The APAA's Top Works under $25K at Frieze Los Angeles 2023

ASMA (Gaga)

.RAR (Wallpaper) Red, 2022

Silicone

$6,000

Extraction. A method applicable both to digital files and the unconscious. Anyone who has ever partaken in the peer-to-peer collective dreamspace of online piracy will be familiar with the .RAR file format, a black box for mysterious contents (which you can never be sure are actually as advertised). Likewise, surrealist artist and author Leonora Carrington spread the rumor that she had been born of the union of her mother and a machine she created which extracted the life force from strays and barnyard fauna, but perhaps this was a metaphor for the animating force humans share with nature, the animal soul. ASMA, a duo based in Mexico City (Carrington’s adopted home), mines similar territory with enigmatic silicon enclosures that lend an air of unreality and haziness, these compositions pull equally from anatomy engravings and the computer desktop, the present collective hallucinations of the internet and the symbology of hermetic manuscripts from the long ago past. – Jeremy Johnston, Darling Green

Etel Adnan (Galerie Lelong & Co.)

Sri Lanka, 2018 

Signed and dated recto 

Etching 

29 ⅞ x 17 ⅞ in

Edition of 35 plus 3 artist's proofs (#30/35) 

This beautiful etching by Etel Adnan (1925-2019, b. Beirut, Lebanon) is a perfect example of an affordable work by an internationally recognized artist who is included in prominent collections and museums around the world – most recently a stunning solo exhibition at the Guggenheim.  Adnan’s career spanned several decades and encompassed a wide range of media—including painting, drawing, tapestry, film, ceramics, and leporello artist books. She was first an author of poetry and prose, often addressing and protesting against the turmoil of the Vietnam War and the Lebanese Civil War.  Informing her writing and later her artwork, was the landscape, its own history and her emotional and physical response to it. For Adnan, the landscape was mingled with memory, especially a sentiment of displacement, as she was born and raised in Lebanon, but lived, studied, and worked in France and California throughout her life. This work would be a captivating addition to a growing collection.

- Mindy Taylor Ross, Art Strategies

Kevin Beasley (Casey Kaplan Gallery)

Vista XXVII, 2023

Polyurethane resin, raw Virginia cotton, Sharpie transfer

11 x 16 x 1.5 inches

$25,000.00

As an art advisor based in San Francisco, it is impossible to ignore the power of California’s landscape in my daily life. When an artist is able to distill the complexity and beauty of nature into their work, I tend to pay close attention. Such is the case with the Virginia born, New York based artist Kevin Beasley, who brings together non traditional mediums which pack a conceptual punch. In the work above, Beasley has used raw Virginia cotton, a byproduct of his birthplace, along with the ultra industrial material polyurethane resin. This juxtaposition of mediums with their own insidious histories critique that same American landscape that Beasley exists within. - Laura Smith Sweeney

Isabelle Ducrot (Standard (Oslo))

Pushing Pots, 2019

Watercolor, pigment, oil pastel on French Paper

65 x 89 cm/ 25 5/8 x 35 inches

Unique

€ 8,500

Isabella Ducrot's still life drawings of multi-colored teapots and vases are jovial and charming. The spry lines and flowing composition, created using a combination of watercolor, pigments, and pastel on Indian, French, Japanese and Chinese paper, have a magical quality about them. Ducrot, a youthful and curious nonagenarian Italian artist, has a strong interest in an array of cultural experiences and disciplines, from Italian Baroque painting to Indian miniatures and Chinese textiles. She is a brilliant storyteller.  These drawings allude to deeper narratives of history and place. As in much of her textile-oriented work, the decorative elements are subjugated to free-flowing forms and the iconography is timeless. Ducrot's work is on view at Oslo's Standard Gallery and stands in beautiful contrast to thirty-two-year-old Julia Rommel's more structured paintings, as part of a two-women exhibition at the gallery's booth. Ducrot's work has been the subject of exhibitions at Museo Carlo Bilotti Aranciera di Villa Borghese, Rome; Biennale Internazionale Donna, Trieste; Fondazione Dino ed Ernesta Santarelli, Rome (2021); San Giuseppe alle Scalze a Pontecorvo, Napoli (2021) Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna et Contemporanea, Rome (2016); Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Naples; Nazionale Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, Rome (2015); Museo Michetta, Francavilla al Mare (2010); City University of New York, New York (2008), as well as numerous gallery exhibitions with Galerie Capitain, Cologne and T293, Rome and STANDARD (OSLO), Oslo. – Mireya Lewin

