Ten Works under $25K on Frieze Viewing Room

Kelly Akashi (Tanya Bonakdar Gallery)

Life Forms (Polymorph), 2022

Calcite, lost-wax cast lead crystal

$24,000

Kelly Akashi’s work casts fleeting gestures and moments of transformation into existence using materials such as wax, bronze, fire and glass. The sculptures challenge the conventions of form in a way that speaks to our interconnectedness with nature, and the possibility of growth from decay. Life Forms (Polymorph), 2022 is a prime example of her practice and offers a small but powerful, presence with the glowing calcite, exposed raw rock and Akashi’s signature hand. The piece is fresh, beautiful and accessible with its scale and price point.  

Madeline Hollander (Bortolami)

Proposals #1 - 5: ISS Ballet, Opticarium, Tetherball Quagmire, Mirascope Solo, and Kissing Jetways, 2022

watercolor and graphite on archival paper

$3k each

Bending the rules – just as a dancer in one of Madeline Hollander's performances might bend a limb – I'm selecting not one but the whole quintet of Hollander's watercolor and graphite works on paper (each piece is sold individually for $3k). LA-based Hollander is an artist, choreographer and dancer whose drawings are at the nucleus of her practice. They act as notations and studies for future projects, composed in her unique synesthetic language: differently sized, brightly colored circles are clustered together in varying degrees and organized in horizontal lines. Viewed together, a suite of these drawings reads like a constellation of latent energy and the unrevealed promise of things to come.

Nasim Hantehzadeh (The Pit)

Wisdom, 2021

Oil pastel, dry pastel, color pencil, and graphite on paper

$22,000.00 USD

I remember being stopped in my tracks upon entering Nasim's graduate studio at UCLA in 2018. The maturity of the visual language in her large-scale drawings was not only unique for an MFA candidate, but Nasim was also exploring difficult topics through a metaphoric symbology that felt wholly resolved. Four years later, Nasim's stunning work on paper, Wisdom, has the expressive immediacy of the medium and a virtuosic amalgamation of recurring imagery that continues to hint at the artist’s Iranian-American heritage, including calligraphic swirls and architectural arabesques, coupled with the cosmic spiky flora and ambisexual orifices that remain consistent in her visual language. 

 

Samuel Levi Jones (Vielmetter)  

Lost Faith, 2021 

Indiana history and Indiana law books on canvas

Price: 20,000.00 USD + 500.00 framing 

Here, Jones continues his ongoing visual exploration of abstract compositions by combining pulped and deconstructed law and history books on canvas. Destroyed book covers and tattered book bindings are torn apart and sewn together with loose threads resulting in a collage of quilt-like patterns. Jones examines the authority inherent in books and questions systems of power and knowledge. The artist, born in Indiana, utilizes emotionally and historically loaded objects from his home state as source material to create this provocative work.  

Steve Locke (Alexander Gray Associates)

Homage to the Auction Block #53, 2020

Acrylic gouache on Claybord

$18,000

In these intimately scaled paintings artist Steve Locke uses strong geometric fields of color that visually reference the color theory found in Josef Albers’ series Homage to the Square. Locke’s series, titled Homage to the Auction Block, refers to racial exploitation in American history, a subject he explored in 2018 and 2019 in the Auction Block Hall Proposal and Three Deliberate Grays for Freddie at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The central symbol of the auction block and its meaning lie beneath the modernist visual construct of these works.

 

Gordon Parks (Jack Shainman Gallery)

Woman and Dog in Window, Harlem, New York, 1943

Gelatin silver print

$20,000 (unframed)

Celebrated photographer Gordon Parks' portrait of a woman in a Harlem window stands out for the considered composition and thoughtfulness captured on his subjects' faces, and the architecture we find them in. There is a timelessness to the image (and to Parks’ work) that is relatable in the joy and understanding of this shared moment. Parks worked extensively in Harlem, inspired by the aspirations and challenges of the people who lived there. He had a way of capturing the true feeling of his subjects, recording their experiences with clarity, understanding and beauty.   

Elle Perez (47 Canal)

Ascension (Fire Island), 2019/21 

digital silver gelatin print

$14,000

Elle Perez is a Bronx-born, Brooklyn-based photographer whose work primarily depicts intimate moments and Perez’s connection to those subjects – whether it be a person or a place. Perez has described how they seek to explore moments words cannot describe, and a space that is not definitive. This photograph of the ocean at Fire Island was also shown in the artist’s solo exhibition at Carnegie Museum of Art, where images of water were a recurring theme. Fire Island is a beautiful barrier Island between Long Island and the Atlantic Ocean that has a history of LGBTQ+ communities, seamlessly tying into Perez’s vision of a world populated by friends and the physical and natural spaces they inhabit.

Stewart Uoo (47 Canal)

Fire Hydrant with Two Holes in American Cheese Yellow, 2021

polyurethane paint, fiberglass, gypsum compound 

$18,000

I've never felt tenderness towards a fire hydrant, but Stewart Uoo has a rare gift in elevating the utilitarian infrastructure of the city into sentient beings. Animated by carnival colors and slick gloss, Uoo transforms the banal into a whimsical conduit of safety and the wry suggestion of pleasure. Like the Pop masters before him, Uoo has a way of freeing the tame in the everyday and adding a sense of magic to our world.

 

Rodrigo Valenzuela (Luis de Jesus)

Afterwork #1, 2021

silver gelatin print

Swinging metal chains precariously hold up steel beams in this surreal photograph by Chilean artist and UCLA Photography Professor Rodrigo Valenzuela. I was recently introduced to Valenzuela’s practice during a studio visit organized by the Hammer Museum and was immediately intrigued with his haunting scenes of abandoned steel factories. The power of this image comes from the juxtaposition of Valenzuela's delicate composition and the industrial subject matter, revealing a critique of automation and the resulting unemployment. This work is part of the artist's Afterwork series, which he began after winning a Guggenheim fellowship in 2021.

Sadie Barnette

Home Goods: Speaker Stack III, 2021

Found speakers with automotive paint and glitter

$18,000.00

Sadie Barnette’s sharp text drawings, photography and installation-based work engage with her familial legacy in her hometown, Oakland, CA. Using found objects and archival materials relating to her father’s radical politics, a member of the Black Panthers and founder of the first black-owned gay bar in San Francisco, Barnette uses the idea of community and place to bring this tradition of activism into the present. Home Goods: Speaker Stack III cleverly reframes the speaker, a tool for amplifying voices: towering, shimmering and triumphant, the work has a celebratory, forceful presence. Barnette capitalizes on the object’s positive potential to inspire truth and ownership of identity.

With thanks to APAA members Victoria Burns, Wendy Cromwell, Joanne Cohen, Elizabeth Fiore, Megan Fox Kelly, Lisa Marie Marks, Heather Marx, Cris McCall, Irene Papanestor and Laura Smith Sweeney

About Frieze Viewing Room

Frieze Viewing Room is a free digital platform, connecting global audiences with Frieze's galleries and artists.  

Opening to all from February 15–20, the Viewing Room offers fair visitors a preview of the wealth of gallery presentations coming to Frieze Los Angeles 2022, as well as the chance for audiences around the world to experience and acquire the artwork on show.