Five Emerging Artists to Watch at Frieze Los Angeles 2025
Focus returns to spotlight the next generation of art spaces and artists, including LA-based talents Kate Meissner, Edgar Arceneaux and Adee Roberson
Focus returns to spotlight the next generation of art spaces and artists, including LA-based talents Kate Meissner, Edgar Arceneaux and Adee Roberson
The Focus section at Frieze Los Angeles 2025 showcases some of the most innovative and thought-provoking art being made today. Curated for the second time by Essence Harden (co-curator of ‘Made in L.A. 2025’), this year’s edition features 12 young US galleries, three of whom are making their Frieze fair debut. With the majority of participating spaces based in Los Angeles, Focus really champions the city’s evolving art community.
The section celebrates diverse practices and perspectives across solo artist presentations, from Kate Meissner’s seductive paintings exploring the psychology of surveillance to Xin Liu’s futuristic take on a sacrificial ceremony. Here are five of the artists debuting exciting new solo projects in February.
Brandon D. Landers presented by Carlye Packer (Los Angeles)
Brandon D. Landers paints ‘unrecorded events’ drawn from his childhood in South Central Los Angeles and his imagination. Everyday moments such as cooking, shopping and play are transformed by the irregular surfaces of Landers’s works, created by dense applications of paint with a palette knife. Landers warps human proportions and defies rules of perspective. He peppers his scenes with advertising cues, brand names and price tags, all written in reverse, pushing audiences to question which side of reality his compositions (and they) inhabit.
Kate Meissner presented by Lyles & King (New York)
Nightclub VIP rooms, hospitals and theatres: these spaces of performance and surveillance are the inspiration for Kate Meissner’s latest works. The LA-based artist examines the psychological distortions triggered by situations of display and examination. She moulds idealized feminine forms into faceless, non-normative, fleshly beings with prosthetic appendages. Inspired in colour and mood by the cinema of David Lynch and David Cronenberg, Meissner works from maquettes, photography and manipulated images to create a compelling blend of naturalism and digital seduction.
Adee Roberson presented by Dominique Gallery (Los Angeles)
Adee Roberson transforms Dominique Gallery’s space into a vibrant visual and sonic celebration of Black women and family. In new paintings and screen prints, the artist weaves family archive material into her characteristic technicolour compositions. Roberson evokes cultural references that plot the timeline, memory and spirit of the Black diasporic movement, with her works on paper in dialogue with sculptures and sound pieces.
Edgar Arceneaux presented by Dreamsong (Minneapolis)
Edgar Arceneaux began his ‘Skinning the Mirror’ series while he was caring for his mother through dementia and continued it as he grieved after her death. ‘Though these works are not autobiographical,’ he explains, ‘the poetics of loss, grief, and love are in there.’ Exploring the fragmentary nature of self-understanding, Arceneaux paints, shatters and strips found mirrors, before transferring the silver nitrate on to canvas. In this state, their reflective surfaces absorb elements from their environments, causing textures and colours to shift until sealed. Arceneaux carries out this ageing process in the homes of artists, activists and community members in Minneapolis, making the DNA of the city part of the works.
Xin Liu presented by Make Room (Los Angeles)
Artist and engineer Xin Liu envisions Make Room’s space as a sacrificial ceremony where ancient ritual and futuristic aspiration intersect. Set at the centre of the glowing, white floor is The Theater of Metamorphoses, a triptych inspired by biological and medical phenomena, including egg freezing, cryonics and bone structures. Liu embeds a cooling system in the work, which draws a veil of frost over its surface. Also featuring a series of wall-based sculptures, Liu’s immersive installation suggests how life cycles are perpetuated, disrupted and reshaped by technological innovation.
Focus is supported by Stone Island.
Further Information
Frieze Los Angeles, 20 – 23 February 2025, Santa Monica Airport. Early-bird tickets now available.
To keep up to date on all the latest news from Frieze, sign up to the newsletter at frieze.com, and follow @friezeofficial on Instagram, Twitter and Frieze Official on Facebook.
Frieze Los Angeles is supported by global lead partner Deutsche Bank, continuing its legacy of celebrating artistic excellence on an international scale.
Adee Roberson, Telepathy, 2021. Acrylic and oil pastel on wood panel, 76 × 76 × 4 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Dominique Gallery