 

Marley Freeman (Karma Gallery)

clues of up-and-down, 2022

Oil and acrylic on linen

20 x 18 inches; 50.80 x 45.72 cm

21⅛ x 19⅛ inches; 53.67 x 48.59 cm (framed)

$22,000

There are many outstanding works for the relatively modest price of ‘$25K and under’ on view at Frieze. Throughout the art world we are feeling the inflationary squeeze -- and dealers do not have their heads in the sand; they have curated accordingly. I spotted one such well-priced artwork in the Karma Gallery viewing room. Twenty by eighteen inches, oil and acrylic on linen, by the mid-career American painter Marley Freeman, the pretty, bright painting, is called “clues of up and down.” 

Freeman’s abstract paintings are sensuous, intense, infused with a love of textile and musicality, and are somehow both full of emotion and also measured. Freeman makes many of her own pigments – they are lush, beautiful, and take the eye and mind on endless journeys. LACMA has a large Marley Freeman painting on view at the moment, part of the New Abstracts exhibition, that has more staccato brushwork, but displaying the same balance and layering as “clues of up and down.”  - Rachel Greene

 

Nan Goldin (Marian Goodman)

Greer modeling jewelry, NYC 1985

Print

45 x 30 in. 

Edition of 25

$22,000

Nan Goldin (b. 1953) is a celebrated photographer and activist. She rose to fame in the mid to late 1980s with her long-standing photo-book-project "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency" which consisted of candid snapshots of young people, mostly friends or acquaintances of Goldin’s, living on the fringes of society. The photographs display their interactions and power dynamics, as well as capture their frustrations, hopes and aspirations. These were the days of parties, drugs and intimate encounters which Goldin captured both behind and in front of the camera. As in the self-portrait she took showing her battered face following a row with her then lover. These photographs stand in direct contrast to the "ideal" public image or desire of wholesome America.  "Greer modeling jewelry", 1985, from this time period, is less about the transgressive nature of the sitter and more about her character, her dreams and ambitions. Greer Lankton, a transgender artist, is captured in a moment of raw intimacy; eyes averting the viewer but no less proud. Goldin's unadulterated portraits display both the vulnerability and resilience of the sitter, despite her apparent fragility. Sadly, Lankton died of an overdose in 1996.  Indeed, if there is something that characterizes Nan Goldin, is her confrontation of important socio-economic and political issues. She survived the AIDS epidemic which claimed the lives of so many of her friends but has been vocal about her mental health struggles and society stigmas. In the documentary "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed", 2022, she describes in painful detail her personal suffering, and those of loved ones, with opioid addiction. The documentary, which won this year's Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival, has also been nominated for an Oscar. Just like she does with her photographs,  Goldin exposes, with great vulnerability, the effects of the indiscriminate prescription of opioids, which led to a major addiction epidemic and overdose deaths in the United States as well as an ongoing mental health crisis. This biographical note adds greater dimension to her photographic work, proving there is no distinction between the artist and the activist or art and life. – Mireya Lewin

 

Marc Hundley (The Modern Institute)

A Contrapuntal Instrument, 2023

Acrylic on canvas

From the fall of the Roman Empire up until the Reformation, the cult of saints, a pantheon of holy people and martyrs, was the main form of religious expression for the common person within the Christian tradition. It was these sanctified figures, usually depicted in images so as to aid the illiterate, that were the intercessors for the poor, the sick, and the desperate, an amorphous host capable of taking on any affliction or meaning necessary. Hundley’s work reconstructs these figures for the modern age, operating just below the surface of popular culture—figures of suffering and ecstatic longing. A Contrapuntal Instrument presents a pensive Glenn Gould in this role, but not Gould the man himself, rather the idea and legend of the renowned pianist (see also: Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser), crossed with Hundley’s own ambiguous personal mythology—the addendum of place to the image as one would a concert location. For these are the relics of Hundley’s new cult—the flyer, the poster, the tour T-shirt—the ruins around which the devotees orient themselves. – Jeremy Johnston, Darling Green

Tony Lewis (Blum & Poe Gallery, LA)

Why, 2022

Graphite pencil, colored pencil,

and rubber cement on paper

44 x 30 1/4 inches (111.8 x 76.8 cm)

$25,000

Why, 2022 is a high energy drawing where concentrated colorful forms collide and overlap resulting in an elegant interplay as they dance across smudged and rubbed graphite. Beginning with improvisational mark-making based on the sound of a word that evolves from a title, a seemingly simple narrative on abstraction unfolds.  As with many of Lewis' drawings, the artist explores linguistics and phonetics through the use of color and form. He draws upon methods of communication and the connections between sound, music, and gesture. His expansive practice continues to seek inspiration from words found in disparate sources such as historical speeches, Calvin and Hobbes comic strips and popular literature.

