Frieze Los Angeles: Booth B17

For Frieze Los Angeles 2023, Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to present works by Leonardo Drew, Ficre Ghebreyesus, Alfredo Jaar, Samuel Levi Jones, Ana Mendieta, Jaume Plensa, Tariku Shiferaw, Nancy Spero, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, and Barthélémy Toguo.

New works by two artists known for their use of abstraction as a means of exploring and critiquing societal structures will make their debut at the fair. Samuel Levi Jones's practice involves taking apart "source" materials with inherent authority, such as law textbooks, and rearranging them in a new form. Jones's deconstruction of these materials provides space for an inquiry into their flaws and undermines their systems of control. For Tariku Shiferaw, who was born in Ethiopia and grew up in Los Angeles, geometric abstraction is a platform for the interrogation of cultural space-making through his signature visual language of mark-making.

Pastels by the late artist Ficre Ghebreyesus (b. 1962 - d. 2012) will also make their debut at the fair. Born in Eritrea during their War of Independence, he left as a teenaged refugee and ultimately settled in New Haven, Connecticut. His vibrant works meld figuration and abstraction, suggesting the non-linear forms of dreams, memories, and storytelling. While Ghebreyesus's work was rarely exhibited during his lifetime, recent posthumous presentations of his work include the 59th Venice Biennale and a 2020 solo exhibition at Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, the catalogue for which has recently been published.

Over the past four decades, Alfredo Jaar has used photographs, film, installation, and new media to examine complex socio-political issues and the limits and ethics of representation. The Broad, Los Angeles derived the title of their 2022 exhibition This Is Not America's Flag from the text of one of Jaar's best-known public interventions, A Logo for America (1987). This work critiqued the common usage of "America" to refer to the United States and its inherent neglect of the rest of the continent. On view in our booth will be A Logo for America (1987-2014) (2016), a lightbox work that depicts the 2014 presentation in New York’s Times Square of the 1987 animation.

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum's boundary-crossing practice centers Black female identity in the discourse of postcolonialism and neocolonialism and draws inspiration from a broad range of fields from ecology to physics to art history. Following the success of Sunstrum's first solo exhibition with the gallery in Fall 2022—also the artist's first major solo exhibition in New York—Sunstrum's painting Walkie Talkie (2022) will be on view in our booth. The painting takes compositional inspiration from Dutch still-lives and depicts a common dish in Sunstrum's native Botswana, layering art-historical and personal references.

Download Frieze Los Angeles Press Release as PDF