6 Unmissable Works at Frieze Los Angeles 2024

Jorge Pardo's Untitled (Set of 5 Lamps) (2022) at Petzel

Jorge Pardo's illuminated works offer a refreshing palate cleanser from the two-dimensional works that often dominate art fairs.

At Frieze Los Angeles, New York's Petzel gallery showcases a set of the artist's hand-blown glass pendant lamps. Hung at the centre of the gallery's booth, these brightly coloured sculptures are guaranteed showstoppers.

Crafted in an array of shapes and sizes, and suspended at varying heights, Pardo's lamps exemplify the Cuban-born artist's commitment to bridging sculpture and design.

The bulbs illuminate the translucent shades surrounding them, creating a glowing interplay of light and shadow. This transformation turns the typically sterile white booth into a warm and experiential space.

Fairgoers are invited to reconsider their perception of the surroundings, echoing Pardo's artistic aim not only to captivate visually but change how one perceives the space they inhabit.

Hiroshi Sugimoto's Studio Drive-In, Culver City (1993) at Lisson Gallery

Lisson Gallery presents Hiroshi Sugimoto's work for the first time since announcing their representation of him earlier this January.

Taken at a drive-in cinema in Culver, Los Angeles, Sugimoto's long-exposure photograph is part of his 'Theaters' series (1978–1993) exploring the concept of presence through absence.

Studio Drive-In, Culver City (1993) was captured during a screening of Mick Jackson's The Bodyguard (1992). The prolonged exposure, spanning the entire two hours and nine minutes of the film, results in a blindingly bright white screen. Within this radiant expanse, there are no discernible characters or scenery, not even a trace of main actress Whitney Houston.

Sugimoto's ambiguous image employs visual absence to represent the passing of time. Haunting and perplexing, the photograph encapsulates the Japanese artist's attempt to elude time and showcases his experimental approach to lens-based media.

Sugimoto's presentation at Frieze Los Angeles precedes his inaugural exhibition at Lisson Gallery, scheduled to open in May in New York.

Jessie Homer French's Drought (2023) at Various Small Fires

Fresh off the heels of her solo exhibition, Normal Landscapes at Various Small Fires in Los Angeles, American artist Jessie Homer French brings several paintings to Frieze Los Angeles.

A self-taught artist, Homer French, now 83, is noted for depicting death, destruction, life, and nature. Her paintings are often naïve in style, featuring flat colours and simplified figures.

Her paintings of wildfires stun with their subject matter and dramatic use of colour. Drawn from her observation of a controlled burn, Homer French became fascinated by an act that both rejuvenates and destroys the environment.

In Drought (2023), silhouettes of trees in a landscape are engulfed in fire and smoke. Within this painting, the saying of 'there is no life without death' resounds. The scene evokes a mixture of grief and an underlying sense that something new will rise from the destruction.

Bruce Nauman's Double Poke in the Eye II (1985) at David Lewis

An edition of 40, Nauman's neon Double Poke in the Eye II (1985) has been widely exhibited, most notably in Venice, when Nauman represented the U.S. Pavilion in 2009.

The sculpture is constructed of neon tubing mounted on an aluminium plate. Two profiles of human heads face each other, positioned at either side of four hands with their forefingers and thumb extended. Flashing in sequence, the forefinger pokes the eye of the opposing profile.

Nauman made his first neon works in 1965, yet his early iterations were often text-based containing word-play or puns.

This year, the Hong Kong non-profit art space Tai Kwun Contemporary is host to an exhibition of Nauman's works from the Pinault Collection (14 May–18 August 2024). A continuation of his major exhibition Contrapposto Studies at Punta della Dogana, Venice (2021–2022), it takes the form of a retrospective—Nauman's first in Asia—foregrounding five decades of Nauman's multidisciplinary practice.

Alan Saret's Cubic Electric (1997) at Karma

My immediate thought was a dandelion clock when I first caught sight of Alan Saret's 1997 wire sculpture in Karma's Frieze L.A. preview. Others say a neural network, or wisps of human hair.

All speak to the American artist's ability to create substance without weight. His spiralling, knotted, twisted three-dimensional networks float throughout their given environment, in this case, the halls of Santa Monica Airport.

For more than 40 years, Saret has been working in his studio in South Williamsburg, New York, focusing on the ways that inorganic materials—wire, steel mesh, latex rubber—can resemble the organic properties we envisage.

His exploration of the three-dimensional started on a trip to India in the early 1970s. For a decade, he'd been in and amongst the conversations of an emerging generation of post-minimalist artists in New York, many of whom—Richard Serra, Lynda Benglis, Eva Hesse, and himself—were celebrated in a 1990 Postminimalist exhibition, The New Sculpture 1965-1975 at Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

While in Los Angeles, I suggest heading to Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) where Saret's sculptures are currently on view in Long Story Short (15 January 2023–28 April 2024), an exhibition of artworks from the Los Angeles museum's collection.

Curtis Talwst Santiago's Culture in the Key of Kerry, Sung by my Aunty's on a Saturday afternoon (2024) at Rachel Uffner Gallery

It was a joy to come across the miniature worlds of Trinidadian-Canadian artist Curtis Talwst Santiago.

Living between Munich, Lisbon, and Toronto, Talwst Santiago creates micro-dioramas in repurposed antique jewellery boxes that are no larger than the palm of your hand.

For Frieze L.A., Rachel Uffner Gallery brings six of his tableaux in varying dimensions—a number small and rectangular, another in a sterling silver scallop-shaped box, and the smallest of the group seems like it would have previously housed a ring.

'I first met Curtis Talwst Santiago in 2016 on a studio visit to Pioneer Works, New York,' recalls Rachel Uffner.

'In that first meeting, I thought, and still do today, that Curtis' work is wholly unique. He has such a distinctive, curious, and inspired voice. His work has not yet been shown extensively on the West Coast, so Frieze Los Angeles will be a great moment to introduce his singular practice to new audiences.'

Talwst Santiago's work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as The FLAG Art Foundation, New York; Pérez Art Museum Miami; and is found in the permanent collection of Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.