APAA’s Top Picks from Frieze Los Angeles & Onsite Guide
Frieze Los Angeles kicks off this week! To mark the fair’s return, we’re highlighting a selection of standout works chosen by our advisors, alongside our curated onsite guide to the must-see exhibitions and favorite dining spots in Los Angeles. The fair runs Thursday, February 26, through Sunday, March 1. Learn more here.
Thank you to our advisors for sharing their top picks from this year’s presentation at Frieze Los Angeles!
Advisor Top Picks from Frieze Los Angeles
Clare Woods, The Controller, 2025
“Clare Woods has created new paintings for Frieze Los Angeles inspired by a visit to The Huntington Gardens. Using her signature wet-into-wet brushwork and expressive gestures, and using her own photographs as reference, Woods conveys the fresh perspective of a British painter seeing California's varied vegetation for the first time. With aluminum as her support, the imagery nearly glows from within, and at a larger-than-life scale, bringing a captivating vitality to the long-established tradition of botanical painting.
Oil on aluminum
78 3/4 x 59 inches
Presented by Night Gallery
Corydon Cowansage, Budding (Blues), 2025
“Cowansage is a superb colorist. Her rich, velvety palette creates a sense of depth that feels tactile. The surface breathes. The work is organic and abstract, creating a sensual and seductive experience. Her lineage clearly seems tied to that of Georgia O’Keeffe.”
Acrylic on canvas
60 x 48 inches
Presented by Kaufmann Repetto Gallery
Louis Fratino, Ale in Liguria, 2025
“Louis Fratino offers a glimpse into his private world through intimate, serene paintings that capture tender moments with friends, family, and lovers. Drawing on a range of modernist influences—including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe—his style melds contemporary life with the aesthetics of 20th-century figuration. Deeply personal and self-reflective, his work is remarkable for its vulnerability as well as its refined painterly skill.”
Oil on canvas
26 3/4 x 30 inches
Presented by David Zwirner
Jordan Ann Craig, Sharp Tongue; Am I Thoughtful or Am I Crazy, 2025
“Sharp Tongue; Am I Thoughtful or Am I Crazy showcases the duality of Jordan Ann Craig’s painting practice. Abstraction becomes a vehicle for Craig’s sustained engagement with her own Northern Cheyenne ancestry. Meticulously rendered compositions reveal parallels between Indigenous material culture and the formal parameters of painting, the rigor of beaded pattern work transformed by the artist's hand into rhythmic tessellations of color and geometry. The dazzling culmination is unmistakably Craig’s own, rooted equally in her commitment to experimentation and reverence for tradition.”
Acrylic on canvas
35 x 35 x 2 1/2 inches
Presented by Hales Gallery
Alicja Kwade, MalusMultiplex, 2025
“Alicja Kwade's solo booth presentation, Fruits of Labor, brilliantly questions reality and the social structures that are embedded in our global society and economy. MalusMultiplex is one of a series of bronze fruit sculptures that ironically reflect on optimization and the circulation of goods, time, and value.
Forms that promise lightness, pleasure, and consumption become heavy, unusable, and contradictory through their materiality.
Altered in weight and shape, Kwade’s deformed fruits beg the question of how value is perceived, transported, and shared (or not) in the global economy. Kwade’s fruits belie the promise of lightness, pleasure, and consumption as they are inedible, hard, and oddly shaped, asking the viewer to reassess.”
Patinated bronze
3 1/8 x 3 1/8 x 3 1/8 inches
Unique variation 2 of 24
Presented by 303 Gallery
Mika Tajima, Negative Entropy (Seishoji Priest Prayer, Periwinkle, Double), 2026
“I selected Mika Tajima’s Negative Entropy because it operates at the intersection of material innovation, systems thinking, and perceptual experience—concerns that feel especially urgent in 2026.
Tajima’s practice interrogates invisible structures: labor, sound, data, and the built environment. In this work, industrial weaving technologies translate recorded sound into textile form, compressing time and vibration into vertical bands of color. The result is not gestural abstraction, but encoded information—an index of energy rendered materially. The title’s reference to “negative entropy” is precise: the work proposes a counter-movement to disorder by fixing ephemeral phenomena into structure.
Formally, the composition is rigorous. The chromatic field—periwinkle and saturated red—creates a retinal oscillation, while the horizontal band interrupts and stabilizes the vertical cascade. It reads simultaneously as painting and as acoustic diagram. The use of nylon, recycled polyester, cotton, acrylic, rayon wool, and acoustic baffling situates the work in dialogue with contemporary concerns around sustainability, architecture, and sensory design.
At Frieze Los Angeles—where conversations around technology, environment, and perception are central—Tajima’s work stands out for its conceptual clarity and material intelligence. It extends the legacy of postwar abstraction into a data-driven present without nostalgia. It is disciplined, contemporary, and structurally exacting—qualities that resonate with how I think about building collections meant to endure.”
Nylon, polyester, recycled polyester, cotton, acrylic, rayon, wool acoustic baffling felt, and white oak
55" × 42" × 1-1/2" (139.7 cm × 106.7 cm × 3.8 cm), panel
56-3/8" × 43-3/8" × 2-3/8" (143.2 cm × 110.2 cm × 6 cm), framed
No. 97279
Presented by Pace Gallery
Onsite Guide for Frieze Los Angeles
LACMA.
Exhibitions and Museums to Visit
Visit the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for multiple special exhibitions, including "Futbol Is Life: Animated Sportraits" ahead of the World Cup, "Collecting Impressionism," and "Arp-Klee."
Head to Perrotin for Takashi Murakami's "Hark Back to Ukiyo-e: Tracing Superflat to Japonisme's Genesis" — a stunning exploration of Japanese art traditions.
Stop by The Broad to see expansive presentations of Lichtenstein, Basquiat, and Warhol, plus Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms.
Explore the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures for exhibitions on Jaws, Ponyo, costumes, and special effects — plus special screenings during Oscars season.
Don't miss "Destiny is a Rose: The Eileen Harris Norton Collection" at Hauser & Wirth, opening just ahead of Frieze.
See Heather Guertin's "The Radiant Edge" at Anat Ebgi Gallery— a must-see during fair week.
Visit Bergamot Station Arts Center for galleries, restaurants, and a special open house celebrating Frieze week.
Take a stroll through Abbot Kinney in Venice for shops, restaurants, and galleries, or walk the mile-long path at Palisades Park for stunning ocean views.
Dining Recommendations
For dining, try Bavel for modern Middle Eastern cuisine (their Lamb Neck Shawarma made the NYT list of 25 Essential Dishes in Los Angeles), Dunsmoor for elevated American fare, Funke for Italian with rooftop cocktails, or Holbox for exceptional Mexican seafood. End your evening at The Roger Room for craft cocktails in an eclectic setting.
Bavel. Image by Tanveer Badal.
