The Best Booths at Frieze LA, from Projects Dedicated to Fire Recovery to Quietly Introspective Sculptures

One of the fair’s most visually striking installations comes from a joint booth by New York’s Ortuzar and São Paulo’s Gomide & Co., who both work with Japanese Brazilian artist Megumi Yuasa. (Gomide & Co. recently began representing the artist and mounted a solo show for him last year; Ortuzar will mount a solo for him next year.)

Yuasa is part of the first generation of Japanese Brazilian artists who began actively showing avant-garde work in the 1960s. The works on view by the octogenarian artist at Frieze range from the 1980s to current day. Since the beginning, Yuasa has always worked with unconventional materials like glass, found wood, bone, and iron to create formalist sculptures and ceramics. Key to his practice is a philosophy of ceramics in which all four of the elements—earth, water, fire, and air—are necessary to the ceramic process. He sees them as being a constellation in these works, orbiting each other.

For Frieze LA, Tilton Gallery has dedicated its booth to the late LA-based artist Noah Purifoy. Focusing on the assemblages made after the artist moved to Joshua Tree in 1989 until his death in 2004, this focused presentation is a knockout. Joshua Tree (1989) shows an aerial configuration of Purifoy’s new hometown, made from various pieces of found wood, some painted in bright shades of green, blue, red, and yellow. On a pedestal is Desert Tombstone (1995) part of a larger series of black, weathered wood resembling a headstone with the fragments of a literary title (in letter blocks from a printing press); here it reads “The winter of my discontent.” But the highlight is an untitled piece from the late ’80s in which various found materials—including a saw, a ledger book from a loan company, pieces of found iron and painted wood, and an abstract collage made from strips of painted canvas—are inset like tools in a tool box into a white-painted hunk of wood.

One of the fair’s sparer booths comes courtesy a solo presentation of Delcy Morelos by Marian Goodman Gallery. From her 2014 series “Organized Salt Water (Agua salada organizada),” these pieces are made of strips of white jute that have been dipped into various hues of red acrylic paint and mixed with soil. They’re reminiscent of cascades and waterfalls, but also of the blood that flows through our bodies. It’s a quiet body of work that rewards closer inspection.

In one corner of Roberts Projects’s booth is an installation by legendary LA artist Betye Saar that is re-created from a 1990 solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Sanctified Visions is dedicated to the memory of author Zora Neale Hurston and meant to mimic her childhood home in Eatonville, Florida. Sitting on a patch of sun-dried grass is a rocking chair that rocks, giving the sense that Hurston’s spirit is still with us. Carved into the chair are various animals and critters, a representation of Saar’s belief that we should live in harmony with these relatives, part of the fabric of life. Behind it is a wall of corrugated steel to which a window-like sculpture is affixed that is filled with found metal, chicken wire, a used artist’s palette, and more.

The centerpiece of Anthony Meier’s solo stand for Saif Azzuz is a 17-foot-long wall installation, What Memories Hold (2024) that gathers dozens of objects and found wood fragments. Included in the work are things like carved pieces of wood, photographs, rocks and seashells, empty beer cans, paintings, assemblages, and buttons with slogans like Bush gives me homeland IN-security and Protect Trans People. Azzuz creates work that reflects on his cultural heritage: his father is a first-generation immigrant from Libya and his mother (and the artist) are enrolled members of the Yurok tribe from Eureka, California. At the core of his practice is a dedication to land stewardship and a belief that our relationship to the land should be one of protection, not destruction.

In a booth shared with Stars, Sebastian Gladstone’s presentation of sculptures by Emmanuel Louisnord Desir stand out. Toward the back is an eye-catching configuration of various pieces of wood—ash and pine—that he has charred. Titled Earth Angel, the work shows a fallen cherub-like figure whose neck twists and whose face writhes in pain. Desir sees it as the angel, now cast down to earth, suffering through the plights of the human condition. In the lower part of the sculpture is a bulge of boils, drawing from the Book of Job, in which the prophet is afflicted with massive pustules to test the strength of his faith. In charring the wood, Desir sees the process as one that cleanses the wood of its impurities.

At Silverlens is a suite of new paintings by Manila-based artist Pow Martinez, who will open a solo show at the gallery’s New York space next month. The figures in his paintings are crudely and grotesquely rendered, all part of his send-up of US culture and how it is exported through soft power internationally to locales in the Global South like the Philippines. Made specifically for Frieze LA, these 12 paintings show Martinez’s vision of the leisurely pastimes of Southern California, like horseback riding, tennis, bodybuilding, and cruising in a convertible sports car.

The idea of mapping serves as an organizing principle for Galerie Lelong & Co.’s booth. Central to this presentation is a map of the southwestern United States by Jane Hammond. Commissioned well before the recent wildfires, Hammond’s view of California in All Souls (Topaz), 2024–25, feels especially poignant this week. A relatively delicate work, it is constructed from dozens of painted pieces of paper which are layered on top of each other, giving it the blocky view of the land when seen from above. To this map, Hammond has affixed dozens of butterflies, a metaphor of the migration journey of monarch butterflies across North America and the fact that the generation that makes the journey south never returns north. Hammond began working in this way shortly after 9/11. Living on Grand Street in downtown New York, she had a direct view of Ground Zero and had trouble sleeping in the weeks immediately following the attacks. That is, until one day, a flutter of monarch butterflies gathered on her fire escape.