As Frieze Art Week takes place, Los Angeles shifts into an art-focused mindset, where market momentum meets curatorial rigor. The city does so with complexity. Many artists are still feeling the effects of the Eaton fires, navigating recovery while continuing to produce urgent work. At the same time, a new generation of pandemic-era artists is spreading its wings, proving that creativity never stalled, only adapted. Others push more directly against entrenched systems, using the exhibition space as a site of resistance and recalibration. This short guide from Whitewall will help you find the Los Angeles exhibition that piques your interest.
Veronica Fernandez: Prey
Anat Ebgi
Wilshire
Veronica Fernandez, “Closer to Power,” 2026. Oil on panel. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York. Photo by Mason Kuehler.
“Prey” at Anat Ebgi marks Veronica Fernandez’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, presenting paintings and sculptures rooted in lived experience. Semi-autobiographical in tone, the works unfold through mood and memory. Rather than pursuing strict realism, Fernandez leans into a dreamlike painterly language, mirroring how the past surfaces when filtered through subconscious recall.
Children and adolescents anchor the compositions. They are not idealized innocents but playful, self-possessed figures occupying crowded scenes alongside friends, siblings, or caretakers. These accompanying presences often appear doubled or shadow-like at the periphery. Interiors and exteriors blur, and subtle pressures of proximity shape the emotional tenor of each work.
A palette of umber, ochre, sienna, and magenta deepens the atmosphere, while rapid, gestural application builds textured surfaces that echo the layered nature of memory. The title refers to the exposed state in which children navigate the world—shaped by inherited roles and unseen systems —that Fernandez seeks to reveal.
What we love: Echoes of the Ashcan School surface in her focus on modern life and social reality. Informed by early experiences of housing instability while raised by a single father, the work holds vulnerability and resilience in careful balance.
Veronica Fernandez at Anat Ebgi
February 21-April 4, 2026
Milton Avery: The Figure
Karma
West Hollywood
Milton Avery, “Young Musician,” 1945. Oil on canvas. © 2025 The Milton Avery Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist and Karma.
Milton Avery’s Los Angeles exhibition marks the first large-scale survey devoted to his work, spanning paintings from the 1920s—when he moved to New York—through 1964. His practice unfolded across a century of stylistic shifts, from American Impressionism and the Ashcan School to Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting. While attentive to these movements, Avery absorbed what resonated and remained grounded in the immediacy of what was before him.
Guided by his belief in “the purity and essence of the idea—expressed in its simplest form,” Avery distilled color, line, and light with notable restraint, often limiting his palette to preserve clarity. Over time, his style evolved from academic conservatism to softened, stylized forms. After a heart attack later in life, he revisited familiar subjects with restraint.
His figure drawings and portraits reveal a perceptive observer of the human condition. His wife recalled how he would sketch guests at home while they talked, capturing them unposed and at ease. That intimacy permeates the canvases: figures feel absorbed rather than self-conscious, held in moments of quiet presence.
What we love: The steady humanity in Avery’s practice—deeply informed by devotion to his wife and daughter—renders love as quiet observation rather than grand gesture.
Milton Avery at Karma
February 21-March 28, 2026
Alma Berrow
Megan Mulrooney Gallery
West Hollywood
Alma Berrow Portrait. Courtesy of the artist and Megan Mulrooney Gallery.
Alma Berrow, Six Ceramic Devil Eggs on a Plate with Lettuce. Ceramic. Courtesy of the artist and Megan Mulrooney Gallery.
Known for championing mid-career artists, Megan Mulrooney Gallery presents British ceramicist Alma Berrow’s first solo U.S. exhibition in Los Angeles, a decadent tablescape that unsettles domestic fantasy. Drawing from her grandmother’s Cordon Bleu magazines and the excess of 1970s home entertaining, Berrow stages dinnerware overtaken by ants, slugs, cigarette butts, and creeping signs of decay.
A former pastry chef who turned to ceramics during the pandemic, learning from her mother in the process, Berrow uses food as both lure and critique. Ornate confections and sumptuous settings initially seduce the viewer, only to reveal a darker meditation on consumption, waste, and the illusion of idealized domesticity. The installation collapses nostalgia into rot, exposing the fragility beneath performative abundance.
What we love: The full-circle intimacy of the practice—an artist returning to learn from her mother—adds emotional depth to a body of work that quietly dismantles inherited domestic myths.
Alma Berrow at Megan Mulrooney Gallery
February 24-March 28, 2026
Kate Zimmerman Turpin: The Light the Ground Gives
Megan Mulrooney Gallery
West Hollywood
Kate Zimmerman Turpin Portrait. Courtesy of the artist and Megan Mulrooney Gallery.
Texas-based artist Kate Zimmerman Turpin makes her first gallery appearance with a debut that marks both a commercial introduction and a shift in context. Working outside the traditional art-world mold, Turpin did not attend art school, pursue an MFA, or move through the usual gallery pipeline. Instead, she began making and sharing work during the pandemic, building an engaged audience online from her home in rural Texas.
