Announcing Frieze Projects Los Angeles
Large-scale commissions by Karon Davis, Cayetano Ferrer, Barbara Kruger, Paul McCarthy, Tino Sehgal and more, will activate the cinematic setting
Large-scale commissions by Karon Davis, Cayetano Ferrer, Barbara Kruger, Paul McCarthy, Tino Sehgal and more, will activate the cinematic setting
At the launch edition of Frieze Los Angeles (February 15-17, 2019), artist projects will be encountered around the New York Street backlot of Paramount Pictures Studios, in buildings, streets, and interior spaces that have been captured countless times on screen. Frieze Projects will create a disorienting atmosphere where visitors are in two places at once: an artificial New York City within Los Angeles.
“For the first edition of Frieze Los Angeles I invited artists who live, work or have histories with the city to develop projects responding to the fair’s untraditional site and context” said Curator Ali Subotnick. “Each artist has embraced the opportunity, and challenge, and the results are often magical and otherworldly, surreal and hyper-real, but never dull.”
Spanning performance, installation and sculpture, featured artists include Lisa Anne Auerbach, Sarah Cain, Catharine Czudej, Karon Davis, Cayetano Ferrer, Hannah Greely, Trulee Hall, Patrick Jackson, Barbara Kruger, Paul McCarthy, Kori Newkirk, and Tino Sehgal with more to be announced in the coming months.
Launched with the first Frieze Art Fair in 2003, Frieze Projects is an independently curated platform for artists to show ambitious, experimental work beyond gallery booths and outside the fair tent. Bettina Korek (Executive Director, Frieze Los Angeles) said, “As an extension of the fair’s programming beyond the booths, Frieze Projects asks artists to respond to the Paramount urban street backlot, a stand-in for a real city and a symbol of Los Angeles’s distinct and vast creative ecosystem.”
Leading guests from the fair tent to the streets of the backlot film set, stickers designed by Barbara Kruger will prompt visitors to contemplate philosophical questions such as “Who will write the history of tears?” “Are there animals in heaven?” or “Who salutes longest?”.
Upon entering the studio backlot, Cayetano Ferrer’s dynamic wall piece will evoke New York’s vernacular architecture and signage. Inside the classic brownstone building, a generic domestic interior will be transformed by Sarah Cain with an all-encompassing painting installation that spreads from the walls to the floors and windows and that will also feature a new stained-glass piece, as well as chocolate service, one of the artist’s vices while painting.
Inside the neighboring apartment, Lisa Anne Auerbach will present one-on-one counselling sessions about collecting and creativity with a “Psychic Art Advisor.” Down the street, Karon Davis will present Game, a work that explores how schools have become a place for the hunted—our children—through dramatically staged life-size sculptures.
Across the way, on a classic Brooklyn residential block, Hannah Greely will hang her paintings out to dry, on a clothesline spanning the apartment buildings. Creeping out from the drain at the bottom of the SoHo subway, Trulee Hall’s fluorescent serpent will snake its way in and out of windows and fire escapes, infesting the classic wrought-iron façade.
In a nod to an outdated mode of broadcasting, Kori Newkirk’s antennae sculptures will land haphazardly across the backlot like tumbleweeds blown from the rooftops, gathering colorful detritus along the way.
In the Upper East Side space, Tino Sehgal’s constructed situation, This is competition, will engage with the commercial activity of an art fair, as two gallerists compete to sell the artist’s work. From the theater, visitors will encounter a sub-level set for an interior domestic space, transformed by Patrick Jackson into a classic dark back alley—reflecting on the magic of movie-making.
On a nearby sidewalk, situated like a game piece inside of an ever-changing portrait of New York City, Catharine Czudej’s new sculpture – a cartoon working class hero – becomes a placeholder, an idea of man from a time in America that maybe never was.
Outdoor sculptures around the backlot and studio campus will include Paul McCarthy’s intervention in the financial district with a monumental inflatable artwork, Daddies Tomato Ketchup Inflatable (2007), exhibited in Los Angeles for the first time. Corazón del Sol will revive her mother Eugenia P. Butler’s seminal project The Kitchen Table (1993), with a new conversation over a meal which will be screened in the lobby of the financial district skyscraper. And installed next to the backlot entrance, Shahryar Nashat’s marble sculpture Mother on Wheels (Oro Grigio) (2018) is inspired by the pedestals he encountered at New York’s Frick Collection, reimagining this fundamental support structure as an autonomous matriarchal presence.
Off the backlot near the Paramount Theater, Nicolas Party’s monumental Head (2019) will greet visitors at the iconic Paramount Fountain, resembling an oversized millinery dummy or a carnival-style head and painted in the artist’s signature graphic style. Finally, inside the Gower Street entrance to the fair, Max Hooper Schneider’s Female Odobenid (2019) exemplifies Schneider’s exploration of evolution and a potential future in which humans and animals become one.
Find further information on all works here.
