8 Standout Shows to See During Frieze Week in Los Angeles

With Frieze Los Angeles and several satellite art fairs opening this week, the city’s lively art scene is bustling with exciting exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. From debut solo shows in the city’s galleries—including Leiko Ikemura’s mystical paintings and sculptures at Lisson Gallery, Sarah Sze’s immersive canvases and video installations at Gagosian, and Alejandro García Contreras’s ceramic sculptures and installations with pop culture and Mexican folkloric references at Anat Ebgi—and museum exhibitions highlighting seminal Los Angeles artists like Robert Therrien and a broad range of the younger creatives in the “Made in L.A. 2025” biennial, these are the must-see shows to catch during the city’s Frieze Week.

1. Leiko Ikemura | Lisson Gallery

A Japanese-Swiss painter and sculptor living and working between Cologne and Berlin, Leiko Ikemura is best known for her evolving style that incorporates elements of symbolism, expressionism, and magical worlds. Inspired by mythology, East Asian painting traditions, Surrealism, post-war abstraction, and mysticism, she creates spiritual works poetically referencing animals, humans, and plants. For her Los Angeles debut, Ikemura showcases an ethereal selection of paintings and sculptures from the past decade that explore the connection between the female body and the natural environment, as well as the relationship between the sky and the horizon where these two worlds meet.

Through March 28

2. Sarah Sze | Gagosian

After initially studying painting, Sarah Sze began her career as a sculptor, but over the years she has incorporated photography, video, printmaking, painting, and installation art into her experimental process to bring the studio directly into the gallery. Celebrated for her intricate, site-specific installations that challenge traditional ideas of sculpture by blending everyday objects with complex architectural and painterly themes, her work is marked by its patchwork feel and the use of ordinary materials to build gravity-defying structures. Making her Los Angeles gallery debut, the New York-based artist presents two immersive video installations and a lively new series of layered, large-format paintings, displayed across three interconnected galleries.

Through February 28

3. Alejandro García Contreras | Anat Ebgi

Alejandro García Contreras is a Mexican artist known for his multidisciplinary works that blend Mexican folklore, ancient mythology, and contemporary pop culture. Exploring themes of transience, mortality, and the human unconscious, he is widely recognized for his highly detailed ceramic sculptures, including serpents, bones, and contemporary idols that blend pre-Hispanic symbols with influences from anime and manga. Based in Guadalajara, where he produces work at the renowned Cerámica Suro, his first solo exhibition at the gallery features new ceramics and installations centered on a paradox: a river embracing a mountain, symbolizing a silent negotiation between opposing forces, with the mountain asserting its dominance and the river responding with continuity.

Through April 4

4. Paige Powell | Jeffrey Deitch

Famously known as a close confidante and constant companion to Andy Warhol, and the former girlfriend of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paige Powell is an American photographer, curator, art advisor, and animal rights advocate who played a central role in the 1980s New York art scene. After relocating from Oregon, she started working at Warhol’s Interview Magazine in 1981, developing a close connection with the celebrated artist during his final years. This enlightening exhibition features two collections of her previously unseen photographs from 1986 and ‘87: Religious Services, Volunteering at The Episcopal Church of Heavenly Rest, New York City, and PRIVATE ANDY, Double Exposures—offering glimpses into a private and deeply human side of Warhol and the social, spiritual, and artistic community that influenced him.

Through April 4

5. David Salle | Sprüth Magers

A prominent painter of the Pictures Generation, David Salle blends popular imagery with firsthand observations and art-historical references to create a unique pictorial style. Widely shown in galleries and museums around the world, he appropriates images from various sources, including 1950s advertisements, comic books, his own black-and-white photography, and past artworks. For his first solo Los Angeles exhibition since 1997, the New York-based artist presents a new series of theatrical canvases that layer unrelated elements to evoke ambiguity and challenge conventional narratives. Combining AI-generated imagery with physical brushwork, Salle creates loosely structured, all-over compositions that keep the eye in motion while delighting the mind.

Through April 18

6. Robert Therrien | The Broad

American sculptor and draftsman Robert Therrien is best known for his oversized objects that surrealistically dwarf viewers to Lilliputian size. Born in Chicago in 1947, raised in San Francisco, and most recognized as a Los Angeles native, Therrien is a poetically inclined artist whose work bridges the gap between Pop Art and Minimalism. Creating sculptures, drawings, prints, and photographs that are both representational and abstract, Therrien pushes everyday items into the realm of the sublime. Featuring over 120 works spanning five decades of his career, the museum’s exhibition highlights his colossal domestic objects, large-scale wire, plastic, and synthetic hair sculptures, and more intimate drawings, paintings, and photographs featuring recurring symbols such as snowmen, birds, chapels, and keyholes—pushing commonplace stuff into the realm of the sublime.

Through April 5

7. “Made in L.A. 2025” | Hammer Museum

The Hammer Museum’s signature biennial, “Made in L.A. 2025,” features new and site-specific works by 28 artists from the greater Los Angeles area. Spanning painting, sculpture, film, theater, and choreography, the exhibition explores the chaotic disorder and complex relationships artists have with Los Angeles. It examines themes like urban life and infrastructure, layered histories and erasure, socioeconomic and racial dynamics, reinvention and resilience, and social and political commentary through the works displayed—providing an essential platform to highlight the diversity and depth of Los Angeles’s arts communities.

Through March 1

8. Arshile Gorky | Hauser & Wirth

As a central figure in the New York School, Arshile Gorky is often characterized as the last of the Surrealists and the first of the Abstract Expressionists. Known for bridging pre-war European modernism with the post-war American avant-garde, the Armenian-American painter spent years apprenticing with masters like Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Joan Miró before developing his own distinctive, lyrical style. He allowed colors to bleed and flow across the canvas, a technique that greatly influenced Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. The gallery’s exhibition showcases never-before-exhibited works created during a 1941 visit to Los Angeles, emphasizing the transformative effect of the two-week trip, along with paintings from the artist’s first solo museum show that same year in San Francisco.

Through April 25