After last year’s wildfires scorched more than 40,000 acres and displaced over 180,000 residents, the Los Angeles art community came together in ways unusual for the sprawling metropolis: Benefit exhibitions and mutual aid networks flourished. That surge of local pride and solidarity carries into this year’s Frieze week, with institutions and galleries foregrounding California artists, many closely tied to the city itself.
Solo presentations of historical figures like Wallace Berman and Raymond Saunders (at Michael Kohn Gallery and David Zwirner, respectively) join those of rising, ultra-contemporary voices such as Veronica Fernandez and Ash Roberts (at Anat Ebgi and Francis Gallery). At Hauser & Wirth, a major exhibition devoted to storied L.A. patron Eileen Harris Norton surveys decades of advocacy while bringing together many of the region’s defining artists of the last half century.
The expanding art fair landscape reflects the same enthusiasm and momentum: new arrivals like ENZO in Echo Park join Frieze, Felix, The Other Art Fair, and last year’s standout addition, Post-Fair, turning the week into a citywide festival.
Here are 10 of the most anticipated gallery shows during Frieze Los Angeles 2026.
Veronica Fernandez
“Prey”
Anat Ebgi
Feb. 21–Apr. 4
Veronica Fernandez’s oversized canvases stage intimate portraits of family life. In her debut solo exhibition with Anat Ebgi, the Los Angeles–based artist deploys impasto, gestural abstraction, and rich jewel tones to blur the boundaries between representation and recollection. In Highway Laundry (2026), for example, thick skeins of magenta pigment threaten to overtake the street, the three figures walking along it, and the glowing gas station sign overhead. The built-up surfaces mirror the accumulation of time and memory. Fernandez often draws from the periods of housing instability she experienced during childhood: Suitcases, laundry bins, brown paper bags, and improvised toys recur across the paintings, binding otherwise disparate scenes together. The show’s title, “Prey,” conveys both the tenderness and wariness that characterize the artist’s approach to representing her past.
Leiko Ikemura
“Riding Horizon”
Lisson Gallery
Feb. 24–Mar. 28
Leiko Ikemura likewise addresses the innocence and anguish of adolescence. For her first Los Angeles exhibition, the Japanese Swiss artist explores the relationship between femininity and the natural world. Across paintings and sculptures, girlish figures merge with birds, cats, fallen trees, and ocean waves. In one colored bronze, a head gives way to a brace of blue birds; in another, feline ears sprout from a crop of hair.
The large tempera paintings amplify this ambiguity. Forms dissolve into wispy clouds, translucent washes of fog, and the raw jute canvas itself. In Zarathustra I (2014), a windswept tree grows from a creature nearly indistinguishable from an outcrop of rocks. Ikemura’s style synthesizes Western Symbolist paintings, East Asian sansuiga landscapes, and traditional Japanese ink drawings as the artist emphasizes multiplicity. Ultimately, her work yields a vision of selfhood that’s as fluid, permeable, and capacious as the worlds it depicts.
“Destiny Is a Rose: The Eileen Harris Norton Collection”
Hauser & Wirth
Feb. 19–Apr. 26
One of this year’s most anticipated Art Week exhibitions turns the spotlight on Los Angeles collector Eileen Harris Norton, whose five decades of patronage have centered on artists of color, especially women, working in California. Organized into chapters, the presentation gathers more than 80 works across mediums and generations, showcasing Norton’s connoisseurship as well as her commitment to social justice and education. Lorraine O’Grady’s Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (1980–83)—a debutante gown made from 180 white gloves—shares space with Alison Saar’s winged assemblage Bye Bye Blackbird (1992) and David Hammons’s African American Flag (1989). Figurative paintings by Kerry James Marshall and Amy Sherald are interspersed with abstractions by Frank Bowling and Alma Thomas. Seen together, the works reveal a collector who shaped formative conversations about representation, materiality, and the cultural legacy of the American West.
Wallace Berman
“It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)”
Michael Kohn Gallery
Through Apr. 25
“It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” marks the centennial of Wallace Berman’s birth. The exhibition focuses on the Los Angeles artist’s iconic Verifax works: collages he produced using an early photocopy machine gifted to him in 1963. Reworking a negative image of a hand holding a transistor radio, Berman filled the device’s face with fragments of photos culled from old books, newspapers, and magazines. Jean Harlow nudes and tarot cards appear next to portraits of Fidel Castro and advertisements for pistols. Curated by his son Tosh Berman, the presentation extends the artist’s legacy beyond his Beat-era associations, emphasizing his engagement with mysticism and Kabbalah and his prescient critique of image saturation and mass media.
