FRIEZE LOS ANGELES × FELIX ART FAIR
February 25 – March 1, 2026
Santa Monica Airport & Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel
KALDI Market Report
Frieze Los Angeles 2026. Image by Casey Kelbaugh/CKA. Courtesy of Frieze.
The numbers are in, the booths are down, and the crates are heading back to New York, London, Seoul, and São Paulo. LA Art Week 2026 — built around the seventh edition of Frieze Los Angeles and the eighth of Felix Art Fair — is over, and by nearly every available measure, it delivered.
More than 100 galleries from 24 countries presented at Frieze LA, welcoming over 32,000 visitors from 45 countries, with representatives from 160 museums and institutions attending across the week. From the first minutes of VIP preview on February 26 through the final public hours on March 1, dealers across both fairs reported not just sales, but something rarer: collective conviction.
That word matters more than it seems. This was a city still processing the aftermath of devastating wildfires that had torn through Altadena and the Pacific Palisades just over a year ago. The art world showed up in force for the 2025 edition too, but in a spirit closer to defiance. This year, the mood had shifted. "From the opening morning, it was clear that this year's edition marked a new level of confidence for Frieze Los Angeles," said Christine Messineo, Frieze's Director of Americas. "Collectors engaged with conviction across every section of the fair, and institutional participation was both deep and sustained."
THE SALES
The headline was a $2.8 million mixed-media work by Njideka Akunyili Crosby — sold by David Zwirner to a European foundation within the opening hours of VIP preview. It was the fair's single largest confirmed transaction, and it set the tone for what followed.
But the breadth across the fair was what stood out. This wasn't a single-gallery story.
White Cube sold three major sculptures from its solo Antony Gormley presentation, each priced between £500,000 and £800,000 — totaling well over £1.5 million. David Kordansky Gallery, one of LA's most respected local powerhouses, reported more than $2.4 million in sales, led by Jonas Wood's Bonsai #12 (2025) at $600,000. Pace Gallery cleared approximately $1.8 million, including a James Turrell installation at $950,000 — confirmed in the official closing statement — alongside a 1983 Jean Dubuffet painting at $475,000. Thaddaeus Ropac reported a Georg Baselitz painting at €1,000,000 and an Alex Katz 2022 canvas, Purple Split 3, at $700,000.
Almine Rech reported an Ewa Juszkiewicz painting in the $800,000–$850,000 range. Garth Greenan placed a Howardena Pindell at $875,000. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery confirmed more than $2 million from a group presentation. Hauser & Wirth — typically reticent on specifics — confirmed its entire solo presentation of newly represented painter Conny Maier sold out before VIP day ended, with large canvases priced at $125,000 and smaller works at $25,000.
THE KOREAN MARKET MOMENT
Tina Kim Gallery's performance deserves its own paragraph. The gallery placed more than $800,000 worth of art during the VIP preview alone: two Ha Chong-Hyun paintings ($180,000 and $250,000), two Lee ShinJa textile works ($70,000 and $180,000), a Kim Tschang-Yeul painting ($70,000), two Maia Ruth Lee paintings ($25,000 and $18,000), and a Jane Yang D'Haene ceramic work ($25,000).
What Tina Kim has built over years — positioning Korean modernism not as a regional curiosity but as a foundational chapter in postwar abstraction — is paying off consistently. Frieze LA remains the most receptive market for it.
FOCUS: THE EMERGING MARKET'S STRONGEST CASE
The Focus section, curated for the third consecutive year by Essence Harden, may be the fair's most quietly consequential corner. Supported by Stone Island, it brings together 15 US-based galleries founded within the past twelve years, each presenting a single artist at depth.
The results were immediate and institutional.
Sea View gallery's solo presentation of recent UCLA graduate Zenobia Lee sold out during VIP preview, with works priced between $7,000 and $20,000. Two pieces were acquired by institutions: one by the California African American Museum (CAAM), another by the Mohn Art Collective (MAC3) — the joint acquisition fund operated by the Hammer Museum, LACMA, and MOCA. Make Room gallery's presentation of Erica Mahinay also sold out in full (ten paintings, $5,500–$35,000), with one work selected by the Santa Monica Art Bank. The 2026 Frieze Impact Prize winner Napoles Marty's booth sold out entirely.
The gatekeeping function of the traditional gallery career ladder is being compressed. For advisors watching the market, the Focus section is not supplementary programming — it is a primary signal generator.
