Nine Shows to See During Frieze Week Los Angeles 2025
From Joseph Beuys as environmentalist at the Broad, to the cultural plurality of María Magdalena Campos-Pons at the Getty, what to see in February
From Joseph Beuys as environmentalist at the Broad, to the cultural plurality of María Magdalena Campos-Pons at the Getty, what to see in February
‘Doug Aitken, Lightscape’ | Marciano Art Foundation | 17 December – 15 March 2025
From light-reflecting seabed-located constructions to hot air balloons to multi-channel works that disorientate the viewer with sensory over-sharing, the work of Redondo Beach-born Doug Aitken often makes use of technology to explore… technology, among other things. Created in collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Los Angeles Master Chorale, his new work Lightscape is a huge, multidimensional ‘cinematic experience’ across seven screens that traverses the mythic landscapes of the American West, from deserts to tech hubs, accompanied by a cast that includes Beck, the LA Dance Project, Natasha Lyonne and LA cumbia-chicha-surf band La Lom. With a soundtrack of Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Steve Reich and the artist’s own compositions, the installation at Marciano Art Foundation will also be accompanied by weekly live musical performances. CW
‘María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold’ | J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center | 11 February – 4 May 2025
Spanning photography, painting, installations and performances, the investigation of ancestry, migration and cultural identity is a unifying thread running through the 35-year career of Cuban-born, Nashville-based María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Considering the means of cultural production – and the associated areas of labour, enslavement and indenture – as part of the work, Campos-Pons’s practice is an acknowledgment of the journeys and trials of her Yoruban, Spanish and Chinese ancestors: her great-grandfather arrived to Cuba from Nigeria as a slave; her grandmother was a Santeria priest. An iconic figure for the New Cuban Art movement that rebelled against state strictures in the 1980s, the artist is founder of Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice, a programme that explores experiences of the ‘planetary South’. A sense of the connectedness – of media and memory, art and activism – should make for a compelling and provoking exhibition. CW
‘Olafur Eliasson: OPEN’ | Museum of Contemporary Art | until 6 July 2025
Discussing this monumental show at MOCA in a recent Frieze video, Olafur Eliasson explained the questions he began with: ‘How do we see, how do we experience, what are the limits of my own seeing?’ While in installations such as The weather project at the Tate Modern in 2003 Eliasson used the size of the exhibition space to miniaturize the viewer, staggering them with the mammoth scale of the cosmos of which they are a part, in ‘OPEN’ Eliasson acknowledges that making people feel small can also make them feel helpless, instead inviting visitors to complete the exhibition, thereby restoring a sense of participation in the universe and individual agency. In the video, the artist expresses his hope to offer a new relationship to so-called ‘hyperobjects’, such as the climate crisis: Eliasson has gone as far as puncturing holes in MOCA’s roof to bring the southern California light into the gallery and reconnect viewers with their climate. ‘We are open,’ he explains. ‘We are also open to YOU.’ CW
‘Gregg Bordowitz: Before and After: In Process’ | The Brick | 2 February – 22 March 2025
Founded in 2005 as LAXART, The Brick opened in 2024 in a new roomy premises – a former furniture showroom, boasting an outdoor patio – on the gallery-filled stretch of Western Avenue. In February it opens ‘Before and After: In Process’, a show of new works by Gregg Bordowitz. A multifaceted figure, Bordowitz is acclaimed as a filmmaker – released over three decades ago, his Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993) remains a seminal piece in the canon of the video essay – ACT UP activist, writer and committed teacher. Bordowitz’s survey at MoMA PS1 in 2021 revealed an artist whose career-long concerns with care, metaphors of the body and public action have been prescient and pressing, while a recent show at the Bonner Kunstverein in Germany explored how his heritage as a Yiddish-speaking diasporic Jew shapes and complicates his ideas of language, identity and time. ‘Cry out, don’t hold back,’ implored one work in Bonn. ‘Raise your voice like a shofar.’ MM
‘Earthshaker’ | Del Vaz Projects | from 17 February 2025
Visiting the archaeological site of Yagul in Oaxaca, Mexico, one day in 1972, the artist Ana Medieta lay down, naked, among the stones of a Zapoetc tomb and strewed herself with white flowers. So began the ‘Siluetas’ series (1973–78) in which the artist’s body is seemingly entwined with nature, subsumed by terrain or merely a trace upon the earth. The first substantial presentation of this series in Los Angeles for 25 years, ‘Earthshaker’ puts Mendieta’s work in dialogue with the so-called ‘Black Paintings’ by the beloved filmmaker, artist and writer Derek Jarman – tar-like painted collages which powerfully convey his sense of ‘modern nature’ – and works by Los Angeles artist P. Staff, including In Exstase (2023), a five channel holographic poem in which assertions such as ‘I AM ALIVE / YOU ARE DEAD’ are haltingly intermixed. Together, these practices tease the separations of self and other, humanity and nature, health and pollution. Marking the Santa Monica non-profit’s tenth anniversary, ‘Earthshaker’ promises to be Del Vaz’s most ambitious project to date, incorporating a series of screenings at venues throughout the city, and a catalogue with texts by the likes of McKenzie Wark. MM
