The Best Booths at Frieze Los Angeles 2024, From a New ‘Mona Lisa’ to Art That Changes in Real Time

Carlos Almaraz, Roberto Gil de Montes, and Joey Terrill at Ortuzar Projects

A week ahead of opening its new Tribeca space (next door to its former one), New York’s Ortuzar Projects put on a three-person booth that can only be described as sheer genius. Since the gallery first began showing LA-based artist Joey Terrill in 2021, the gallery has been deepening its connection to his artistic networks. Last year, the gallery mounted an exhibition for Carlos Almaraz and Elsa Flores, an artist-couple whom Terrill first met in 1980. Around the same time as the Almaraz and Flores show, on the occasion of Roberto Gil de Montes’s exhibition at Kurimanzutto in New York, dealer Ales Ortuzar also helped facilitate a conversation between Terrill and Gil de Montes.

Now, the gallery has dedicated its booth at Frieze LA to the work of Almaraz, Gil de Montes, and Terrill, who were part of a loose community of queer Chicano artists that helped define LA’s art scene in the 1970s and ’80s. The works on view here date from 1979 (the year before Almaraz and Terrill’s fateful meeting) to 1991 (two years after Almaraz’s death). Even those who know these artists’ oeuvres well will have to reconsider them after visiting this knockout booth.

Each artist tackled their sexuality in their work. Almaraz’s sexuality was masked and coded, while Terrill was assertive about his queerness. Gil de Montes, meanwhile, falls somewhere in the middle, producing work that is rich in symbolism. The highlight of this booth is Almaraz’s Circular City (1989), a spinning, off-kilter depiction of Los Angeles, with Echo Park, a frequent subject of the artist, at its center.

vanessa german at Kasmin

A sense of healing is palpable in Kasmin’s booth, which is given over to vanessa german. The works here radiate calmness and serenity, and act as a welcome balm amid the chaos of an art fair like Frieze. This new body of work, conceived specifically for the fair, is a departure from the sculptures she’s been showing for the past few years. Each sculpture here is nearly monochromatic and made primarily from rose quartz, known for its healing properties. In using this material, German aims to create work that helps reunify mind, body, and spirit—especially at a time of extreme loneliness and isolation.

The series started with a pair of boots that she adorned with rose quartz for a 2022 show at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in Massachusetts. The majority of the works on view are busts that expressively depict figures ranging from The Notorious B.I.G. to George Floyd. Also on view are a decked-out boombox and skateboard, as well as a girl’s dress that german found in North Carolina. She has affixed it with vials containing handwritten prayers—“protection from the lies of capitalism and meanness” and “protection from emotionally paralyzed humans,” for example—and views the work as channeling the protection that an ancestral group of lesbian aunties would bestow upon its wearer.

James Perkins at Hannah Traore Gallery

James Perkins’s stunning wall-hung works, included in the fair’s Focus section, are each made from a dyed piece of silk fabric that is wrapped around a 2-by-4. Perkins then buries the works on the beach of Fire Island, just outside New York, for up to two years. During that time, the minerals from the sand and the salt from the waves that lap onto the shore transform the fabric into ethereal gradients; they now act as permanent records of the elements. Accompanying this installation are several floor pieces: three-dimensional right triangles, made in either wood or stone. That series is titled “Grounded in Love,” an acknowledgement of Perkins’s belief in all that coexistence with nature can provide.

Lotus L. Kang at Commonwealth and Council 

Transformation is also key to the work of Lotus L. Kang, which takes center stage in Commonwealth and Council’s booth. Hanging from the beams above the booth are undulating lengths of light-sensitive film. Kang, who will feature in this year’s Whitney Biennial, has exposed these strips to illumination in a greenhouse environment for stretches of time during a process that she calls “tanning.” But even beyond the greenhouse, the films are still developing, since they haven’t been sealed. Notably, each work is titled after the place where Kang tanned it; each acts as a document of where its materials have been and who’s seen them. But those documents are not made to be visible forever. Eventually—perhaps in a hundred years—the films will turn completely white.

Aydeé Rodríguez López and David Montaño Roque at Proyectos Monclova

The paintings of Aydeé Rodríguez López, on view in the orange-painted booth of Proyectos Monclova, act as a testament to the lived experiences of Afro-Mexicans. Like most Latin American nations, Mexico has a long history of denying the existence of Black people in the country. Take the case of Vicente Guerrero, a leading general of Mexico’s independence war from Spain who became the newly liberated country’s second president. He abolished slavery in Mexico, and is to date the only president of African descent to lead the country. But in at least a few contemporary portraits, he is depicted as white.