INSTITUTIONAL ACQUISITIONS: THE COMPLETE PICTURE
Mohn Art Collective / MAC3 (Hammer + LACMA + MOCA): Clarissa Tossin, LA Weeds: First Harvest (2026), from kaufmann repetto; Zenobia Lee, from Sea View; Sharif Farrag, from Jeffrey Deitch.
California African American Museum Acquisition Fund: Zenobia Lee, from Sea View; Jessica Taylor Bellamy, Linear Burn (2025), from Anat Ebgi ($11,000).
Santa Monica Art Bank × Frieze LA Acquisition Fund: Erica Mahinay, Unfetter (Blue Gaze) (2025), from Make Room.
Five works. Five institutions. All artists at the beginning of their careers. All placed into permanent public collections as a direct result of one fair. That is by design, and it is working.
BEYOND THE BOOTH
Frieze Projects (in partnership with Art Production Fund, under the banner Body & Soul) brought new commissions to the Santa Monica Airport campus. Amanda Ross-Ho's durational performance Untitled Orbit (MANUAL MODE) ran throughout the week. Cosmas & Damian Brown's Fountain: Sources of Light (2026) incorporated metal plates and bowls painted in workshops with local children. Shana Hoehn's outdoor sculpture Deadfall (2026) — a city tree transformed into cheerleader legs via the Santa Monica Urban Forest program — became one of the fair's most-photographed works.
The Frieze Library, launched this year in direct response to the Palisades fire, invited participating galleries to donate art publications to the newly reopened Pacific Palisades Library. A small gesture, and precisely the right one.
The Deutsche Bank Frieze Los Angeles Film Award ($10,000) went to Joey Bueno Breese for El Rio Nuestro, with Devin O'Guinn taking the Audience Award.
THE ARI EMANUEL MOMENT
No account of Frieze LA 2026 is complete without the story of the quilts.
Ari Emanuel — CEO of Mari Group, which acquired Frieze last year — arrived at the Santa Monica Airport campus before the VIP doors opened on February 26. He walked directly to the booth of Fort Gansevoort, a New York gallery making its Frieze LA debut, presenting a solo show by Yvonne Wells, an 86-year-old quiltmaker from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Within three minutes, he committed to three works: Wells's quilted portraits of Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley, priced between $50,000 and $60,000 each.
"He said, 'These are amazing,'" Fort Gansevoort's founder Adam Shopkorn recounted the following day. "His wife came alongside him. Within three minutes he told me, 'I am going to take Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley.' I said, 'That's amazing. Thank you so much.'" The transaction was finalized through Emanuel's art advisor, Jeffrey Deitch, whose gallery was also exhibiting at the fair. It was the fair's first sale. It was also its most human story.
FELIX ART FAIR: A DIFFERENT KIND OF SERIOUS
Six blocks and a world away — at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel — Felix Art Fair was doing what it has always done: running a fundamentally different kind of fair.
Now in its eighth edition, Felix was founded in 2018 by collector Dean Valentine alongside dealers Al and Mills Morán. The premise has never changed: 57 galleries taking over hotel rooms, suites, and poolside cabanas around a David Hockney-painted pool, conducting business at a pace that feels less like a trade fair and more like a very well-curated gathering with uncommonly good art.
Warmer-than-expected late February weather helped. For blizzard-weary visitors flying in from New York, the Roosevelt's sun-drenched pool deck was a genuine relief. Social energy translated into sales energy.
FELIX: STANDOUT SALES AND WORK
The fair's most-discussed early transaction was Stroll Garden's presentation of Raina Lee — stoneware works referencing Monet, Van Gogh, and Sargent, priced at $6,000 to $8,000 each. Eleven of twelve pieces sold before the Wednesday preview closed. The twelfth was on hold.
The work that generated the most sustained critical attention was Maddy Inez's ceramic fountain The Sower (2023), presented in Megan Mulrooney's cabana. Inez is the daughter of Alison Saar and granddaughter of Betye Saar — a lineage felt in the work without overwhelming it. The sound of trickling water gave the space a meditative quality that suited the setting exactly.
Felix also launched The Felix Podcast this year, hosted by Dean Valentine and journalist Janelle Zara, with inaugural guests including philanthropist Jarl Mohn and artists Frances Stark and Joey Terrill.
THE SATELLITE PICTURE
LA Art Week 2026 extended well beyond its two anchor fairs.
Butter Art Fair (Inglewood) — Co-founder Mali Bacon describes the fair, now making its LA debut, as a correction to the 2020 moment when institutional attention to Black art too often centered the work without the artists. Its public, portfolio-based selection process and emphasis on artist welfare gave it a distinct ethos.
