11 Must-See Shows during Frieze Los Angeles

It’s a strange time for Los Angeles to be hosting an art week. The city is still reeling from the devastation of January’s wildfires, which scorched more than 40,000 acres and displaced over 180,000 people. The destruction affected the entire city, including its art scene: artists, galleries, and institutions alike.

In the immediate aftermath, uncertainty loomed over the city’s major cultural events, with the 2025 edition of Frieze Los Angeles in particular facing mounting pressure over whether to proceed. However, on January 17th, Frieze confirmed that the fair would proceed as planned. “After careful consideration and extensive conversations with galleries, partners, and city-wide stakeholders, we can confirm that the sixth edition of Frieze Los Angeles will go ahead,” read a statement from the fair.

With that decided, the city is now preparing for its regular January fairs, despite the circumstances. Also taking place are the L.A. Art Show, Felix Art Fair, and newcomer Post-Fair, along with a schedule of standout exhibitions that highlight both the city’s thriving art scene and its perseverance. The fires might not be far from visitors’ minds, as some gallery shows, like one at Anat Ebgi, will directly support artists who lost their spaces to the fires.

Here are 11 must-see gallery shows during Frieze Los Angeles 2025.

Woody de Othello breathes life into everyday objects, often transforming phones and clocks into anthropomorphized ceramic and bronze sculptures. Based in Oakland, California, Othello has said of his transformative practice: “I choose objects that are already very human.” For his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, “Tuning the Dial” at Karma, Othello narrows in on our relationship with sonic technology, endowing items like boomboxes and horns with distinctly human characteristics.

Three bronze sculptures, accompanied by an ambient soundscape by Oakland-based musician Cheflee, welcome guests to the show. These include Inner Knowing (2025), a totemic assembly of interwoven appendages topped with an open palm and a listening ear. In the adjacent space, visitors encounter a series of glazed ceramic sculptures perched on platforms evocative of African drums. Also included is Drum and Base (2024), a ceramic boombox whose self-referential title highlights the connection between its sculptural foundation and the music genre that inspired it.

The final room of the gallery presents Othello’s works on paper. These works are mounted across a sand-covered floor, a reference to the Sahara desert and its significance as a prehistoric site of Black civilization.

Lisson Gallery

Feb. 19–Mar. 29

Artsy Vanguard 2018 alum Kelly Akashi lost her home and studio in the Los Angeles wildfire this January. Yet from this devastation, she salvaged several bronze casts and borosilicate glass forms. These surviving pieces, now bearing the transformative patina of the fire, feature prominently in her inaugural exhibition with Lisson Gallery.

Incorporating materials like glass, earth, stone, bronze, and lace, Akashi’s works are mounted on the walls of the gallery and arranged among a landscape of stone and marble sculptures on weathering steel pedestals. The works are personal: Mask (2024), for instance, is a red organic form sprouting from a bronze cast of Akashi’s lower face. Lace doilies, once owned by the artist’s grandmother and recently acquired by Akashi, are delicately draped over the rusted steel surfaces throughout the exhibition. Elsewhere, Akashi has used CT scans to enlarge images of seed pods from plants like devil’s claw, sweetgum, and datura, which are then 3D-printed and cast in bronze. In the context of L.A.’s recent destruction, these works bring a sense of renewal.

Akashi joined Lisson Gallery in September 2023, which represents her along with Tanya Bonkadar Gallery.

After the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Japanese artist Yoshimoto Nara struggled to paint. Instead, he found solace in the tactility of clay, which allowed him to channel his emotions physically into the material. Even as he started to paint again, Nara maintained this practice. Now in “My Imperfect Self,” now showing at BLUM, Nara presents 11 new sculptures that explore this less-covered side of his practice.

“I can have the material there before me, to begin with,” Nara told Asymptote Journal. “I have a thing to touch and ‘knead.’ To knead means to think by using the hands. My intuition told me to think by hand. I guess I wanted to go back to a point where I could communicate with my childhood memory again. As a child, I played with clay, and that was my very first hand-craft experience.”