‘Raqib Shaw: Ballads of East and West’ | The Huntington | Until 3 March 2025
Raqib Shaw’s lushly paradisical landscapes and glittering temples reframe a personal narrative of loss and displacement. Born in Calcutta in 1974, Shaw grew up in Kashmir before fleeing the region as a teenager as it was riven by conflict. He moved to London to study art, fascinated by the National Gallery’s collection of Old Masters, and his intricate and ornate paintings invoke both the Renaissance world he discovered and the continent he left behind: Biblical themes such as the expulsion from paradise are overlaid with the narrative complexity of Mughal art (plus disconcerting details such as fighter jets), all rendered with Shaw’s minutely precise technique of enamel paint applied with porcupine quills. This show presents seven of his coruscating works in dialogue with the Huntington’s own historical masterpieces in a very unusual meditation across two artistic hemispheres. CW
‘Mark Dion: Excavations’ | La Brea Tar Pits | Until 25 September 2025
Like several exhibitions in this list, Mark Dion’s ‘Excavations’ forms part of the epic regional event PST ART: Art & Science Collide. Dion prepared for this installation by joining excavations, cleaning fossils and ‘shadowing a taxidermist’ at the La Brea Tar Pits, a portal to the Pleistocene epoch since the discovery of fossils there in 1906. The installation suggests a ‘backstage’ space, with Dion’s work placed within an atmospheric curatorial limbo of murals, dioramas and maquettes. Among the highlights is a ten-foot-long sculpture of a fossilized pack rat skeleton, (pack rats’ nests contain organic material that can date back tens of thousands of years, allowing scientists to explore long-disappeared ecosystems) and drawings of mammal skeletons with parts relabelled with the names of local scientists, artists, historical figures and landmarks: Frank Zappa is a rib, Gene Autry a fibula and Cher a tail bone. Dion perhaps shows us the uneasily fine line between hoarding and research, knowledge and obsession. CW
‘Scientia Sexualis’ | ICA Los Angeles | Until 2 March 2025
Appeals to immutable, observable scientific ‘truths’ are often made in conservative discourse about sex, gender and identity: yet rigorous study of, say, genetic activity, actually contradicts the notion that all humans are simply either XX or XY, male or female. Organized by UC Riverside’s Jennifer Doyle and Jeanne Vaccaro of the University of Kansas, this survey of works by more than two dozen artists looks at how scientific, medical and psychiatric constructs have been used to govern our bodies, and how ‘research-driven interventions’ can disrupt knowledge systems. Many works investigate the intertwining of sexual regulation and power systems, with works by KING COBRA, Candice Lin and Wangechi Mutu exploring how the birth of modern gynaecology was intertwined with violence against Black and marginalized women, with others pointing to potentials for pleasure and self-fulfillment, from Carlos Motta’s miniature sculptures of pre-Hispanic sexual practices to El Palomar’s dance-filled video portrait Schreber Is a Woman (2020). In works like Nicole Eisenman’s portrait of her psychiatrist father there is a winning humour: a good way to resist a system, sometimes, is to laugh at it. MM
‘Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature’ | The Broad | 16 November 2024 – 23 March 2025
The sun-soaked West Coast might seem a strange place to encounter the master of lard, lead and the multi-pocket tactical gilet, but ‘Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature’, compares the social, political and environmental thrust of his work with the parallel growth of the ecological movement in southern California. With more than 400 works, many drawn from The Broad’s own collection, the show positions the artist’s humble and repeatable materials as key, with a focus on his ‘multiples’, such as Sled (1969), Felt Suit (1970) and Rhine Water Polluted (1981). Inspired by Beuys’s work 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks, 1982–87), which saw the planting of 7,000 trees accompanied by basalt marker stones across the city of Kassel in Germany as a visible, mutable and organic reckoning of the traumas of World War II, an accompanying tree-planting programme, ‘Social Forest’, sees 100 native oaks newly rooted in LA’s Elysian Park and Kuruvungna Village Springs in early January. By Frieze Week, they’ll be going strong. CW
Further Information
Frieze Los Angeles, 20 – 23 February 2025, Santa Monica Airport. Early-bird tickets now available.
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Frieze Los Angeles is supported by global lead partner Deutsche Bank, continuing its legacy of celebrating artistic excellence on an international scale.
Main image: Doug Aitken, Lightscape, 2024, © Doug Aitken Workshop
