For Frieze Los Angeles 2026, Gagosian stages a presentation that feels less like a booth and more like a meditation on California itself — its myths, industries, landscapes and contradictions. Historic heavyweights including Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Gehry, David Hockney, Ed Ruscha and Wayne Thiebaud enter into dialogue with new and recent works by Louise Bonnet, Chris Burden, Urs Fischer, Piero Golia, Mark Grotjahn, Jennifer Guidi, Lauren Halsey, Alex Israel, Nancy Rubins, Sterling Ruby, Jim Shaw, Honor Titus, Mary Weatherford, Jordan Wolfson and Jonas Wood.
The result is a layered portrait of the state as both dream factory and lived terrain.
Hollywood — that eternal engine of reinvention — flickers through the presentation. Alex Israel’s Paramount Pictures (2025), the first new work from his Noir series to appear since his Beverly Hills exhibition, captures the city as cinematic hallucination. Developed through digital renderings and translated into paint with a Warner Bros. scenic artist, the work folds analog nostalgia into screen-based unreality, collapsing myth and infrastructure into a single shimmering streetscape. Piero Golia’s Mariachi Painting #8 (2016), fragmenting the Looney Tunes curtain graphic “That’s All Folks!”, offers a sly epilogue — a wink at performance, closure, and the theatre of art itself.
Elsewhere, Los Angeles’ civic and social fabric comes into focus. Lauren Halsey’s LODA PLAZA II (2025) honours the signage of Black- and Brown-owned businesses, foregrounding the communities that shape the city’s cultural spine. Chris Burden’s 5 Foot Stepped Skyscraper (2014–23) compresses metropolitan ambition into a miniature vertical fantasy, built from handmade metal toy parts — utopian and precarious at once. In The Fair Way (2024), Honor Titus reframes the manicured geometry of the golf course, exposing privilege embedded in leisure.
Nature — cultivated, abundant, ritualised — threads throughout. Hockney’s Two Vases with Flowers on White (1988) offers luminous stillness, while Sterling Ruby’s ceramic FLOWER (9032) (2025) treats the kiln as a site of alchemical transformation. Gehry’s copper Fish on Fire (2023) extends his long fascination with the fish form — an ancient creature reimagined as architectural icon.
California’s abstraction lineage is equally present. Diebenkorn’s radiant Ocean Park #108 (1978) distills Santa Monica light into bands of colour, a horizon line humming with heat. Nancy Rubins’ graphite-covered Drawing (2021) transforms paper into something metallic and weighty. Mary Weatherford’s Saffron Emerald Split (2026) punctures paint with neon, collapsing city glow and desert dusk into one charged surface. Ruby’s Turbine. Intercontinental 9122. (2026) cuts across the picture plane with explosive diagonals — natural and mechanical energy in collision.
And then the dream turns darker. Louise Bonnet’s Bra 1 (2025) twists the body into contorted absence, garments implied but unseen. Jim Shaw’s Dream Drawings mine the subconscious, where California’s promise mutates into something stranger and less stable.
Together, the works frame California not as backdrop but as condition — a place where light dazzles, industry churns, and fantasy never quite settles.
Gagosian will also participate in the Beverly Hills Art Walk on Wednesday 25th February, remaining open until 7pm. On view in the gallery is Sarah Sze: Feel Free, the artist’s debut Los Angeles exhibition — extending the conversation beyond the fair’s temporary architecture.
California, as ever, refuses to sit still.
FRIEZE LOS ANGELES 2026, February 26th–March 1st, 2026 Santa Monica Airport, California Booth C12
