11 Must-See Los Angeles Exhibitions for Frieze Week

With Frieze Week set to take over Los Angeles, galleries across the city Los Angeles exhibitions come into sharp focus. Prepare to move across neighborhoods and into unassuming buildings in search of galleries presenting a dynamic range of artists. From local voices to international and transient practitioners, these exhibitions probe questions of identity, spirituality, and nature.

Across generational lines, the works on view remind us that certain questions are never fully resolved. Instead, they are revisited and reframed by each new generation, articulated on their own terms. The result is a rare opportunity to encounter artwork spanning materials, mediums, and sensibilities, often inside spaces that feel deliberately disconnected from one another. This guide offers a starting point for those ready to step into the layered, ever-evolving ecosystem that defines Los Angeles during Frieze Week.

Wolfgang Tillmans: Keep Movin’

Regen Projects

Hollywood

In this Los Angeles exhibition, German artist Wolfgang Tillmans returns to Regen Projects for his ninth solo exhibition with the gallery, presenting new photographs, videos, sculptural installations, and a new iteration of Truth Study Center. The exhibition traces how Tillmans’ practice continues to evolve between lived reality and the sociopolitical, sensual, and spiritual tensions that shape it. His images, at once intimate and systemic, oscillate between abstraction and documentation, collapsing the distance between personal perception and collective discourse.

First initiated in 2005, Truth Study Center reappears as a living archive—tables layered with texts, clippings, found imagery, and the artist’s own works. Here, Tillmans exposes the fragile ecosystem of information and misinformation that structures contemporary understanding, inviting viewers to consider how truth is assembled, circulated, and destabilized.

What we love: Two new video works, which first premiered at the Centre Pompidou in summer 2025, reveal Tillmans’ deepening engagement with sound. In Travelling Camera (2025), a drone-like flight across a dense urban landscape unfolds through the hidden infrastructure of a 4K monitor—technology layered with organic and cultural fragments, forming a quiet meditation on matter, media, and time.

Wolfgang Tillmans at Regen Projects
January 15-March 1, 2026

Paulo Nimer Pjota: No Boca do Sol II

Francois Ghebaly

Downtown L.A.

One of Los Angeles’s most mythic exhibitions this season unfolds at François Ghebaly, where Paulo Nimer Pjota presents twelve new paintings staged against a monumental red wall drawing that envelops the gallery. The immersive installation extends the dream logic of his canvases into architectural space, dissolving the boundary between image and environment.

Red dominates the exhibition—symbolizing fire, rebirth, and cyclical renewal—while water flows throughout as both motif and metaphor. In Pjota’s visual language, water becomes a conduit between founding mythologies and navigation, a site of discovery where histories surface and dissolve. Blue emerges as its counterpoint, evoking the spiritual and the divine, where the terrestrial brushes against the cosmic. Medieval maritime maps, once marked with sea monsters at the edge of the known world, echo through the works, reinforcing themes of exploration and belief. Spirituality, long rooted in Pjota’s practice through ritual and meditation, anchors the exhibition’s atmosphere.

What we love: In Vitória-régia (2025), a red lake recalling the myth of El Dorado shimmers beneath a reticulated ceramic vessel brimming with chrysanthemums and butterflies. Perched on a lily pad and framed by red cacti, the floral arrangement becomes the composition’s source of light—less decorative than devotional, radiating a quiet intensity that anchors the painting’s mythic atmosphere.

Paulo Nimer Pjota at Francois Ghebaly
February 21-March 28, 2026

Leonard Baby: Resting Babyface

Half Gallery

Villa Carlotta, Franklin Village

Now based in New York, California artist Leonard Baby presents a series of new works at Villa Carlotta in Los Angeles with Half Gallery. Balancing humor and sincerity, the artist transforms autobiographical struggle into quietly resonant scenes that explore vulnerability, memory, and the complexity of lived experience.

Installed within the historic residence, the paintings take on added poignancy. The Villa’s transient history contrasts with the emotional weight of the works, creating a space that resists easy closure. Instead, the exhibition leans into ambiguity, affirming the beauty of the unresolved human condition. A highlight, Group Therapy, depicts a figure stretched across a couch as a therapist listens nearby, while ancestral presences hover above with grimacing, watchful expressions. The scene conveys the act of unpacking intergenerational trauma, where confession and inheritance converge.

What we love: In this Los Angeles exhibition, bedrooms and therapists’ offices emerge as intimate stages, mapping a familiar emotional terrain where confrontation and reflection unfold with quiet candor.