Now in her mid-30s and a mother of two, Turpin forged her path independently before entering the gallery sphere. Installed across the gallery’s two spaces, a monumental 25-foot-long painting unfolds as the exhibition’s anchor, announcing her arrival with scale and confidence. The gesture feels both intimate and expansive, rooted in lived experience yet newly situated within a formal exhibition framework.
What we love: Turpin represents a generation of artists who emerged during the pandemic and are now entering galleries with fully formed voices. Her trajectory suggests that some practices were simply waiting—quietly developing—until the right moment to surface.
Kate Zimmerman Turpin at Megan Mulrooney Gallery
February 24-March 28, 2026
Leiko Ikemura: Riding Horizon
Lisson Gallery
Hollywood
Leiko Ikemura, Installation View of “Riding Horizon.” Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery.
This marks Leiko Ikemura’s first Los Angeles exhibition, bringing together works produced over the past decade that explore the relationship between the female body and the natural world—what she describes as “the place where two worlds come together.” That in-between space is made tangible through a metallic mesh wave that cuts through the gallery, functioning as both sculptural line and architectural intervention, designed in collaboration with her partner Philipp von Matt.
A hybrid figure—a girl whose head is replaced by a brace of birds—greets visitors outside. Inside, a reclining figure recurs across bronze sculptures and large-scale tempera paintings on jute, where the forms become softer and less defined. Since the 1990s, Ikemura’s adolescent protagonists have inhabited indeterminate landscapes anchored by a distant horizon. Her own life journey—from childhood in Japan to studies in Franco-era Spain, work in Switzerland, and eventual settlement in post-Wall Germany—inflects the work with a sense of displacement and searching. Across painting and sculpture, Ikemura conjures a dreamlike terrain where humans and nature exist in fragile, reflective coexistence.
What we love: The quiet persistence of her adolescent figures—neither child nor fully adult—who hover in states of becoming. Their ambiguity, set against shifting horizons and hybrid forms, makes the exhibition feel suspended between vulnerability and transformation.
Leiko Ikemura at Lisson Gallery
February 24-March 28, 2026
Erin Wright: Fever Dream
albertz benda / Friedman Benda
West Hollywood
Erin Wright, Installation View of “Fever Dream,” February 24 – March 28, 2026. albertz benda, Los Angeles. Photo by Evan Walsh.
Erin Wright is known for her classical still lifes and sculptures, rendered with such even, delicate brushwork that her paintings can appear almost digitally produced. In her Los Angeles exhibition, she captures intimate relationships between objects and absent figures, constructing compositions that subtly probe indifference, presentation, and the superficial codes of contemporary life.
Her arrangements resist hierarchy—objects sit in nonchalant proximity, seemingly arbitrary to their surroundings and context. The gallery itself becomes a playground of painting, design, and architecture. Wright replicates doorknobs, windows, and fireplaces, creating a visual environment that mirrors the building. In works like French Door, an acrylic on canvas painting, a closed glass door reveals palm trees and foliage beyond, visible through softly diffused light. A small series of door and window paintings employs trompe l’oeil effects so convincing that the boundary between painted illusion and actual architecture feels uncannily thin.
What we love: Wright extends duplication beyond the canvas, incorporating objects by Friedman Benda into the installation, collapsing art and design into a single, carefully orchestrated environment.
Erin Wright at albertz benda / Friedman Benda
February 24-March 28, 2026
Mira Dancy: Mourning’s Orbit
Night Gallery
Arts District
Mira Dancy, “No Crease or Fold Untouched (Janes Village),” 2026. Oil and acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery.
“Mourning’s Orbit” marks both a homecoming and a departure for Mira Dancy. Based on photographs taken around her home in Altadena after the Eaton Fire reshaped the community, the exhibition reflects a profound shift in her practice. Long known for goddess-like figures that have defined her acrylic paintings for the past fifteen years, Dancy turns here toward landscape, toward what remains.
Yet her luminous, otherworldly color persists, unifying past and present bodies of work. Charred and decaying trees stand alongside signs of renewal across scorched hillsides. A restrained chaparral palette—suns, clouds, muted skies—holds grief and beauty in the same frame. Intimate strokes delineate and soften space, forming garden-like groves that feel both Edenic and unsettled, suspended between hope and loss. Dancy’s moral stance remains central: painting becomes an act of witness and response. The title suggests mourning not as a fixed state, but as a cyclical passage—an orbit one moves through, returning and recalibrating over time.
What we love: The quiet refusal of spectacle. Instead of centering devastation, Dancy focuses on subtle transformation—allowing grief, resilience, and renewal to coexist within the same horizon.
Mira Dancy at Night Gallery
February 24-April 4, 2026
Christine Tien Wang and Rachel Youn: Factory Doomscroll
Night Gallery
Arts District
Christine Tien Wang, “Tiananmen after Sadayuki Mikami,” 2025. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery.
Rachel Youn, “CLEANSE (I’ll do it myself),” 2024. Steel, aluminum, AC motor, hardware, nylon, UHMQ, “escape photo real ocean” PEVA shower curtains. Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery.