Guerrero is the subject of one 2023 painting by Rodríguez López in which he depicts the former president dancing with Juan del Carmen, a Mexican colonel during the war of independence who was also of African descent and who has largely been written out of history. Another painting depicts enslaved Africans performing the Dance of the Devil during Día de los Muertos celebrations. This dance was by no means satanic—it was a ritual performed by enslaved people in the hope of gaining better living conditions and their freedom. During their performances, they wore animal-like masks with manes that extend to their torsos. Accompanying these paintings, which have exquisite hand-carved frames, are sculptures by David Montaño Roque, one of Mexico’s leading makers of Dance of the Devil masks.

Blessing Ngobeni at Jenkins Johnson Gallery

Blessing Ngobeni, a leading South African artist, has on view several eye-catching works made on unstretched canvas. These are layered, dense works that reveal their secrets over time and require close viewing. Made with materials such as sparkling fabrics, they convey a sense of joy, but their upbeat vibe belies the difficult subject matter that Ngobeni is addressing in his work: the country’s corruption, low wages earned by workers in mines, and the unfulfilled promises made by Nelson Mandela. In one work, there is a person with a stomach bloated by a large diamond and a rooster who appears unable to fly. In a sharp condemnation of South Africa’s current state, Ngobeni also includes text that reads: “Good for nothing.”

Awol Erizku at Sean Kelly

In this powerful booth, Awol Erizku looks at how notions of beauty have been determined in both Africa and the West. His two subjects: the ancient Egyptian queen Nefertiti and Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Erizku recently spent time researching in the archives of the Andy Warhol Museum, whose presence looms large in this booth. One painting is a riff on Warhol’s serialization of beautiful white women, from Marilyn Monroe to Elizabeth Taylor. Onto the canvas he presents 12 silkscreened Nefertitis in black, red, green, and yellow. On the booth’s black walls are dozens of tiny Nefertitis.

Erizku’s Mona Lisa work is rife with art-historical references. There are, of course, allusions the iconic painting itself, painted in 1503. The work’s numerous thefts and vandalisms since the beginning of the 20th century have catapulted it to international fame. In 1919, eight years after an Italian nationalist stole the painting, Marcel Duchamp famously appropriated a ready-made postcard of it for an artwork, drawing a mustache on her and the letters L.H.O.O.Q., a French pun that, when read aloud, sounds like “she has a hot ass.”

Erizku’s Mona Lisa appears to be a postcard-size reproduction of the painting. But to this history, Erizku inserts another: that of David Hammons’s 1990 work A Fly in a Sugar Bowl, in which Hammons placed a black fly into a bowl of sugar. This fly is actually a zippper; it’s a pun referring to both a winged insect and the part of one’s pants used to shut them closed. To his Mona Lisa, Erizku has added a chrome-plated zipper. His version rests behind a plate of bulletproof glass, made to the specifications of the container the encases the actual Mona Lisa in the Louvre.

Ana Mendieta at Galerie Lelong & Co.

Lesser-known work by Ana Mendieta stands out here. There are photographs that comprise Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants), from 1972, which acted as documentation for a performance in which Mendieta attached her friend’s beard to her face. But there are also less famous works, such as Untitled (Cosmetic Facial Variations), 1972/97, a related series that was also made while Mendieta was studying at the University of Iowa. In this suite of four photographs, Mendieta has sculpted her hair into various shapes, forming masks around her visage.

Jennifer K Wofford at Silverlens

Bay Area artist Jennifer K Wofford’s section of Silverlens’s booth provides plenty of visual allure with its walls painted in stripes of bright green, yellow, and pink. On these walls hang three paintings she made after a recent stop at the iconic Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, a famed halfway point between San Francisco and Los Angeles. In a self-portrait, the artist, dressed in a brightly colored and patterned dress, stares somberly into a gilded mirror; the color palette of the reflected ceilings and walls correlates with the hues of the booth’s walls. In another painting, Wofford’s dress reappears as an amorphous shape rising up to the canvas. The Madonna Inn has imposing boulder-like walls, which Wofford has mimicked in three sculptures of rocks made from chicken wire.

Geoffrey Holder at James Fuentes

To accompany a splendid solo show dedicated to the late Geoffrey Holder, James Fuentes has also dedicated his Frieze LA booth to the larger-than-life artist and actor. Presenting several portraits created throughout his career, the booth’s most alluring work is a 1956 painting on Masonite that depicts Holder’s wife, the acclaimed dancer Carmen de Lavallade. In it, de Lavallade has an elongated neck and sits against a mostly rust-brown background, illuminated by loose white brushstrokes. That work finds its twin in a full-body painting of a seated de Lavallade made two decades later that is on view in the gallery’s Hollywood space. It immediately grabs your eye, drawing you right in.