Raymond Saunders
“Notes from LA”
David Zwirner
Feb. 24–Apr. 25
Raymond Saunders, who passed away last July at age 90, also incorporated found imagery into his mixed-media assemblages. The Pittsburgh-born painter spent most of his career in Oakland, California, covering canvases with inky blank expanses layered with advertisements, exhibition posters, and handwritten correspondence. We Try (1985), for instance, reads as a blackboard awash with chalky smears, children’s illustrations of suns and flowers, taped papers with daubs of colorful paint, and bits of Chinese calligraphy. Throughout, texts and artifacts associated with his longtime career as an educator appear alongside gestural marks and textural color fields. The canvases register as spaces for ongoing notation and accumulation rather than resolution—visual diaries that he never quite closed.
Alma Berrow
“What Slips Beneath the Sugar”
Megan Mulrooney
Feb. 24–Mar. 28
Rising U.K. ceramist Alma Berrow transforms the gallery into an immersive dinner party. At the center of the exhibition, an oval table holds glossy, trompe l’oeil sculptures of half-empty salad bowls, torn In-N-Out sauce packets, bonbons coated in suggestive white powder that falls from open baggies, and ashtrays stuffed with crinkled gold cigarette butts. The guests are absent, but it’s easy to imagine the gallery-going set who’d only just slipped out for the next event. Handmade from earthenware, fired and painted with fine pigments and gold luster, the works toggle between the hyperreal and the cartoonish, the glamorous and the abject. Berrow captures the aftermath of conviviality with a sharp eye toward the performance and excess embedded in many of the city’s social rituals.
Hayv Kahraman
“Libations”
Vielmetter Los Angeles
Through Mar. 21
The paintings in Hayv Kahraman’s third exhibition with Vielmetter respond to the 2025 Eaton Fire in Altadena that displaced the artist and her family. Conceived as offerings “to a burning world,” the pictures feature her signature female figures—prominent brows, dark hair, pupilless eyes—engaged in rituals of mourning and resistance like dancing and sewing strands of tears. In I’ve been circling for thousands of years (2025–2026), four women whirl their long hair in circles, strings of water droplets forming a mandala-like shape between their faces.
Ritual also structures the material surface. The paintings incorporate handmade flax textiles, marbling techniques, Arabic inscriptions, and talismanic symbols such as Sufi magic squares. The canvases simultaneously depict and enact a kind of divination, proposing image-making as an antidote to disaster and devastating loss.
Tacita Dean
“Trial of the Finger”
Marian Goodman Gallery
Feb. 21–Apr. 25
Following her first major U.S. career survey, “Blind Folly,” at the Columbus Museum of Art, Tacita Dean unveils a new body of analog films, drawings, and photographs. The centerpiece: a 16mm film, Sidney Felsen decorates an Envelope (2026), observes the late Gemini G.E.L. cofounder carefully covering an artist’s royalty payment with postage and rubber stamps from his office archive. Visual evidence of his decades of creative partnership surrounds him. Elsewhere, abstract 35mm film installations share space with gestural chalk drawings on salvaged school slates and painted Polaroids of artifacts from the artist’s studio, which include mirrors and fragments of Roman sculptures. Together, the works situate Dean’s longstanding commitment to manual image-making within L.A.’s history of collaboration between artists, printers, filmmakers, and fabricators.
“The Stars Before Us All”
La Loma Projects
Through Mar. 28
La Loma Projects presents paintings by a group of nine Australian First Nations artists whose work is rarely seen in Los Angeles. They index landscapes, narratives, and ceremonial practices while remaining rooted in ancestral traditions reaching back tens of thousands of years. The show is organized in collaboration with Michael Reid and spans 1990 to the present, featuring luminous, layered color fields by Anmatyerre elder Emily Kame Kngwarreye and swirling dotted abstractions on linen by Raylene Walatinna and her mother Betty Chimney. Elsewhere, Timo Hogan’s monumental diptych depicts a pastel lake bisected by a white snake, while Djirrirra Wunuŋmurra’s work covers bark with repeating motifs associated with Yukuwa (yam). The paintings altogether sustain and reinvigorate techniques and symbols from one of the world’s longest continuous cultures.
Ash Roberts
“The Year Room”
Francis Gallery
Feb. 20–Apr. 18
A series of 12 paintings, each measuring 48 by 72 inches, traces a year’s passage in rising contemporary artist Ash Roberts’s fourth showing with Francis Gallery. As you circle the gallery, pale pink water lily–filled ponds give way to verdant forest floors, while gold-leaf skies blaze above grassy hillsides, and deep blue shadows gather between snowdrifts. Across the shifting color palettes and natural imagery, a rippling mark reappears—sometimes suggesting a flock of starlings, other times a wavering waterline.
In a departure from earlier works that leaned toward abstraction, these paintings feature recognizable forms including butterfly wings, birch trees, cirrus clouds, and full moons. Roberts draws inspiration from both her current home in Los Angeles and from her childhood in upstate New York. She suffuses the paintings with a palpable nostalgia for predictable weather patterns and discrete seasons now all but lost.