Tony Lewis (b. 1986, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in Chicago. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C, moCa Cleveland, Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA and is included in collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, NY and the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY.  – Joanne Cohen

Ana Mendieta (Galerie Lelong & Co.)

Flower Person, Flower Body, 1975 / 2020

Color photograph

16 x 20 in (40.6 x 50.8 cm)

Edition 3 of 10 with 3 AP (#3/10)

$25,000

One of the most influential Cuban American artists of our time, Ana Mendieta’s work is a haunting and unflinching representation of our connection to the earth. Exiled from Cuba at a young age, Mendieta’s art and performances harness her experiences to explore humanity’s inherent need for belonging. The Silueta series features over 200 earth-body works that document the artist burning, carving and molding her outline into the landscape. Their ghostly qualities seem to foreshadow her mysterious and untimely death in 1985.  In Flower Person, Flower Body, the figure has found its belonging within the water and the flowers are representations of femininity. Her outlined body feels reminiscent to Ophelia’s tragic demise in Hamlet, emphasizing her practice’s analysis of the challenges women were facing during the late 1970’s. The subject matter remains relevant in today’s times as women’s rights continue to be challenged.  -Victoria Burns 

Victoria Morton (The Modern Institute)

Pitch O, 2022

Oil and acrylic on canvas

12 x 24 x 5/8 inches

$10,000

Victoria Morton’s Pitch O, 2022 is a small painting that deploys the artist’s signature style of atmospheric forms of color, varied paint application from light brush strokes to poured areas of color, and the rhythmic weaving in and out of space. As an artist who works across media there is a nod to her music practice in the title as well as the syncopation of form and color across the painting.  The intimacy of scale invites the viewer to come close, slow down, and really look.

Morton lives and works in Scotland and has exhibited extensively across the United Kingdom for 20 years.   Frieze LA coincides with her debut solo show at a gallery in Los Angeles. – Lisa Marks

Matt Paweski (Herald St, Gordon Robichaux)

Bonnet (Wooly), 2023

Aluminium, aluminium rivets, vinyl paint

19.1 x 66 x 30.5 cm / 7.5 x 26 x 12 in

Unique

 

Paweski’s sculptures are beguiling in the transparent nature of their materials and construction—nothing is hidden or disguised—yet they still appear as otherworldly; objects somehow outside of the logic of the mechanical or industrial in which they have their material origin. Bonnet (Wooly) is a perfect example of this, a form that is somehow familiar on the fringes of our perception, but refuses to materialize into a direct formal reference. It is somewhere in between a fossil of the animal kingdom (phylum Mollusca, perhaps?), costume, architecture (especially swooping space age forms, visitors to Los Angeles for Frieze may find echoes in the Theme Building as they fly into LAX), and industrial design, yet it defies all of their specificity. Inside and outside becomes irrelevant, and this irrelevance brings to mind Gilles Deleuze’s thoughts on Leibniz, the fold, and the baroque: “The world is an infinite series of curvatures or inflections, and the entire world is enclosed in the soul from one point of view.” . – Jeremy Johnston, Darling Green

Kaveri Raina (Chapter NY)

Wish It Was Otherwise; Lack Of—Revisited, 2022

Acrylic, graphite, oil pastel, burlap

80 x 48 inches

Kaveri Raina first caught my eye at a summer group show at Luhring Augustine in 2019 and her expressive paintings often feature unexpected imagery. Working on stretched and dyed burlap as the base of her work, Raina pushes acrylic paint from the back to the front of the material, achieving rich texture with the addition of pastels, graphite, oil stick and charcoal. Having moved from India to Ohio at the age of ten, Raina’s paintings are based on memory, imagination, and her hybrid sense of self, often employing recurring forms and abstracted figures.  Wish It Was Otherwise; Lack Of—Revisited, was inspired by the former Queen of Jhansi, Rani Lakshmibai, who is a symbol of resistance and power in India. The work evokes ideas of female empowerment through resistance. -Elizabeth Fiore