Enzo Art Fair (Echo Park) — A new free-admission fair organized by collector R. Parmar, offering New York and international galleries a low-risk LA entry point in a hybrid forum-fair format.
Startup Art Fair (Venice Beach, The Kinney) — Returning after five years away, the artist-run hotel-room format ran a shuttle to Frieze.
Post-Fair (former Santa Monica Post Office) — Now in its second year under gallerist Chris Sharp, Post-Fair has quickly established itself as the fair week's thoughtful, unhurried coda. One-third local, two-thirds international, consistently showing more experimental work with more generous floor space than a booth allows.
Julia Stoschek Foundation (Variety Arts Theater, Downtown LA) — Not a fair, but one of the week's most significant events: the Foundation's first US exhibition, an immersive time-based media survey with works by Marina Abramović, Arthur Jafa, Anne Imhof, and Jordan Wolfson, among others, occupying six floors of a historic downtown theater.
What 2026 Leaves Behind:
Three things from this edition will matter beyond the week.
The institutional pipeline is working. The coordinated acquisition infrastructure — MAC3, CAAM, the Santa Monica Art Bank — is putting emerging work directly into permanent public collections off the fair floor. It creates provenance. It creates price floors. And it signals that LA institutions are active participants in the market, not passive observers.
The emerging market is being validated at speed. Zenobia Lee, Erica Mahinay, Napoles Marty — none of these artists spent years building gallery careers before reaching a platform like Frieze. They arrived early and left with institutional stamps of approval. That speed of validation is accelerating, and it changes how advisors and collectors should think about the Focus section specifically.
Los Angeles is not trying to be New York. The most important thing Frieze LA has done over seven editions is resist the temptation to replicate Frieze New York's scale and density, building instead something that works specifically here: intimate enough to feel like a community event, large enough to matter commercially, rooted enough in local culture to feel necessary rather than transplanted. Felix amplifies that quality. The new satellite fairs are beginning to follow.
Santa Monica Airport — the fair's home since 2023 — is scheduled to close in 2028. This was one of the last two editions to use it. Whatever replaces it will inherit a fair that has figured out what it wants to be. In a city that has been through a great deal recently, that is worth noting.
Sources
- Artsy — "$2.8 Million Njideka Akunyili Crosby Artwork Leads Sales at Frieze Los Angeles 2026"https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-28-million-njideka-akunyili-crosby-leads-sales-frieze-los-angeles-2026
- The Art Newspaper — "Better every year: Frieze opens to swift sales for Los Angeles artists"https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/02/26/frieze-los-angeles-sales-report-vip-day-local-artists
- ARTnews — "Dealers Are Abuzz at Frieze LA's VIP Day: 'It's a Frenzy'" https://www.artnews.com/art-news/market/dealers-abuzz-frieze-los-angeles-vip-day-frenzy-1234774824/
- FAD Magazine — "Frieze Los Angeles 2026 Closes with Strong Sales and Major Museum Acquisitions"https://fadmagazine.com/2026/03/02/frieze-los-angeles-2026-closes-with-strong-sales-and-major-museum-acquisitions/
- Artnet News — "Frieze Owner Ari Emanuel Buys Three Quilts at Los Angeles Fair, Beating VIPs in the Door"https://news.artnet.com/market/ari-emanuel-frieze-la-sales-2747230
- ARTnews — "Heading Into Frieze, LA Is Poised Between Grief and Hope" https://www.artnews.com/art-news/market/frieze-los-angeles-art-world-grief-hope-1234773976/
- The Art Newspaper — "Frieze Los Angeles Reflects the City's Resilience" (preview)https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/02/23/frieze-los-angeles-2026-preview
- Santa Monica Daily Press — "Frieze Los Angeles Returns with 100-Plus Galleries from 24 Countries"https://www.smdp.com/frieze-los-angeles-returns-to-santa-monica-airport-with-100-plus-galleries-from-24-countries/
- Artsy — "The 10 Best Booths at Frieze Los Angeles 2026" https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-10-best-booths-frieze-los-angeles-2026
- Frieze Official — "Frieze Los Angeles 2026: In Pictures" https://www.frieze.com/article/pictures-frieze-los-angeles-2026
- Artsy — "5 Artists We Discovered at Felix Art Fair 2026" https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-5-artists-discovered-felix-art-fair-2026
- Hauser & Wirth — Frieze Week Events page https://www.hauserwirth.com/art-fairs/frieze-los-angeles/frieze-week-events/