Leonard Baby at Half Gallery
February 25th-March 10th, 2026

Tonia Nneji: Saints of Good Evening Street

Rele Gallery

Melrose Hill

Tonia Nneji’s Los Angeles exhibition marks her first solo show in five years, signaling a new chapter in her practice. The work sharpens and clarifies her visual language, presenting women who exist fully on their own terms, embodying freedom without apology. Across layered compositions, Nneji confronts inherited notions of virtue and womanhood, questioning who defines morality and who is burdened by it.

Known for her bold command of color, she punctuates deep greens, inky blacks, and saturated blues with sudden chromatic intensity. Her lived experiences surface through these dense, textured fields, where cultures of suppression become central themes. Materially, the paintings pulse with movement: long, swirling outlines and rhythmic strokes animate each figure, giving the surfaces a charged, almost kinetic presence.

What we love: The exhibition interrogates what is labeled “immoral” when women claim joy, autonomy, and ease. Few faces are fully rendered, allowing viewers to see themselves within the figures—expanding the conversation around identity, freedom, and the moral frameworks still imposed on female expression.

Tonia Nneji at Rele Gallery
February 21-March 21, 2026

Tacita Dean: Trial of the Finger

Marian Goodman Gallery

Highland Corridor

At Marian Goodman Gallery’s Los Angeles outpost, Tacita Dean presents a sweeping installation of new works that take over the space. The exhibition includes two 35mm film installations and a new 16mm film, Sidney Felsen Decorates an Envelope (2026), accompanied by chalk and slate drawings, Polaroid works, and works on glass. Together, the presentation expands Dean’s exploration of time, fragility, and material transformation.

The title references a critique by English writer Dr. Samuel Johnson on 17th-century metaphysical poets. This exhibition also marks Dean’s turn toward Polaroids. Confronted with a high exposure failure rate, she began painting directly onto the images instead of discarding them. The camera’s double-exposure function led her to experiment with broken Roman fingers, feet, and other artifacts in her Berlin studio. The act of never fully seeing or controlling the image’s alchemy aligns closely with Dean’s process-driven practice.

What we love: Sidney Felsen Decorates an Envelope honors the late Los Angeles printmaking pioneer Sidney Felsen. The 14-minute 16mm film serves as a quiet tribute to a foundational figure in the city’s art history.

Tacita Dean at Marian Goodman Gallery
February 21-April 25, 2026

Tarini Sethi: Speaking With the Same Tongue

Rajiv Menon Contemporary

Hollywood

In her Los Angeles exhibition, Delhi-based artist Tarini Sethi centers the body as a site of radical possibility. Drawing from India’s art historical canon—particularly sacred iconography and multi-limbed deities—she constructs a universe that feels both ancestral and speculative. The result is a distinctly Indofuturist terrain where eroticism and spirituality coexist, intertwined within each charged composition.

Grounded in the aesthetic traditions of the subcontinent, Sethi’s work probes the intersections of power, pleasure, the grotesque, and the sacred. Across works on paper, she employs precise, deliberate mark-making to evoke bodily form and sensation. By pushing against established pictorial conventions, she generates a new sensory language—one in which bodies multiply, unfold, and resist containment. The figure becomes elastic and expansive, capable of transformation beyond inherited frameworks.

What we love: The way Sethi collapses sacred symbolism and psychosexual intensity, creating compositions where the body is neither moralized nor restrained, but liberated into mythic, sensorial possibility.

Tarini Sethi at Rajiv Menon Contemporary
February 25–April 4, 2026

Sahana Ramakrishnan: Weird Fishes

Rajiv Menon Contemporary

Hollywood

Following recent travels to the Arctic Circle, Sahana Ramakrishna’s Los Angeles exhibition presents new paintings and sculptures that bridge worlds—myth and fieldwork, folklore and lived encounter. Weaving observation with imagination, she draws from her time in polar Norway, where she listened through hydrophones beneath glacial ice to the distant signals of belugas, seals, and narwhals. The experience—encountering a dimension she can never physically inhabit—anchors the exhibition’s atmosphere.

Rather than rendering the Arctic as barren or austere, Ramakrishna paints it as an enigmatic underworld, saturated with color and governed by alternate laws. In Selkie (2026), a human soul coils within an Arctic seal in a shapeshifting psychic event, echoing Northern folklore in which selkies seduce and lure humans toward peril. In The Death of Venus (2026), Botticelli’s sea-born goddess is reimagined within the ocean’s food chain, devoured by fish—love recast within ecological reality.

What we love: The centerpiece, The Magic Flower (2026), takes the form of a kavad, an illustrated wooden storytelling box whose narrative unfolds as its doors open. Inside, a tale of love and crossing ignites passion before catastrophe. The kavad structure privileges depth over linear progression, inviting viewers to move through the story rather than simply witness it.

Sahana Ramakrishnan at Rajiv Menon Contemporary
February 25–April 4, 2026

Zoe Walsh: Outside

Vielmetter Los Angeles

Downtown L.A.

