FRIEZE LOS ANGELES 2026

Xiyao Wang, a leading voice in contemporary abstraction, creates lines that snap, drift, and double back. Her canvases hover, as if the next gesture were already forming. Drawing on deep knowledge of both Asian and Western traditions, she folds influences from Taoism, dance, and martial arts into a language that feels instinctive yet exacting.

Aaron Garber-Maikovska brings another register of abstraction, one driven by the body’s logic. His marks emerge from performance, leaving the afterimage: loops, jolts, and hesitations that feel quickened, almost combustible. His fluted poly works become a physical manifestation of his innermost thoughts and feelings, with each brush stroke representing a gesture imbued with a personal yet universal meaning.

Brian Rochefort, meanwhile, takes a three-dimensional route, turning ceramics into controlled eruption. His vessels swell, crack, and crust over with glaze, holding the record of heat and pressure. They sit somewhere between studio experiment and natural phenomenon - objects that appear discovered as much as made.

Karin Gulbran adds a counterpoint with ceramic works that merge form, surface, and figuration. Her vessels often double as creatures or characters, their hand-painted glazes moving between tenderness and unease.

Gulbran’s ceramics occupy a space where the playful meets the uncanny, expanding the language of the medium through narrative and a deliberately off-kilter beauty.

Courtesy MASSIMODECARLO.