7 Discoveries from Los Angeles Satellite Art Fairs

While Frieze Los Angeles attracted many local and visiting art enthusiasts this past week, the city’s satellite fairs offered equally exciting discoveries in similarly adventurous venues.

Felix Art Fair, a contemporary art fair inspired by the intimate hotel-fair format popularized in the 1990s, returned to the historic Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel for its eighth edition, February 25—March 1, 2026. Showcasing artworks by established and emerging artists presented by around 60 international galleries in hotel rooms, suites, and cabanas, including the areas surrounding the famous David Hockney-designed pool, the fair was once again a favorite among collectors, curators, and critics in search of the new.

Fresher to the Los Angeles art scene, the alternative Post-Fair was back at Santa Monica’s former post office, housed in a celebrated 1938 Art Deco building, from February 26—28 for its second edition. It featured 30 international galleries presenting contemporary art in a variety of media, not far from the Frieze locale. Further into Los Angeles, the new boutique ENZO art fair, which was completely free for both exhibitors and visitors, launched its first edition with nine national and international galleries showcasing the work of emerging artists in a former warehouse space in the city’s lively Echo Park neighborhood from February 25—28, 2026.

Below, discover standout works by our favorite artists at the fairs.

1. Raina Lee | Stroll Garden | Felix Art Fair

Working from a treehouse studio in her backyard in Los Angeles’s hilly Mount Washington neighborhood, Raina Lee creates unique glaze paintings inspired by artworks she saw in museums during her recent travels to Chicago, New York, and Paris for her solo show at the fair. Making her own glazes and using various firing techniques, Lee crafts hand-built reproductions of the paintings, such as this one of John Constable’s Cloud Study from The Frick Collection in New York, which includes the frame that displayed it in a solo show at Los Angeles-based Stroll Garden’s room. By layering glazes and hand-carving details with a drawing tool, Lee produces innovative reinterpretations of the masterpieces we love.

2. Madeline Donahue | Nina Johnson | Felix Art Fair

A Houston-born, Brooklyn-based artist, Madeline Donahue creates paintings, drawings, and ceramics that explore the physical and emotional aspects of motherhood. Known for skillfully combining humor, absurdity, and tenderness in portraying the messy, often unseen sides of parenting, her new body of work—shown by Miami’s Nina Johnson gallery in a two-person exhibition at its cabana during the fair—focuses on sexual freedom, motherhood, and reclaiming desire in middle age. Revealing drawings and paintings like Hello Hello, which depict the two roles she wants to play, were perfectly paired with Haus of Garbage’s sculptural objects and wearable head and body pieces made from safety pins and chain maille. 

3. Channing Hansen | Marc Selwyn Fine Art | Felix Art Fair

The grandson of Al Hansen, one of the founders of the experimental Fluxus movement, Channing Hansen creates hand-knitted abstract paintings and installations that blend traditional craft, cutting-edge technology, and scientific concepts. He makes his own fibers by twisting wool from raw fleece into yarn and dyes them with custom colors. Then, he uses specialized software to generate scores, following algorithms carefully to produce painterly abstractions. In one of the two shows the Los Angeles-based gallery held at the fair, the Hudson, New York-based artist’s vibrant CF35.B4 work Cosmic Fabric series was featured in a solo exhibition alongside more of his lively textile paintings and a spiraling, cave-like installation that transported visitors into a vivid, dreamlike world.

4. Rieko Otake | Tomio Koyama Gallery | Post-Fair

Specializing in unpainted wood sculptures, Rieko Otake is known for her delicate, hand-carved figures that preserve the raw texture and fresh quality of the wood, often evoking a sense of spiritual presence. She mainly uses camphor, Japanese cypress, and katsura wood in her hand-carved pieces, leaving them unpainted to emphasize the natural beauty of the materials and their connection to nature. With visible chisel marks that reflect a rhythmic exchange between the artist and the wood, the Kanagawa-based artist’s woodcarvings often feature motifs like young girls, birds, and deer. The piece Hand in Hand, part of the gallery’s solo exhibition of her work at the fair, shows a pair of Pinocchio characters immersed in gloves, with their noses humorously at two different stages of growth.

5. Joel Otterson | Ehrlich Steinberg | Post-Fair

Celebrated for his bricolage sculptures that blur the lines between fine art and craft, Joel Otterson reimagines everyday objects and utilitarian materials by assembling them into new and surprising forms. Over the past 40 years, the Los Angeles-based artist has used everything from tables and beds to dinnerware and rugs, combined with copper pipe, bronze, wood, clay, concrete, stained glass, and lacemaking to construct uncanny sculptures. On display at the fair, his L.A.-based gallery, which is currently showing his early work in a survey about Nature Morte, a seminal 1980s New York gallery where Otterson got his start, featured a solo exhibit of new and recent moss agate pieces. It included stone mineral formations that resemble landscape imagery associated with 19th-century painting, such as his striking The Search for God, set in intricate silver, copper, and bronze frames handcrafted by the accomplished artist.

6. Mars Ibarreche | ILY2 | ENZO

Mars Ibarreche is a Portland-based mixed-media artist best known for small-scale collages that poetically employ text. Originally from Florida and having lived in New York and Los Angeles, their work is strongly shaped by urban settings, street art, DIY aesthetics, and queer culture. Utilizing pulp paperbacks, salvaged packaging, and discarded print matter, the hand-cut collages resemble book covers or miniature shrines. Exploring themes of rupture, repair, vulnerability, and the creation of meaning, the phrases often mirror the artist’s immediate feelings, moving from humorous to profoundly somber. Presented in a solo show in the Portland and New York-based gallery’s section of the fair, hand-cut letters spell out broken phrases, like the playful Portals Portals, in what the artist aptly calls their “temporary/accidental poems.”

7. Kris Lemsalu | Margot Samel | ENZO

A prominent visual and performance artist who represented Estonia at the Venice Biennale in 2019, Kris Lemsalu creates ceramic sculptures, installations, and performances with found and natural materials like animal pelts, fur, leather, wool, seashells, and everyday objects such as car doors, CDs, and food. Her visionary works, driven by a shamanic force, explore the tensions among embodiment, agency, and theatrical construction. Featured in a two-person exhibition with painter Sasha Brodsky in the New York gallery’s segment of the fair, her sculpture Booty Call 911 depicts a lion-headed ceramic figure reclining within a staged domestic interior made from locally sourced materials, holding a rotary telephone. The piece uses symbolism to depict bodily empowerment through sculpture, with the title blending erotic language and emergency rhetoric. It highlights power in vulnerability, with intimacy serving as the foundation for expressing authority.