Santa Monica Put up Workplace, a brand new satellite tv for pc truthful, 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 facet of town, places it a good 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 truthful will run three days, 20-22 February, with an inaugural lineup of twenty-two galleries and 4 undertaking areas. They embody 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, slightly than the normal fair-stand format. Sprüth Magers is displaying works by the late artist Kaari Upson; Theta will carry works by the Footage Era 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 truthful’s founder and primarily based his strategy on a boutique expo he beforehand organised in Paris to coincide with Artwork Basel’s truthful there, Place des Vosges. “The truthful panorama has gotten actually difficult,” Sharp informed Artnews. “The price construction [of larger fairs] is considerably prohibitive and I wished to create a substitute for 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 prime value of participation places huge strain on exhibitors to make vital gross sales and recoup their expenditures, a system that has turn into notably 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 truthful and media firm—this yr’s Frieze Week in Los Angeles is shaping as much as be one of many greatest. Past the principle truthful and three satellite tv for pc gala’s—the Felix Artwork Honest, 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.
