Tag: CASTLE

Last week, during Los Angeles Art Week, I saw James Franco everywhere. I saw James Franco at Felix at the Hollywood Roosevelt, where the David Hockney-painted pool was closed because a man had had a heart attack inside it the day before. I saw James Franco at the Karma party at Ghengis Cohen, his trucker hat popping up behind a psychic and very beautiful astrologer. I saw James Franco at Frieze, taking in the valuable wall real estate at the sizable David Zwirner booth. But the first place I saw James Franco smile was at the inaugural Post-Fair in Santa Monica, as Theta gallery founder and director Jordan Barse took him through her exhibition of Tinseltown-themed paintings by Pictures Generation artist Nancy Dwyer. I smiled at the Post-Fair, too.

The Post-Fair, a little jewel box of a fair held at the landmark Santa Monica Post Office building, was founded by Mid-City gallerist Chris Sharp, a dealer with excellent taste and an aptronym for a surname. He decided to start his own fair for a simple reason: Frieze, where the price of a small booth starts at $35,000, is just too expensive. Participating in that fair, or even its somewhat less costly alternative, Felix, can knock out an emerging gallery like Sharp’s, whose business is four years old. He aimed for something more equitable than the established fairs, splitting the cost of renting the post office between 26 galleries (all showing single-artist presentations) for a flat rate of $6,000 each.

“We’re in a moment where things are so difficult,” he says. “Survival feels so precarious and the market’s so weak, so I just wanted to create something where participating in it wasn’t an existential threat to the gallery. Because a lot of the time, when you’re doing these big fairs it’s make or break, just because the costs are so high.”

“To use Marxist terminology,” he says, chuckling, “we’re seizing the means of production.” The name really works.

Sharp’s fellow gallerists met the idea with enthusiasm. He invited galleries ranging from decades-old, established institutions like Sprüth Magers and PPOW, to far younger galleries, like the Dimes Square-adjacent King’s Leap, and CASTLE, which opened in a Hancock Park apartment less than two years ago. Instead of constructing conventional booths, each gallery received equitable wall space, lending the fair the feeling of a group show. The 1938 building, sun-soaked with Art Deco moldings and worn stone, was a pleasure to move through, especially in comparison to the claustrophobic convention center at the Santa Monica Airport. Numerous guests commented on how nice the space smelled, like fresh cut wood.

“It’s a really beautiful space, and the flow is nice and pleasant,” says Barse. “I love the scale of it. It just feels very manageable, whereas many fairs can feel very overwhelming and exhausting, with layouts that make you feel trapped. But I think that people flow through quite naturally here without feeling pressured or rushed. You’re engaging visitors more easily, and they have time to stop and chat about the art.”

Eden Deering, director of PPOW—which showed Harry Gould Harvey IV’s storybook-like, eerie work—described the Post-Fair as “refreshingly human.”

“It avoided the often transactional feel of white-walled booths,” she says. “Instead, it offered a sense of discovery and connection.”

Between the low costs and minimal construction, Sharp purposefully created an environment where there’s “a lot less pressure” to make sales, enabling exhibitors to take more aesthetic risk. He opted to show work by the late German-Iraqi sculptor Lin May Saeed, centering a piece depicting a wide-eyed, nervous doe. Sharp says that, despite Saeed’s renown in Europe, she has no market in the United States, and he relished the opportunity to bring her to a wider audience. 

“I actually really like art fairs,” he says. “A lot of people complain about them, but one of their great virtues is you get a lot of people in front of your work. At my gallery, I’m lucky if I get 300 people to visit the show over the course of the entire show. You do an art fair, and you get thousands of people. I mean, not like everyone’s going to look, but you’re still getting this really high volume of exposure for your artists. So this fair is a perfect context to be able to show work by Lin May Saeed, where if we don’t sell anything, it’s not a big deal.”

Sharp expected some amount of blowback from the powers that be at Frieze. But the devastating Los Angeles wildfires changed things. “My fair feels like it’s essentially somehow critical of the status quo, but the fires and the aftermath kind of created this really nice and unexpected solidarity among the entire art community,” he says. In 2025, attending LA Art Week was not just an excuse to take pictures of one’s friends’ art and enjoy a complimentary champagne in a lounge sponsored by a Swiss bank—instead, it became a way to both offer real, needed support to the city’s artists and art workers, and to blow off steam and have fun. People actually danced (and made out on the dance floor) at the Hop Louie party. Everyone needed to breathe, maybe even the James Francos of the world.

CASTLE founder Harley Wertheimer, who exhibited paintings by Victor Boullet at the Post-Fair (my favorite was of a charming little owl with red-rimmed eyes), says we need people coming to LA in the wake of such tragedy. “I don’t even think it’s a purely financial thing,” he says. “It’s also an energy thing. It’s a beautiful city filled with beautiful, hardworking people who work in the arts, and their work should be seen.”

Post-Fair’s spirit of experimentation leaked over into Art Week as a whole. The New York-based Uhaul Gallery, which shows work in a moving van, parked outside the Santa Monica Post Office after getting ejected from Frieze. There was an inflatable tube man, like the kind they display outside car dealerships, waving around atop the van, by artist Sam Keller. He was rendered in the stars and stripes of the American flag, with an erect, inflatable tube penis flopping in the breeze. He made me happy.