While the art world has felt bleak amid a buckling market, a new art fair is gracing Los Angeles this year. Named for its location, Santa Monica Post Office, will run concurrently with Frieze LA and Felix art fair in February.
The new boutique art fair may be small in size, but it is expected to pack a big punch. The LA fair was born from the earlier and smaller project Place des Vosges in Paris, also named for its location, for which a limited number of notable international galleries staged a show together over the last two consecutive years. Noticing some success and a lot of camaraderie, organizer Chris Sharp decided to bring this energy from the city of light to the city of angels.
“The fair landscape has gotten really complicated,” Sharp told ARTnews in an interview. “The fee structure [of larger fairs] is somewhat prohibitive and I wanted to create an alternative to that.”
In recent years, art fairs have expanded and become more corporatized, with substantial price increases, in which it can be difficult, if not impossible, for emerging or small galleries to participate, let alone experiment with their presentations. charging project spaces $2,000 and galleries $6,000—a nominal fee compared to its larger competitors—Santa Monica Post Office will be “much more collegial” with “less pressure to sell”. It is expected to feel more like a large curated group exhibition rather than an art fair with separate booths set up to sell.
The move is not entirely unexpected for the art world, which has seen art dealers dissatisfied with the status quo established by art fairs such as the Art Dealers Association of America and the Armory Show.
Santa Monica Post Office will feature a total of 25 local, national, and international galleries hailing from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, Toronto, New York, Milan, and Tokyo. The fair will consist exclusively of solo projects, including a presentation of one of Kaari Upson’s last bodies of work via Sprüth Magers, a showcase of Sara Cynwar’s latest work presented by Cooper Cole, and a show of work from the late Lin May Saeed from Chris Sharp Gallery.
The full list of participants are listed below.
4649, Tokyo
Babst Gallery, Los Angeles
Castle, Los Angeles
Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles
Cooper Cole, Toronto
Cruise Control, Cambria
Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles
Et al., San Francisco
Good Weather, Little Rock, Chicago
House of Seiko, San Francisco
Kayokoyuki, Tokyo
King’s Leap, New York
Laurel Gitlen, New York
Lomex, New York
Louis Reed, New York
Michael Benevento, Los Angeles
Overduin & Co., Los Angeles
P.P.O.W., New York
Roland Ross, Margate
Sprüth Magers, Berlin, London, Los Angeles, New York
Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin, Los Angeles
Theta, New York
Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo
Tureen, Dallas
The Untitled Love, Los Angeles
Zero…, Milan