All 11 of these sculptures are marked by the artist’s hands. Sleepy Eyes (2024), for instance, uses the cartoonish style of his popular figurative works, yet the massive clay head is largely imperfect, characterized by hand-made indents. In the show at BLUM, which marks 30 years since his first exhibition with the gallery in 1995, these heads are joined by a selection of drawings and paintings. For example, in Blurry Mind (2024), viewers find Nara’s trademark child subject with a haunting gaze, set against a dark backdrop.

Pace Gallery

Through Mar. 22

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein anchors Pace Gallery’s group exhibition “The Monster,” co-curated by the gallery’s chief curator Oliver Shultz and artist Robert Nava. For Nava, as for Shelley, the idea of the “monster” goes beyond its negative connotations. Instead, by drawing on mythical and monstrous elements of the mythical and monstrous, the exhibition includes works that navigate the tension between attraction and repulsion.

For the show, Nava has curated works from artists he admires, including notable contributions from Louise Bourgeois and Paul McCarthy. The works span from the disconcerting—like Richard Learoyd’sFish Heart (2008), a camera obscura photograph depicting an animal organ in detail—to the eerie facial expressions found in Lucas Samaras’s Untitled (1985). Also included is Huma Bhabha’s Untitled (2024), a pastel work depicting a ghostly figure with a portrait of a dog embedded in its face.

Southern Guild

Through May 3

Growing up in Limpopo, South Africa, Manyaku Mashilo witnessed the “koma” coming-of-age ceremony for young women in her community. However, she moved away before experiencing the ceremony—which involves red ocher, clay, and animal fat—herself. Mashilo channels this cultural heritage into her paintings, often featuring women engulfed by the same red ocher hues. These works are featured in “The Laying of Hands” at Southern Guild, her first solo show in the U.S.

Mashilo’s process involves laying her canvases flat on the ground, allowing the mixture of ruddy ink and clay to flow and settle naturally. This creates otherworldly settings for the women in her paintings. A diptych included in the show, What We Saw, What We Made, When We Remembered (2025), depicts two women wearing headdresses on opposing panels within a temple-like structure. This work, among several others, pays homage to the ceremonial traditions of the Sepedi people, particularly her grandmother, a healer in the community.

Living and working in Cape Town, Mashilo has presented solo shows with Bonne Espérance Gallery in Paris and 99 Loop Gallery in Cape Town.

Issy Wood, “Wet Reckless”

Michael Werner Gallery

Feb. 15–Apr. 5

Silver revolvers, fur jackets, lavish dinners, and gleaming Mercedes-Benz cars take center stage in “Wet Reckless,” Issy Wood’s latest exhibition at Michael Werner Gallery. An Artsy Vanguard 2020 alum, the 31-year-old artist strips these seductive objects of their glossy appeal, revealing instead an underlying sense of unease. By painting objects such as luxury cars and firearms, Wood examines the precarious balance between desire and danger.

Wood, who once described herself as a “medieval millennial,” takes a classical still-life approach that offers a sharp critique of contemporary materialism. Guns with Accessories (all works 2024) presents a revolver through a seductive lens, whereas Smithnwesson24 renders a duller revolver with an empty bullet chamber surrounded by four ghostly figures. The artist’s interest in death and decay is evident throughout.

An MA graduate of the Royal Academy Schools in London, Wood has mounted solo exhibitions at Tank Shanghai, Carlos/Ishikawa in London, and the now-defunct JTT Gallery in New York. Her work is held in major collections, including the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

Sean Kelly Gallery

Through Mar. 8

Chicago-based artist Lindsay Adams often turns to flowers and the nude forms of Black women as her muses. However, in “Keep Your Wonder Moving,” her first exhibition with Sean Kelly Gallery and her West Coast debut, she shifts from her earlier figurative work towards a complex abstract language. The show features 11 abstract paintings that depart from direct depictions of nature and Black subjects, embracing a more fluid, conceptual storytelling. As Adams describes it, this transition marks “an inevitable shift toward expressing a conceptual story, allowing myself latitude in my storytelling and cultural reflection.”

