There was a spectre haunting the Frieze Los Angeles Art fair—the spectre of the grandmother’s attic. Musty copper and seashells, old gold and furniture brown, sequins and feathers, paintings and sculpture not literally from an antique store but clearly informed by visiting one. Where else would anyone find all this Laura Ashley? Not quite cottage-core because the imagery here is too diverse and fragmented—this is still contemporary art, after all—but something still to do with nostalgia, warmth, unsexual femininity, flowers, estate sale pottery, and brown. Familiarity: weirdness, confrontation, contrast, and unfaded glamour are banished in this aesthetic—as too uncomfortable? Or failing to reflect properly relatable themes?
Fairs are often so large and diverse that one can accidentally manifest any leitmotif desired into being just through an unconscious act of mental curation but trust me, seriously, there is an awful lot of this going on this year. Signal manifestations at the fair include:
A pair of Karens—a 2005 Karen Kilimnik (perhaps a bellwether piece) The witch’s meeting house in the Malvern Hills, Buckingham, England from Blood on Satan’s Claw, 1604 (2005)—a Tudor mansion in oils, surrounded by lumpen dark green foliage, dwarfed by—and visually competing with—its hideous traditional frame. Likewise frame-focused, though perhaps more on-purpose, is Karin Gulbran’s Obscure Mirror (Verdant Landscape with Lemons and Aqua Glass) (2022)-where the empty center—a 1950s textured reflecting glass tinted the color of a rubber bathing cap—sits surrounded by a thick frame studded with shells and mushroomy growths. Vaguely Disney.
Diana Al-Hadid produced Dear Wife, Save Me (2024-2025), which is kind of all frame—a goopy mixed media openwork the size and shape of a thick painted canvas looking like an abstract distillation of Mothball Contemporary’s favorite colors: a warm, aged, iridescent rainbow. Suchitra Mattai’s under the same rain (2025) is a rug featuring leaves dripping rain on flowers and anonymized figures (figures appear anonymized when at all this year) mounted to a “vintage headboard”—forming yet again something framelike. The materials include “family earrings.” Rebecca Manson’s American Lady (2025) is made of “Porcelain, glaze, adhesives, canvas, pigment, hardware” and forms a big, crafty wall-mounted butterfly wing. It sits next to Sadie Barnette’s Jewelled Sky, a somehow-produced (does anyone care anymore?) photo-derived print of gaudy jewelry pinned onto a sky of heavenly clouds.
The idea is third-handness. The decaying decorative secondhand-store early-20th-century statuettes, candelabras, and other middle-class mantelpiece clutter from which this vibe derives were themselves half-assed, mass-produced junk poorly imitating genuinely handcrafted 19th century objets d’art made for far wealthier patrons.
What are we doing here? Celebrating traditional constructions of community, family, the overlooked labor of domesticity, a vanished image of a stable home/nest, the rounded and organic mother, a re-examination of the ‘70s Pattern and Decoration Movement—or just regurgitating the old for lack of any vision of the new? Is there a difference?
