The organizers of Frieze Los Angeles have revealed details of the art fair’s 2023 iteration, its largest to date. The event will take place at the Santa Monica Airport February 16–19 and will feature 124 participating galleries, a 24 percent increase over the previous year. Of note, the fair will feature more twentieth-century art than in years past, in which contemporary art took center stage. The Los Angeles gallery scene, which exploded over the past year, will be prominently represented amid a globe-spanning contingent featuring galleries from twenty-two countries, including South Korea, where Frieze successfully established its presence this past September.
The fair’s Focus section, devoted to galleries from across the country that have been in operation for twelve years or less, will be cocurated by Amanda Hunt, of Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, and independent curator Sonya Tamaddon. The beloved Frieze Projects, an outdoor section of the fair featuring site-specific installations and large-scale sculptures, will be curated by the nonprofit Art Production fund and will occupy space between the airport’s Barker Hangar and a tent designed by Kulapat Yantrasast’s Why Architecture. The hangar, which once played host to the short-lived New Los Angeles International Contemporary Art Fair, will feature work by underrecognized twentieth-century artists.
Frieze Los Angeles was launched in 2019 at a Paramount Studios backlot, where it ran for two successive years before the Covid-19 crisis put paid to the planned 2021 iteration. The fair in 2022 moved to a vacant lot outside the Beverly Hilton, where, according to the Los Angeles Times, lack of easy access to food was a concern for many visitors and exhibitors. The move to the Santa Monica Airport brings the event far to the west of L.A.’s gallery scene but offers the fair a 30 percent larger footprint, and plenty of room for restaurant pop-ups. Additionally, it presents visitors with a fresh landscape. Christine Messineo, Frieze’s director of the Americas, noted in statement that Frieze Los Angeles “encourage[s] our visitors to explore everything Los Angeles’s West Side has to offer, from major institutions to smaller spaces that form the fabric of the city’s art community.”