Discover the 8 Artists and Designers Who Made the Biggest Splash at Felix LA

Founded in 2019 by art collector Dean Valentine and gallerist brothers Al Morán and Mills Morán with the goal of creating a fair experience that prioritizes connoisseurship, collaboration and community among collectors, dealers and artists, Felix LA has been a hit from the start.

“A lot of important collectors are here and galleries are doing great with sales,” Mills Morán told Galerie on opening day. “The fair and its style of presentation provides a more intimate experience, where collectors can spend more time carefully looking and have better conversations. Galleries use their rooms differently for their displays, which makes for more variety and enjoyment in the viewing process.”

Galerie has picked eight works by the standout artists and designers. From eye-catching figurative and abstract paintings and drawings to imaginative ceramics and innovative design objects, these are the most notable works from the fair.

1. Sarah Bedford at Mrs.

Born in Montana and educated at Cooper Union for Fine Art in New York, Sarah Bedford explores nature for its potential for personal transformation and internal growth through her spirited paintings, drawing and ceramics. Long fascinated with flowers and plant-life as the subjects for her creative endeavors, the Brooklyn-based artist has also worked as a floral designer and was the consulting curator for New York’s Museum of Arts and Design “Flower Craft” exhibition in 2022. It’s through her colorful still life compositions and lively landscapes, however, that her poetic vision of nature—as seen in her Late Spring painting at the fair—has taken on a life of its own, which viewers can enjoy long after the flowers that inspired the artist are gone.

2. Sung Jang at Volume Gallery

Exhibiting monochromatic paintings of fragmented map-like forms and functional sculptures that mix found stones with sophisticated, handmade wooden bases, Sung Jang investigates his inherited Korean culture in response to the industry of production and consumption, process of design, fabrication and labor and individual experience related to artifacts. An award-winning Chicago-based designer and artist, he blurs the boundaries between the two ways of working—creating design objects that aim at improving the quality of life and artworks that express a personal vision. His Shape of Land paintings at the fair presented textured, black, mental maps of past places he has visited, while his Given sculptures joined specifically selected rocks with geometrically crafted bases to construct sublime combinations, which can delightfully be used as either a chair, stool, or small table.

3. Margaux Ogden at Tif Sigfrids

A Brooklyn-based painter who has studied at Bard College, Brandeis University, Boston University and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and was an Abbey Fellow at the British School at Rome in 2021, Margaux Ogden makes striking abstract paintings that repeatedly reference a floor mosaic from a Roman bath that she observed during her residency in Rome. Creating each new, large-scale painting in relationship to the one that came before it, Ogden makes color and compositional shifts to ingeniously keep the image advancing while continuously returning to its source. Her new Bathers (Viridian, Magenta, Green & Red) painting evolved out the vibrant canvases recently on view in the exhibition “Tidal Locking,” her first solo show with the Athens, Georgia-based gallery.

4. Motohiro Hayakawa at Jack Hanley Gallery

Best known for his psychedelic paintings and drawings depicting battle scenes with manga heroes, monsters, aliens and robots, Motohiro Hayakawa occasionally makes surreal figurative drawings that take the human body on a trippy rollercoaster ride with humorous and semi-erotic results. Presenting a series of reasonably priced, small-scale pencil drawings of wildly imaginative, comical characters at the gallery’s cabana suite for the second year in a row, the Japanese artist and illustrator offered dozens of playful, stream-of-consciousness figures, which were quickly being acquired by both emerging and seasoned collectors.

5. Rob Lyon at Adams and Ollman

A self-taught painter living in England, Rob Lyon makes lyrical landscapes inspired by the area where he grew up and later returned to raise a family. Rendering abstract hills, clouds and trees with bold brushstrokes, he paints flat planes of color and patterned realms to give an impression of the places he knows quite well yet chooses to see anew. Walking the range of chalk hills in the south-eastern coastal counties of England known as the South Downs, ideas for paintings like Dial, one of several of the artist’s recent landscapes on view at the fair, arise. Experiencing a spiritual sensation when walking the South Downs, Lyon imaginatively conveys that heightened sensory state in his small-scale, colorful canvases.

6. Bari Ziperstein at Charles Moffett

Born in Chicago, Bari Ziperstein moved to attend California Institute of the Arts, where she received an MFA in 2004, and has lived and worked in Los Angeles ever since. A sculptor working with the medium of ceramics, Ziperstein has recently been receiving national attention through a series of acclaimed solo shows at Vielmetter in Los Angeles, Nina Johnson in Miami and New York’s Charles Moffett, who was showing several of her finely crafted sculptures at the fair. Best known for her shaped, patterned pieces inspired by Brutalist architecture, turn of the century Viennese Design and Soviet Era agitprop, her large-scale ceramic sculptures—like Opaque Windows—are intricately crafted and dynamically glazed.

7. Elana Bowsher at Sea View

Blurring the boundary between figuration and organic abstraction, Elana Bowsher explores the body through the lens of the pelvic bone. Born in San Francisco and schooled at UCLA, the Los Angeles-based artist beautifully blends the anatomical with the abstract in her skeletal interpretations. Inspired by the symbolic language of artists Hilma af Klint and Georgia O’Keeffe, luminescent paintings such as Plume II at the fair suggest a sense of mystery and awe. Looking as much like a flower, feather, shell or sponge as it does a bone, the subject of her painting reminds us that everything evolved from a primordial soup, which contained the building blocks of the first forms of life on earth.

8. Sahana Ramakrishnan at Fridman Gallery

Born in Mumbai and raised in Singapore, Sahana Ramakrishnan makes paintings exploring the concepts of time and interconnectedness of living beings. Employing symbolism and mining ancient myths, the Jersey City-based artist creates allegories about water and its significance to life, as seen in her large-scale canvas Song of the Naga, which shows a male figure in new surroundings. Associated with water, such as rivers and seas, Nagas are regarded as protectors and guardians of aquatic realms. Their presence symbolizes their role in safeguarding the life-giving forces of water and maintaining the balance of nature, while also being considered bestowers of fertility and prosperity—something Ramakrishnan’s painting dramatically captures through its sublime palette and powerful imagery.