Frieze Los Angeles Reawakens the City With Its Sixth Edition

With 95 exhibitors from 20 countries, Frieze Los Angeles, returning for its sixth edition, focuses on the interplay of the city as an art center and its global influence. Held at LA’s Santa Monica Airport from February 20 through 23, the fair is set in a structure designed by Kulapat Yantrasast’s architectural studio WHY. "Frieze Week is one of the most exciting weeks in Los Angeles. It galvanizes art audiences and energizes the entire city,” Christine Messineo, Frieze director of Americas, tells L’OFFICIEL.

For Messineo, Frieze Los Angeles is a touchstone for the broader art world; an opportunity to come together and a moment to create the future. “Community-building and greater access are so important for the next generation of art audiences,” she says. “That's something I feel particularly attached to, and that I have worked hard to bring to the fair."

To help revitalize the city’s cultural ecosystem, gallery Victoria Miro will open their stand at Frieze as a space for galleries participating in the fair to come together and raise funds for fire relief efforts by donating works to benefit the LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund.

Read on for gallery and event highlights alike for this 2025's Frieze Los Angeles.

Galleries Section Highlights

Major galleries, such as Gagosian, Pace, and Hauser & Wirth, will present alongside 14 first-time exhibitors, including Southern Guild, Mariane Ibrahim, and Timothy Taylor. Frieze’s blended gallery perspective emphasizes the Los Angeles community, spotlighting nearly half of its local participants, including Blum, Regen Projects, and David Kordansky Gallery. International presences, such as Maureen Paley, Victoria Miro, and Thaddaeus Ropac, further the reach of the fair's offerings. And galleries that have graduated from Focus to the Galleries sector, such as Matthew Brown, Sebastian Gladstone, and Nazarian/Curcio, expand the dynamic exchange of ideas that characterizes the Frieze environment.

Highlights include Candida Alvarez of Monique Meloche, with vivid, color-burst expressions that bring her intuition into collage effect. Liang Hao, who is represented by Shanghai’s Bank gallery, uses hyperrealism to consider literal and expressive elements of the body. Sean Kelly’s Donna Huanca ruminates on cycles of life, the body, and the natural world through materials and abstraction. And Richard Saltoun Gallery’s Greta Schödl explores visual poetry, weaving history and the present with letters and symbols.

Focus Section Highlights

The next generation of contemporary artists are collected in Focus, curated for a second turn by Essence Harden, co-curator of Made in LA 2025. Featuring 12 emerging galleries, with three making their Frieze debuts, Focus presents solos by galleries with a space in the U.S., formed from 2013 and after. Here, the likes of Bel Ami, Sow & Tailor, and Superposition Gallery elevate innovative new voices.

Featured artists include Carlye Packer’s Brandon D. Landers, who pushes the bounds of the imagination with paintings of everyday moments from his childhood in LA’s South Central. Lyles & King’s Kate Meissner explores the psychology of performance and surveillance spaces in new and unexpected lights. And Dominique Gallery’s Adee Robertson celebrates Black women and family through expressions that cull personal archives and cultural references into visual memories.

Frieze Programs and Collaborations

Frieze Los Angeles features the Art Production Fund’s return with site-specific artworks, presented throughout the fair campus. This year’s showcase, “Inside Out,” explores the theme of perspective from both personal and collective views. The works also reflect on how the city itself is shaped by identity, migration, and community.

Frieze will also present a city-wide project by interdisciplinary artist Coco Fusco in collaboration with Mendes Wood DM and Orange Barrel Media. Through her work Only in Darkness, Fusco explores race, gender, and colonialism. The project will be presented through a series of public billboards and digital screens throughout LA, offering a collective space for reflection and dialogue.

Madeline Hollander’s choreographed flight project merges dance and the body with Los Angeles airspaces, and Greg Ito's inflatable candle sculpture, embellished with California poppies, represents hope and transformation. Ozzie Juarez recreates murals, architecture, and performances from his South Central upbringing that speak to personal experience and cultural identity. And Dominique Moody will restage her installation The Nomad, a mobile dwelling of found objects and salvaged materials that challenges the idea of what defines the concept of home.

Cultural Happenings During Frieze Week

LA museums and cultural institutions will present a variety of exhibitions and events. At the Getty, María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold discovers more than three decades of the Cuban-born artist’s work, touching on ancestry, migration, and identity. Olafur Eliasson: Open at the Museum of Contemporary Art inquires into how we see and experience, and where we find the limits of our own seeing. Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature at The Broad spans more than 400 works, comparing the social, political, and environmental impact of his work and California’s ecological movement. And at ICA LA, Scientia Sexualis surveys the works of more than two dozen artists who consider the scientific, medical, and psychiatric constructs that surround our bodies. 

Also, Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal will show at the Hammer Museum, and Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics will exhibit at LACMA. Animation and Me at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures will host a series of events and activations.