“I’m very interested in moving and exploring the paint because there is a level of freedom,” Adams said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about liberation and engaging in dialogue in that way, using the canvas as a way to negotiate.” Adams takes a layered approach, where pigments are built up, washed away, and manipulated. This process is exemplified by Fire This Time (2024), a fiery abstract diptych.

Adams is currently an MFA student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her work appears in collections such as the Baltimore Museum of Art and Northwestern University Law School. In 2024, the 34-year-old artist won the Helen Frakenthaler Award.

In the aftermath of the wildfires in Los Angeles, Anat Ebgi has organized “The Wave,” a benefit exhibition featuring the works of 15 L.A.-based artists. The gallery will donate 10% of its proceeds to the L.A. Arts Community Fire Relief Fund. It features a range of works, from Anabel Juárez’s ceramic sculpture of a flower pot, Mix bucket II (Off the 110) (2024), to Meeson Pae’s supernatural landscape painting Emit (2025).

The exhibition replaces a planned solo show by Alec Egan, who lost the works for the event in the fire. The new exhibition is named after one of the surviving paintings, The Wave (2024), a tranquil depiction of a purple horizon seen from the beach. This community-focused event aims to rebuild and offer a platform for reflection and rebuilding. Also included is a new painting by Egan, City View (First Tree) (2025), created after the fire. It depicts a single palm tree on fire against a haunting, orange-lit skyline.

Other participating artists also include Cosmo Whyte, Erin Wright, Jaime Muñoz, Jane Margarette, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, John Brooks, Joshua Petker, Kate Pincus-Whitney, Olive Diamond, Robert Russell,Samantha Thomas, and Sarah Ann Weber.

Megan Mulrooney

Feb. 19–Mar. 29

The walls of Hungarian artist Maria Szakats’s grandmother’s house, lined with richly embroidered textiles, left an indelible impression on the artist. Her childhood memories resurfaced in her twenties during a hallucinogenic trip in a flower-wallpapered apartment, where floral patterns pulsed before her. These experiences shape the thick mohair textiles featured in “Hover,” mounted by Megan Mulrooney.

Departing from her usual AI-generated imagery, Szakats embraces floral compositions—orchids, peonies, dahlias, fire lilies, and tulips—rendered in fluffy layers. The titular work, Hover (2025), for instance, presents a bright orange flower, seemingly bursting from the work, with a showy black bloom lingering behind it. Other pieces, like the orchid-inspired “Orchidion” series, present close-ups of the flowers, evocative of the huge, overwhelming rose in René Magritte’s The Tomb of the Wrestlers (1960).

Living and working in Paris, Szakats holds an MFA from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. Her solo shows have been staged by Galerie Chloe Salgado in Paris and Tusk in Chicago.

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Feb. 15–Mar. 29

Indian artist Shilpa Gupta’s 100 Hand-drawn maps of USA (2008/2023) features a standard tabletop mechanical fan blowing and turning the pages of a book of maps. These drawings of the U.S. national borders were created from memory by 100 U.S. residents. Part of Gupta’s “Some Suns Fell Off” at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, the work interrogates the arbitrary nature of nationalism and border control.

The exhibition also features other installations, sculptures, drawings, and sound-based works exploring the random yet significant impact of statehood, for example, in the series “Map Tracings.” Here, the artist distorts the familiar shape of the U.S. using twisted copper wires, suggesting that national identity is malleable, rather than predetermined. Elsewhere, in a dimly lit room, a moving microphone recites the names of 100 poets imprisoned or executed by authoritarian regimes, accompanied by a single, slowly rotating lightbulb—a haunting archive of voices silenced by state power.

Born in Mumbai, Gupta has spent her 30-year career creating work that questions the status quo and holds those in power accountable for systemic oppression. Her work has recently been shown at the Ishara Art Foundation in Dubai, Centro Botín in Spain, and the National Gallery Singapore.

Marian Goodman Gallery

Feb. 19–Apr. 26