Where the Real Runs Out: Digital Realms at Frieze Los Angeles 2024

Artists at Frieze Los Angeles 2024 are redrawing the parameters of reality in a landscape of art-making that is adapting to—and creating—new digital possibilities. This interrogation extends to all corners of consumer society, from image circulation to digital land ownership. Galleries platforming these innovative practices in Santa Monica, February 29–March 3, include Altman Siegel, Bank, Gallery Hyundai, Lehmann Maupin and David Kordansky Gallery.

A small monitor dangles off a hook inside the polished dome of a bell jar in Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Synthia Stock Ticker (2000). Synthia, the character on screen, is one of several female personae Hershman Leeson has developed to navigate an evolving technological context. Here, Synthia’s behavior and mood shift in accordance with real-time changes in the stock market: she shops and dances on an upturn, smokes on a downturn, and slams the table in frustration when the market is immobile. 

This exploration of algorithmic workings is also pursued by Trevor Paglen in his latest “machine vision” works. Paglen has devoted the last decade to developing tools that key into machine-learning algorithms to expose the ways in which computers abstract the visions they analyze and absorb. Paglen’s works lay bare moments when malleable human perception encounters the formalizing logic of machines. 

Simon Denny considers digital land ownership in his ongoing series “Metaverse Landscapes.” Denny’s paintings map metaverse property and its digital ownership tracking tokens. He incorporates the grid layout of the colonial cartographic tradition to demonstrate how metaverse property is “as abstracted as any terrestrial land plot.” 

Presented by Altman Siegel.

Kim Sung Yoon is crafting a new form of still life. Painting in oil, Kim borrows techniques from Edouard Manet and his final floral still lives. Yet unlike Manet, who painted fresh flowers cut from the garden and brought to him in bed, Kim creates impossible floral arrangements in each vase, using internet images from different regions and seasons. Kim’s latest works embody a state of transience: we catch them unfurling, with petals shedding, paint dripping and buds blinking into focus. 

Presented by Gallery Hyundai.

Hollywood imagery, advertisements and news items converge in Bai Yiyi’s largescale canvases. Images swell and bend beyond their dimensions, morphing into pools of texture, glitter and color that evoke the accumulation of visual data and its incessant online circulation.

Chen Tianzhuo’s three-channel installation Exo-Performance/Baby Chinayu and Exo-Perfomance/Beio (2019) intersects sculpture, digital technology and the human body. Working in an animation studio in Los Angeles, Chen builds digital sculptures inspired by the Chinese philosophical tradition of the two-part allegory, and influences that range from religious symbols to contemporary subcultures, which he layers onto the bodies of his two performers. Baby Chinayu and Bei-O move through computer-generated wastelands that represent heaven and hell.

Presented by Bank.

Lee Bul’s practice centers on a meeting point of organic and synthetic forms, with a particular focus on the figure of the cyborg. In her series “Perdu,” Bul creates amorphous shapes that veer towards a suggestion of corporeality but remain cellular, unsettled and otherworldly. It takes Bul two months to complete each piece, working with mother of pearl and acrylic paint, rooting the juncture of the natural and the artificial within the very substance of her works.

Presented by Lehmann Maupin.

Sam McKinniss’s paintings emerge from a media-saturated world. He works from images he sources from the internet, selecting recognizable scenes and people as his subjects. The flatness of a reality distilled to pixels regains life and depth in McKinniss’s paintings, a new series of which will be unveiled at Frieze Los Angeles. McKinniss’s piercing palette imbues his work with a sense of immediacy, promising intimacy and psychological sincerity.

Presented by David Kordansky Gallery.

Read More

Themes of Material and Memory at Frieze Los Angeles 2024.

Further Information

Frieze Los Angeles is at Santa Monica Airport, February 29–March 3, 2024.

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^{Main Image: Sam McKinniss, Spring Break, 2023. Oil on linen, 107 × 191 × 3 cm. Photo: Dario Lasagnil; courtesy David Kordansky Gallery}