The Frieze Los Angeles fair will return to Santa Monica Airport for its fifth edition (29 February-3 March 2024), albeit with a pared-down roster of exhibitors compared to its fourth edition. On Thursday the fair’s organisers revealed a lineup of more than 95 exhibitors, a drop of more than 20% from its 2023 outing, which featured 124.That iteration was the fair’s largest to date, taking advantage of Santa Monica Airport’s sprawling campus by making use of its historic Barker Hangar and erecting one of the bespoke mega-tents that have become the fair’s calling card. In 2024, the fair will take place entirely within a tent structure designed by Kulapat Yantrasast’s architectural firm, Why. This will resolve a circulation issue from the 2023 edition, which required attendees to walk (or ride in electric carts) between the fair’s two main spaces. Christine Messineo, Frieze’s director for the Americas, said in a statement: “Both visitors and exhibitors will benefit from our expanded footprint, centralised layout and redesigned exterior spaces.”As in years past, the leading mega-galleries will all have stands at the fair, including David Zwirner, Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Pace Gallery and White Cube. The fair will once again boast an especially strong contingent of local galleries, with more than half of exhibitors having spaces in Southern California. The fair’s Focus section, often its most thematically compelling, will be organised by Essence Harden, visual arts curator at the California African American Museum; it will showcase presentations around the topic of ecology by galleries from across the US that have been in operation for 12 years or fewer.“I was deeply interested in the possibility of stretching the term ecology to include position, geography, material and theoretical concerns within art making,” Harden said in a statement. “The presentations chosen for this year’s Focus section reflect that winding impulse, highlighting a series of dynamic emerging galleries and artists.”The Focus section will feature seven of the 13 first-time exhibitors at Frieze Los Angeles, including closely watched local galleries Babst Gallery and Shulamit Nazarian, the Oakland-based pt. 2 Gallery and the New York-based Lyles & King. Also making their debuts at the fair, in other sections, will be the New York-based galleries Kasmin, Petzel and Rachel Uffner Gallery, as well as the Shanghai-based spaces Bank and MadeIn Gallery, plus the Manila-based gallery Silverlens.As in 2023, the fair will take advantage of Santa Monica Airport’s large expanses of outdoor space, bringing projects to the site’s athletic fields and community park. Previous editions of the fair took place at Paramount Studios in Hollywood (in 2019 and 2020) and the Beverly Hilton hotel in Beverly Hills (in 2022). The 2024 edition of Frieze Los Angeles will also mark a slight calendar shift for the fair, from the mid-February opening of years past to the very end of the month, giving globe-trotting fairgoers who may be in Mexico City for Zona Maco (7-11 February 2024) earlier in the month a little more time to recover from fair-tigue.
