As Frieze Los Angeles returns to Santa Monica Airport for its sixth edition, the city’s vibrant art scene takes center stage in an international celebration of contemporary creativity. From February 20–23, 2025, the fair brings together a diverse roster of global galleries, ambitious installations, and cutting-edge artistic voices that push the boundaries of visual culture. Under the direction of Christine Messineo, this year’s event once again highlights LA’s influence on the art world, with special programming including Focus, curated by Essence Harden, spotlighting emerging talent.
Here are five artists’ works who garnered attention:
Brian Rochefort (b. 1985, Lincoln, RI) / Sean Kelly
Represented by Sean Kelly, Brian Rochefort’s mixed-media sculptures captivate with their vivid, otherworldly textures and organic forms. Inspired by his travels to remote landscapes—including the Amazon, the Galápagos, and volcanic terrains—Rochefort transforms traditional ceramic techniques into dynamic, almost topographical compositions. His meticulous layering of colorants, proprietary glazes, and melted glass results in chromatic, molten-like surfaces reminiscent of subterranean caves, volcanoes, jungles, and coral reefs. Blurring the boundaries between creation and destruction, his work evokes the raw energy of nature’s most fragile ecosystems. Set to be featured in Made in L.A. 2025 at the Hammer Museum, Rochefort continues to push the boundaries of ceramics from his studio in Los Angeles.
Lily Stockman (b. 1982, Providence, RI) / MASSIMODECARLO
Lily Stockman, shown by MASSIMODECARLO, has luminous paintings that bridge the natural and the spiritual, weaving together elements of landscape, history, and abstraction. Inspired by the rhythmic patterns of nature—vernal pools, birdsong, mineral licks—as well as devotional art and poetic meter, her compositions feature biomorphic forms and a distinct palette of crackling oranges, earthy reds, and Holbein browns. Stockman’s work, often described as both diagrammatic and atmospheric, evokes the meditative precision of Josef Albers with the ethereal sensibility of Agnes Pelton. In a notable project, she explored The Odyssey through Emily Wilson’s translation in a project at Gagosian Athens, further expanding her engagement with literary and historical themes. Splitting her time between Los Angeles and Yucca Valley, Stockman continues to translate the visual poetry of her surroundings into striking, contemplative paintings.
Vincent Pocsik (b. 1985, Cleveland, OH) / Nazarian / Curcio
Showcased by Nazarian / Curcio, Vincent Pocsik presents his striking wood-based sculptures, where furniture and the human form meld into surreal, emotionally charged compositions. Exploring the interplay between the seen and the unseen, Pocsik’s work breathes life into wood, a material he believes holds inherent truths about the world. His process blends traditional craftsmanship with contemporary fabrication techniques, resulting in fluid, anthropomorphic forms that blur the boundaries between design and fine art. Evoking themes of memory, transformation, and the tension between nature and the manmade, his sculptures challenge conventional perceptions of both material and form. Working from his Los Angeles studio, Pocsik continues to push the expressive potential of wood into evocative new realms.
Jessica Taylor Bellamy (b. 1992, Whittier, CA) / Anat Ebgi
Represented by Anat Ebgi, Jessica Taylor Bellamy’s work captures the layered contradictions of Los Angeles, where nature and civilization collide in an ever-shifting landscape impacted by climate change of fire and drought. Blending image and text, abstraction and figuration, her paintings and mixed-media works explore themes of home, identity, and ecological fragility. Inspired by her Ashkenazi Jewish and Afro-Cuban heritage, Bellamy weaves personal and historical narratives into compositions that juxtapose luminous skies, sunsets, shorelines, and flora with barriers like lace curtains, iron gates, and chain-link fences—suggesting both intimacy and restriction. Her use of personal photographs and silkscreened newsprint elements further underscores the intersection of personal memory and society. A native Angeleno, Bellamy’s practice serves as a poetic meditation on the precarious beauty of a city shaped by both utopian dreams and underlying instability.
Ambera Wellmann (b. 1982, Lunenberg, Nova Scotia) / Company Gallery / Hauser & Wirth
Co-presented by Hauser & Wirth and Company Gallery, as part of Hauser & Wirth’s Collective Impact model, this solo presentation by Ambera Wellman offers a compelling glimpse into Wellmann’s upcoming major exhibition in New York later this year. Wellmann unveils a series of hauntingly beautiful paintings that blur the boundaries between past and future, figuration and dissolution. Drawing from Renaissance and Baroque traditions, her compositions depict unmoored figures and fragmented forms drifting through surreal landscapes that speak to themes of metamorphosis, survival, and self-destruction. Engaging with the global environmental crisis, Wellmann reworks and layers unfinished compositions in a process she calls “visual catachresis,” creating evocative assemblages of human and non-human presences. Works such as Noise of Oblation (2024) and Shoal Spectrum (2024) conjure images of ecological collapse, weaving jewel-like detritus with Baroque memento mori.
With an impressive lineup of artists redefining their mediums, navigating themes of identity, ecology, and transformation, Frieze LA 2025 promises an electrifying experience.