This two-person Los Angeles exhibition brings together Christine Tien Wang and Rachel Youn—marking Wang’s decade-long relationship with the gallery and Youn’s second major exhibition. Both artists fixate on the exhaustive gestures of contemporary life, movements that promise satisfaction yet often lead nowhere.
Youn’s sculptures animate the artifacts of self-care culture, exposing the mechanical infrastructure behind objects meant to soothe and optimize. Wang, by contrast, paints hyperreal internet memes, elevating fleeting digital content into sustained contemplation. In both practices, objects of instant gratification are slowed and contained, forcing viewers to confront what we consume, and just as quickly discard. Youn reveals the systems; Wang exposes the labor embedded in replication. Together, their works feel like a preservation archive of absurd rituals designed to calm, entertain, and distract. Across the exhibition, humor meets unease as cultural debris edges toward obsolescence.
What we love: The collaboration sharpens our awareness of physical and digital decay in real time. Even when the references feel dated, the satire lands—quietly confronting the rhythms of late-stage capitalism with precision and wit.
Christine Tien Wang and Rachel Youn at Night Gallery
February 24-April 4, 2026
Cayetano Ferrer: Object Prosthetics
Commonwealth & Council
West Lake
Cayetano Ferrer, Installation View of “Object Prosthetics,” 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council.
Cayetano Ferrer’s exhibition draws from the remnants of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s original campus, demolished in 2020. Salvaging tiles, concrete slabs, and column fragments, the artist recontextualizes architectural debris in “Object Prosthetics,” his second solo exhibition with the gallery. The works are built upon a modular system of aluminum armatures fitted with linear motion sliders. Rubble rests within these supports, held in place by rods and pins, while resin components mediate between object and structure.
The armatures assert themselves boldly, adopting and subtly subverting the visual language of institutional display. Lattice-like geometries shift between opacity and translucence, and fragments are positioned according to their original orientation. Adjustable track posts allow the configuration to remain dynamic rather than fixed, transforming presentation into an active, evolving system. Each fragment carries the aura of the former building, suspended between presence and absence.
What we love: Ferrer’s ability to turn institutional ruin into a living framework—where memory is not static, but mechanically reoriented—invites viewers to reconsider how architecture, history, and value are preserved and performed.
Cayetano Ferrer at Commonwealth & Council
January 31-March 14, 2026
Leslie Martinez: Harbinger
Commonwealth & Council
West Lake
Leslie Martinez, “Tone and Temperament,” 2026. Canvas scraps, used terrycloth studio rags, used studio clothing, heavy duty sewing threads, paper fragments, modeling paste, plaster cloth, plywood scraps, shredded paper, aluminum roof flashing, found moon style hubcaps, rivets, nylon mesh, dowel rods, rolled paper, vinyl, and acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth & Council.
This marks Leslie Martinez’s second solo Los Angeles exhibition with the gallery. Known for creating transitional shifts within her work, Martinez continues her formal experimentation here, introducing new techniques that expand her language of abstraction. Through layered color, reconstruction, and assertive mark-making, she explores how abstraction can register the tensions of living under systemic surveillance and control. The surfaces feel unsettled and in flux, as if the paintings themselves are negotiating pressure.
Color behaves unpredictably, shifting with angle and illumination. Edges harden or dissolve depending on proximity, directing and destabilizing the viewer’s visual experience at once. The result signals a subtle but ominous evolution in her practice, where material and atmosphere carry equal weight.
What we love: Martinez grew up in South Texas along the U.S.–Mexico border, an environment where surveillance and psychological tension were normalized parts of daily life. While the work is not autobiographical, that lived awareness gives it charge. Rather than turning inward, Martinez structures a sensory experience that invites viewers to confront the broader conditions shaping contemporary life.
Leslie Martinez at Commonwealth & Council
January 31-March 14, 2026
Pippa Venus Garner: Secret Asian Man Presents: Knock, knock! (Posthumorous)
Commonwealth & Council
West Lake
Pippa Venus Garner, Installation View of (Secret Asian Man Presents: Knock, knock! (Posthumorous),” 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council.
This exhibition marks the first solo presentation of the artist, organized posthumously by Pippa Garner’s estate. Drawing from the Pippa Garner archive, the show foregrounds a legacy defined by humor, provocation, and unrelenting desire. Garner approached eroticism and sensuality as part of a life cycle—from gestation to birth—treating the body as both medium and message.
On view is a selection of Garner’s irreverent props and propositions, including a cocky doorknocker, Pay Per View panties, a Sex-Organ, a Sex Change Booth, and her own formulation of Newton’s Law: If you knock me up, I’ll knock you down. Her T&A (tits & ass implants), collaged shirts and g-strings, along with drawings, texts, bills, and letters, are presented not as relics, but as artifacts of a practice that insisted on its own survival.
What we love: The exhibition embraces humor without softening its edge. Even in a posthumous context, Garner’s wit remains intact, proving that legacy and levity are not mutually exclusive.
Pippa Garner at Commonwealth & Council
January 31-March 14, 2026
