The Artists Taking Center Stage at Frieze Los Angeles 2026

At Frieze Los Angeles 2026, solo artist presentations were among the most memorable. This year, many of them shared an interest in material processes, systems of knowledge, and the circulation of images today.

Jordan Ann Craig (Hales Gallery)

Jordan Ann Craig’s presentation at Hales Gallery was her first solo exhibition in California, where she grew up in the Northern Cheyenne community. Her paintings use vivid colour and structured grids that echo the visual patterns of beadwork and quillwork. Craig’s work looks at abstraction as something that exists across different times and cultures. By using repetition and sequences of colour, her compositions create links between Indigenous craft traditions and the visual language of twentieth-century painting.

Installation view, Jordan Ann Craig at Frieze LA 2026, Hales Gallery

Loriel Beltrán (Lehmann Maupin)

Presented by Lehmann Maupin, Beltrán draws on both Latin American modernism and postwar abstraction. Her works are difficult to define as either painting or sculpture. Built from thick, layered surfaces that resemble construction materials, the compositions use texture as the key element. The ridged surfaces move the focus beyond a purely visual reading, encouraging viewers to see the physical structure as part of the meaning.

Conny Maier (Hauser & Wirth)

Large-scale figures dominate the canvases of Conny Maier, whose paintings show wrestlers, bathers, and monumental nudes that balance humour with a sense of tension. Recently named Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year, Maier is part of a broader renewed interest in expressive figuration in contemporary German painting. Her presentation with Hauser & Wirth highlighted how physical scale can shape emotional perception. The exaggerated bodies appear both strong and vulnerable at the same time, suggesting a sense of vulnerability beneath physical strength.

Installation view, Conny Maier at Frieze LA 2026, Hauser & Wirth

Jessie Homer French (Various Small Fires)

Over more than six decades, Jessie Homer French has developed a distinctive approach to landscape painting rooted in the landscape and climate of California. Her works often depict wildfire as both a destructive force and a natural process of renewal. Presented by Various Small Fires, her paintings combine symbolic imagery with close observation of nature.

Élise Peroi (Carvalho)

For Élise Peroi, represented by Carvalho, weaving becomes a way of thinking about language, landscape, and memory. In her installation made of silk and linen, fabric appears as an image that also functions as a structural element. Working with subtle tonal variations and geometric rhythms, the artist created a space that looked more like a drawing in air than a textile work. The lightness of the materials gives the installation a sense of fragility and poetry at the same time.

Installation view, Élise Peroi at Frieze LA 2026, Carvalho

Jim Hodges (Anthony Meier)

Light is both the material and the subject in Jim Hodges’s work. The new wall pieces shown with Anthony Meier use reflective surfaces that change with the light, making the works appear constantly shifting.

Working across drawing, sculpture, and installation, Hodges often explores ideas of fragility. Here, colour and light interact to create a sense of movement and subtle emotional tension, connecting material experimentation with a more personal dimension.

Jacob Fenton (Josh Lilley)

Digital culture is both the source and the subject of Jacob Fenton’s paintings. Using appropriated imagery, the Los Angeles–born artist explores how new myths are formed and spread online, often through the reuse of historical symbols. His presentation with Josh Lilley Gallery combined cinematic references with fictional characters drawn from extremist visual culture. As a result, these images become both a critique and a reflection on the instability of meaning online.

Ebony G. Patterson (moniquemeloche)

Dense layers of textiles, artificial flowers, jewels, and photographic images define the visual language of Ebony G. Patterson’s installations. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, the artist often explores themes of visibility, mourning, and postcolonial identity. Beneath the visually elaborate surfaces, her works reflect on questions of race, gender, and historical memory.

Installation view, Ebony G. Patterson at Frieze LA 2026, Monique Meloche Gallery

Marley Freeman (Parker Gallery)

Marley Freeman’s abstract paintings reflect her early experience working in textile mills. Her paintings sometimes seem to echo antique fabrics. Repetition and pattern play an important role in her work, linking contemporary painting to craft traditions. In Freeman’s practice, the process itself becomes a way of preserving cultural memory.

Alicja Kwade (303 Gallery)

At 303 Gallery (B20), Alicja Kwade brought together coloured stone spheres and bronze casts of everyday objects, including a monobloc plastic chair and a shopping bag. The juxtaposition of materials suggestive of geological time with items associated with mass production reflects the artist’s longstanding interest in the systems that shape perception and value. Based in Berlin, Kwade often works with repetition, mirroring, and displacement to question the frameworks through which we attempt to understand reality. By placing humble objects in dialogue with planetary forms, she probes how material existence is interpreted through human systems of logic and classification.