Los Angeles–based artist Zoe Walsh’s “Outsides” comprises four new paintings that explore queer representation within charged ecologies, where foreground and background, exteriority and interiority, dissolve into one another. Contemporary figures—friends or the artist—appear within transient, unfixed landscapes, alongside quotes from Pat Rocco, the queer photographer and activist active in Los Angeles in the 1960s and ’70s. This cross-generational dialogue grounds the work in lineage while keeping it in motion.

Walsh’s process begins with digital renderings before moving through hand-stenciling, printmaking, and painting. The layered approach merges multiple material techniques while remaining rooted in painting itself. Saturated purples, blues, magentas, and greens flood the canvases, testing the elasticity of acrylic and pushing form toward fluidity. Through stenciling and screen techniques, surfaces blend and figures partially dissolve. Even when forms appear fixed, slippages emerge—details shimmer in and out of focus. It is within this in-between space that subjectivity expands and queer presence resists containment.

What we love: The way Walsh constructs luminous, layered environments where identity feels porous rather than fixed—honoring queer history while allowing space for ambiguity, transformation, and self-definition.

Zoe Walsh at Vielmetter
February 14-March 28, 2026

Rodney McMillian: Some lives in the sunshine

Vielmetter Los Angeles

Downtown L.A.

This solo exhibition by Rodney McMillian spans painting, video, sculpture, and installation, examining the intersections of race, class, and power in both historical and contemporary American life. At its core, the presentation navigates the lasting effects of redlining and predatory lending, tracing how these policies shaped the nation’s racially inflected distribution of wealth and continue to reverberate today.

McMillian’s use of nontraditional, utilitarian materials—house paint, chicken wire, blankets, and bed sheets—anchors the work in the language of domestic space. Thrifted and post-consumer objects, often bearing price tags and visible stains, become charged with memory and socioeconomic residue. Repurposed piggy banks and altered furniture emerge as sculptural interventions, transforming everyday symbols of aspiration and stability into reflections on fragility and access.

In his landscapes, the aftermath of structural inequity lingers. A double rainbow rendered through chicken wire suggests both hope and entrapment, beauty filtered through systemic constraint.

What we love: This Los Angeles exhibition speaks directly to the lived realities of the people who make up this country, grounding its critique in materials and narratives drawn from everyday American life.

Rodney McMillian at Vielmetter
January 10-February 28, 2026

Raffi Kalenderian: Spotlight

Vielmetter Los Angeles

Downtown L.A.

Raffi Kalenderian’s presentation at Vielmetter Los Angeles is a focused departure from the sprawling group energy often associated with the city. Instead, the exhibition spotlights two new and intimately related paintings. Landscape III (Huntington Gardens) renders the cycads of the Huntington Botanical Gardens in vivid shards of blue, black, and white. The leaves whirl and flicker across the canvas, while thick impasto builds texture along their knotted trunks, giving the foliage a tactile, almost sculptural presence.

Its counterpart, Ariana, stages a portrait within a landscape. A woman in a brilliant pink dress sits in the artist’s studio before a black-and-white rendering of Landscape III. The foreshortened perspective exposes floor and walls in restrained greys, heightening the saturation of her gown. Pink echoes subtly in the shadows and blushes faintly within the landscape behind her, complicating the formal relationship. A splattered studio floor disrupts compositional rhythm, introducing a charged, almost chaotic counterpoint.

What we love: Kalenderian’s portrait-driven practice condenses into this tight dialogue between figure and ground—color-saturated, patterned, and intimate, yet quietly expansive in its painterly ambition.

Raffi Kalenderian at Vielmetter

February 14-March 28, 2026

Hayv Kahraman: Spotlight

Vielmetter Los Angeles

Downtown L.A.

Hayv Kahraman’s third solo Los Angeles exhibition is also her first since being displaced by the 2025 Eaton Fire in Altadena. This new body of work responds to rupture—asking what remains, and what rituals endure, when the world collapses. Drawing from her experience of the fire and its aftermath, Kahraman explores loss, migration, and the fragile architecture of belonging.

Rendered in a dreamlike register, the paintings are charged with divination, ritual, and quiet magic. Handmade flax surfaces and marbling techniques lend the works a tactile, almost ceremonial materiality. Female figures move through the compositions in deliberate, symbolic acts—sewing strands of tears, whirling and swirling their long hair. At times they appear as talismans, recurring presences across multiple canvases, embodying resilience and continuity.

What we love: The layered references to Sufism, rooted in Kahraman’s maternal lineage. Subtle invocations of Sufi mysticism and Arabic inscriptions ripple across the marbled surfaces, embedding the work with spiritual depth and ancestral memory.

Hayv Kahraman at Vielmetter
February 7-March 21, 2026