The Top Los Angeles Exhibitions to Discover During Frieze Week

Frieze Week in Los Angeles has a way of sharpening the senses. Studded throughout the city, exhibitions gather momentum—some expansive and archival, others intimate and newly restless. Together, they trace a portrait of artists reckoning with history, image-making, desire, and the charged atmospheres of now. These shows hum alongside one another, offering moments of stillness, friction, and surprise. Below, a guide to what’s worth stepping into while the city is wide awake.

“Destiny Is a Rose: The Eileen Harris Norton Collection”

Hauser & Wirth

Downtown Los Angeles

Drawing from more than fifty years of collecting, “Destiny Is a Rose” presents over eighty works from Eileen Harris Norton’s collection, unfolding across the gallery as a series of thematic and chronological chapters. The exhibition brings together paintings, sculptures, photographs, and works on paper by artists including Kerry James Marshall, Mark Bradford, Lorraine O’Grady, David Hammons, Lorna Simpson, and Alma Thomas. The presentation traces relationships—between artists, ideas, and moments in time—revealing how Harris Norton’s commitments to artists of color, women artists, and California-based practices have shaped the collection. Early Los Angeles works give way to global perspectives, while recurring attention to race, gender, and abstraction anchors the show. Throughout, collecting radiates as an active practice of cultivation, marked by continuity, care, and perpetual dialogue.

What we love: The show’s beguiling title, “Destiny Is a Rose,” is drawn from visionary Kerry James Marshall’s 1990 painting. “I collected artists making the art of our time,” said Eileen Harris Norton. “They weren’t investments; they were relationships—pieces to live with and be changed by.”

“Destiny Is a Rose” at Hauser & Wirth
February 24 – August 16, 2026

Ken Gun Min: “Strange Days of a Quiet Sun”

Nazarian / Curcio

Hollywood

Ken Gun Min’s latest paintings immerse viewers in profoundly layered environments where ornament, symbolism, and material intersect. Cascading across richly colored canvases embellished with embroidery, beading, and hand-applied elements, Min conducts encounters between figures, animals, and landscapes imbued with historical and emotional suspense. The exhibition centers on a sweeping, double-sided folding screen inspired by East Asian byōbu and byeongpung traditions, presenting a rainbow-hued scene on one side and a minimalistic, nearly monochrome tree on the other. From moment to moment, motifs gathered from European hunting imagery, Korean folklore, and political history intersect, while recurring animal figures—notably the tiger—appear as sites of fortitude and metamorphosis. Botanical realms function as connective tissue, holding yearning, anguish, and remembrance within intentional suspension.

What we love: The way in which Min turns an astronomical phenomenon into an emotional climate, transforming a darkened sun—heavy with onyx and lace—into a poignant symbol of collective grief that still manages to glow.

Ken Gun Min at Nazarian / Curcio
February 21 – March 28, 2026

Sayre Gomez: “Precious Moments”

David Kordansky Gallery

Mid-Wilshire

Winding through all three gallery spaces, “Precious Moments” unites new paintings, sculptures, and videos that reflect Sayre Gomez’s constant dialogue with the visual language of Los Angeles. Sweeping, photorealistic paintings reveal composite urban scenes built from found imagery, cell phone photographs, and stock images, rendered through techniques borrowed from sign painting, set design, and digital manipulation. Sculptural works translate familiar architectural forms—utility poles, playground structures, unfinished developments—into deftly crafted objects that invite close inspection. A central sculptural installation recreates the stalled Oceanwide Plaza towers, illuminating tiers of speculation, abandonment, and informal artistic intervention. Within the show, Gomez considers how environments shaped by capitalism, infrastructure, and media are encountered on an intimate scale, particularly through the lens of family and childhood.

What we love: In “Precious Moments,” miniaturization becomes a tool for attention rather than control.

Sayre Gomez at David Kordansky Gallery
January 16 – March 1, 2026

“Sarah Sze: Feel Free”

Gagosian

Beverly Hills

Sarah Sze’s inaugural Los Angeles gallery exhibition fuses two enveloping video installations as well as a fresh series of large-scale paintings that treat collage as multidimensional expression. Planted across unified galleries, the exhibition plays out beautifully through environments influenced by light, projection, and vacillating surfaces. In Sleepers and Once in a Lifetime, moving images travel across suspended forms and architectural structures, splintering and reappearing as light meets shadow and reflection. The accompanying paintings meld oil, acrylic, photographic segments, and digital imagery, extending Sze’s investigation into how images circulate between memory, perception, and material form. The works explore how contemporary experience is molded by constant visual flux, with meaning emerging through repetition, interruption, and return.

What we love: The sense of time stretching and folding as images shimmer through space.

Sarah Sze at Gagosian
January 29 – February 28, 2026

David Salle: “My Frankenstein”

Sprüth Magers

Miracle Mile

David Salle’s new paintings extend his long-standing exploration of juxtaposition, bringing together disparate image sources within dynamic, precisely calibrated compositions. Figures, gestures, and fragments appear in counterpoint, arranged with a musical sensibility that emphasizes rhythm and resonance over linear narrative. The works balance expanses of abstraction with recognizable imagery, disrupting habitual associations and inviting viewers to reconsider how meaning is constructed. Deeply colored and harmonious, the paintings draw energy from contrast—between surface and depth, immediacy and reflection—while maintaining a refined attention to structure. Salle’s latest creations continue to probe painting’s capacity to hold complexity, ambiguity, and emotional charge in a single frame.

What we love: In “My Frankenstein,” visual dissonance becomes a source of spectacular momentum.

David Salle at Sprüth Magers
February 24–April 18, 2026

Luc Tuymans: “The Fruit Basket”

David Zwirner

Mid-City

Luc Tuymans’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles raises the curtain on a group of new paintings that probe mediation, fragmentation, and the instability of contemporary images. Anchored by the monumental multipart work The Fruit Basket, the exhibition brings together canvases derived from smartphone photographs, documentary stills, and sculptural models. Several works explore light emitted from screens, while others depict figures and objects that feel both familiar and estranged. The perceptive Tuymans employs muted palettes, thin paint application, and intentional framing to highlight distance and uncertainty. The mesmeric paintings resist singular interpretation, instead making way for questions of memory, representation, and how images carry meaning in a digital universe. 

What we love: The skillful artist creates powerful tension by way of scale paired with restraint.

Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner
February 24 – April 4, 2026

Takashi Murakami: “Hark Back to Ukiyo-e: Tracing Superflat to Japonisme’s Genesis”

Perrotin

Mid-City

Takashi Murakami presents a dazzling suite of new paintings that follow the visual lineage from Edo-period ukiyo-e prints to Impressionism and contemporary Superflat aesthetics. The exhibition embraces large-scale reinterpretations of bijinga works by Kitagawa Utamaro and Torii Kiyonaga, alongside paintings that examine Claude Monet’s engagement with Japanese prints. Murakami’s layered acrylic surfaces—built through silkscreen techniques and polished to a luminous finish—translate historical compositions into his distinct visual language. Later works shift these connections into contemporary Japanese culture, incorporating motifs from manga, anime, and Murakami’s own legendary flower imagery. Through acts of copying and transformation, the exhibition frames art history as a mesmerizing, ever-evolving exchange.

What we love: The extraordinary ways in which intense historical study becomes a catalyst for visual reinvention.

Takashi Murakami at Perrotin
February 14 – March 14, 2026