Santa Monica Put up Workplace, a brand new satellite tv for pc honest, will launch subsequent month throughout Frieze Los Angeles, with 26 exhibitors taking on an Artwork Deco former publish workplace in downtown Santa Monica. The selection of venue, on the far west aspect of the town, places it a long way from lots of the main museums and gallery districts, however a brief 11-minute drive from Frieze Los Angeles’s venue, Santa Monica Airport.
The honest will run three days, 20-22 February, with an inaugural lineup of twenty-two galleries and 4 undertaking areas. They embrace worldwide galleries like Sprüth Magers and Tanya Leighton Gallery, many mainstays of the Los Angeles and New York artwork scenes—like Michael Benevento, Chris Sharp Gallery, PPOW and Theta—in addition to carefully watched areas from Toronto, Tokyo, San Francisco, Milan and elsewhere.
Most will placed on solo shows in an open-plan association, fairly than the standard fair-stand format. Sprüth Magers is exhibiting works by the late artist Kaari Upson; Theta will deliver works by the Footage Technology artist Nancy Dwyer and Dallas’s Tureen gallery will supply work by Lula Broglio.
Chris Sharp, proprietor of the namesake Los Angeles gallery, is the honest’s founder and primarily based his strategy on a boutique expo he beforehand organised in Paris to coincide with Artwork Basel’s honest there, Place des Vosges. “The honest panorama has gotten actually sophisticated,” Sharp informed Artnews. “The charge construction [of larger fairs] is considerably prohibitive and I needed to create an alternative choice to that.”
At Santa Monica Put up Workplace, industrial galleries can pay $6,000 to take part, whereas undertaking areas pay $2,000, small charges in contrast the the five- and six-figure stand prices on the world’s greatest gala’s. That top value of participation places monumental stress on exhibitors to make vital gross sales and recoup their expenditures, a system that has change into significantly onerous amid the slowdown within the artwork market over the previous two years.
Whereas there was hypothesis within the commerce about consolidation amongst artwork gala’s—Endeavor, the leisure conglomerate that owns Frieze, introduced final yr that it was exploring the attainable sale of the artwork honest and media firm—this yr’s Frieze Week in Los Angeles is shaping as much as be one of many greatest. Past the principle honest and three satellite tv for pc gala’s—the Felix Artwork Truthful, the Spring Break Artwork Present and now Santa Monica Put up Workplace—the long-running LA Artwork Present will as soon as once more coincide with Frieze this yr.
