and poetic abstraction, Rawles employs water as both a vital, organic material and a historically charged space. Across her compositions, bodies are submerged in exquisitely rendered submarine landscapes of bubbles, ripples, refracted light, and expanses of blue. For Rawles, water acts as a signifier for both physical and spiritual healing, as well as historical trauma and racial exclusion. Rawles uses this complicated duality as a means to envision a new space for Black healing and to reimagine her subjects beyond racialized tropes. Rawles’s first museum solo exhibition Away with the Tides recently closed at the Pérez Art Museum Miami and will travel to Memphis Brooks Museum of Art this March. Concurrent to the fair, works by the artist are also included in two group exhibitions currently on view in Los Angeles: Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968 at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics at LACMA.
In addition to foregrounding artists with strong ties to Los Angeles, the booth will spotlight works by Erwin Wurm. Best known for his sculptures, which include human-sized pickles, a house compressed to just one meter wide, and his iconic, participatory One Minute Sculptures, Wurm has examined the fundamental tenets of the medium for decades. Confronting expectations about what sculpture can or should be, the artist explores intriguing new possibilities through investigations into volume, mass, surface, color, and time. For example, Wurm’s Flat Sculpture series, which he began in 2021, marks one of the latest evolutions in the artist’s experiments with the formal qualities of sculpture. In Cast(Flat Series) and Hot (Flat Sculptures), both from 2021, Wurm pushes the idea of flattening volume to an extreme, creating “flat sculptures” with paint on canvas. For each composition, he selects a single word relating to other series or sculptural concerns (such as “hot” and “cast”) and expands it to fill the entire picture plane, ballooning and distorting the text almost beyond recognition. Rendered in the signature colors of Wurm’s palette—light blue, electric chartreuse, and pale yellow—the paintings navigate a narrow border between representation and abstraction, reflecting Wurm’s recent interest in moving away from figuration. Erwin Wurm: A 70th-Birthday Retrospective is currently on view through March 9 at the Albertina Modern in Vienna.
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