Frieze Los Angeles 2023
Santa Monica Airport
3021 Airport Ave, Santa Monica, CA 90405
Lehmann Maupin returns to Frieze LA with a curated presentation of works by three gallery artists–Chantal Joffe, Catherine Opie, and Billie Zangewa. The works on view render the nuances of family life, interior space, and private labor as unabashedly public, yet boldly intimate, breaking free of traditional notions of domesticity. Through painting, photography, and hand embroidery, each artist depicts quiet and tender moments of human connection. Their radical visibility presents intimacy as subversively powerful, insisting on this kind of emotional labor as both a cornerstone of public life and a deep well of artistic inspiration. Lehmann Maupin’s booth will also include a focused presentation of new paintings and sculpture by Japanese artist Mr., on the heels of his exhibition Mr: You Can Hear the Song of This Town at the Phoenix Art Museum (on view through March 12, 2023).
London-based artist Chantal Joffe is known for her whimsical portraits of herself and of the people she is closest to, including her immediate family, her friends, and her extended family members. By creating tension between the scale of her compositions and the proposed intimacy of their subject matter—as in her self portrait Love Letter 1 (2023), where Joffe is seen reclining nude in the bathtub while reading—Joffe prioritizes the human identities and relationships that undergird her compositions over any kind of painterly realism. This approach heightens already complex narratives around connection, perception, and representation (implicit in the relationship between artist and subject), inviting viewers to reconsider their own interpersonal worlds.
In a newly-printed photographic work from her Domestic series (1998), Catherine Opie captures a tender moment between two lovers. Gina & April, Minneapolis (1998) depicts two women in bed, wrapped in their bedding and in one another’s arms. The image is devoid of extraneous detail—the walls are blank, the bedding simple, and the composition closely cropped—training the viewer’s eye on the relationship pictured and mandating a kind of voyeurism. Opie’s photograph challenges the boundaries of private life, bearing witness to simple yet radical human connection. Opie’s other works on view, Jewelle and Diane, San Francisco, California (1998) and Kristopher & Clara, Tulsa, Oklahoma (1998), echo similar themes of romantic and family life and indicate the artist’s long-term interest in unconventional domesticity.
After the birth of her son, South African artist Billie Zangewa began making hand-stitched silk collage works that depict quotidian scenes from daily life, using her own kitchen table as her studio space. In sea of love (2022), which shows Zangewa’s son resting peacefully in bed, the artist reflects on strong emotional connections built within the home. In Under the African Skies (2023), Zangewa turns this focus outward, exploring the unifying connection between community and nature. The collage depicts a group of school children deeply immersed in a game of cricket, while their parents watch and socialize. Zangewa’s colors are neutral and muted throughout, emulating a misty Johannesburg morning and integrating her figures with their surrounding landscape. These new works, which are part of Zangewa’s upcoming exhibition Billie Zangewa: Field of Dreams at SITE Santa Fe, shift the artist’s focus towards the relationship between family and place. She weaves domesticity and landscape together, evidencing through her process, material, and conceptual development the inextricable link between the two.
Lehmann Maupin’s immersive presentation of new Mr. works will feature paintings, sculpture, and works on paper. Mr.’s work is known for its references to a range of artistic precedents—including 19th-century ukiyo-e prints, pop art, and anime—that create a fantasy world grounded in depictions of everyday rituals, customs, and objects. Interested in bridging visual pop and high-art cultures, the artist often compared himself to a translator. His work aesthetically situates anime, manga, and other hallmarks of otaku (an increasingly prevalent Japanese subculture centered around reclusion and retreat into immersive fantasy worlds) within the realm of fine art, repositioning them for a global audience.