Frieze Los Angeles 2026 | Booth B5
Preview (Invitation only): February 26–27, 2026
Public Days: February 28–March 1, 2026
Santa Monica Airport, 3233 Donald Douglas Loop S, California
Alexander Gray Associates presents works by Kamrooz Aram, Ricardo Brey, Bethany Collins, Melvin Edwards, Jennie C. Jones, Kang Seung Lee, Donald Moffett, Carrie Moyer, Betty Parsons, Joan Semmel, and Ruby Sky Stiler. Across painting, sculpture, and works on paper, these artists examine how images and materials shape experience, memory, and belief. Moving between figuration and abstraction, they consider how meaning is inherited, disrupted, and remade.
Joan Semmel's paintings treat the body as lived experience rather than objectified image, collapsing the distance between subject, painter, and viewer. For more than five decades, her work has asserted self-representation as both feminist proposition and painterly method. Ruby Sky Stiler's composite figures in Cropped Bather with Seated Artist (2025) similarly reclaim the authority of the female body, repositioning women from passive subjects to empowered makers.
If the body becomes a site where meaning is constructed and contested, material itself operates as a parallel register of force and memory. Melvin Edwards's welded steel sculptures and works on paper distill compression, tension, and release into physical form. This presentation marks the debut of rare 1960s works, including Inside and Out (1963–64), a Lynch Fragment created in Los Angeles more than sixty years ago. Donald Moffett's hybrid objects extend Edwards’s material inquiry. Works like Lot 040225 (nature cult, mutation) (2025) treat engineered surfaces as sites of psychological and political charge, where the industrial meets the organic.
These investigations into what materials hold—physically, historically, emotionally—trace back to Betty Parsons's mid-century abstractions, including Looking Back (1957), which recall a foundational moment when risk and improvisation opened new possibilities for American painting. Carrie Moyer extends this legacy, reclaiming ornament, sensuality, and excess as critical strategies. Where Parsons worked within the constraints of her era, Moyer expands abstraction into contemporary feminist vocabularies. Her painting So Many Moons Ago (2025) generates new experiential modes through innovative approaches to color, texture, and surface.
If Moyer reclaims ornament within contemporary practice, Kamrooz Aram’s San Cosimato (2025) reveals it as foundational to abstraction itself, demonstrating how ornamental traditions share the same conceptual rigor as modernist painting. Jennie C. Jones locates another form of cultural knowledge within abstraction. Deep Red Tone with Flourish (2026) uses architectural felt and acrylic to translate musical architecture into visual form. Across these practices, abstraction becomes a carrier of cultural memory and historical specificity, rather than merely a form of formal experimentation.
Bethany Collins forwards how that memory might be recovered and contested. Through works like Moby Dick (Epilogue) (2025), she enacts erasure and reconstruction as methods for examining what societies remember and what they seek to obscure. Kang Seung Lee's Untitled (Untitled, Joe Brainard, 1971) (2025) operates in the same territory, where preservation becomes an act of intimacy and care. In both practices, memory emerges as a living, unsettled structure, always subject to revision and retrieval.
Across generations and methods, these artists demonstrate that images don't merely reflect meaning, but actively shape it. From Semmel's reconfigured body to Collins's evocative surfaces, gesture and material become sites where history lives, contested, reimagined, and remade.