Duty Free Art at the Santa Monica airport for Frieze Los Angeles 2026

Fairs, you either love them or hate them, but what you certainly can't do is avoid them. They arrive, they take over, they make you walk more than planned. You meet people who can spend ten million on an Egyptian reliquary, an abundance of black paste glasses wander from booth to booth, assistants who bump into each other while they are with the buyers on a FaceTime call. In Seven Days in the Art World, Sarah Thornton described Art Basel as "the Olympics of the art world", places where reputations are made visible, loyalties are tested and success briefly becomes legible. His ethnographic eye captures a system driven by proximity and speed, where looking, making contacts and buying collapse into a single gesture. Art fairs, as Paco Barragán points out The Art Fair Story, long ago they surpassed their role as simple markets. They have become cultural infrastructures, temporary cities that compress the hierarchies of the art world into a dense and inevitable form of retail sales.

Frieze began as an extension of Frieze magazine, founded by Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover, who transformed Regent's Park in 2003 into a temporary argument about the importance of fairs. Over time, the project expanded to Frieze Masters, New York, Los Angeles and Seoul, before absorbing other fairs such as The Armory Show and EXPO Chicago. Today, Frieze is perceived less as a unique event than as an annual system, a constellation in which art incessantly orbits its own occasions. When Frieze first arrived in Los Angeles in 2019, it did so with the air of belated confirmation, as if the fair had finally grasped a truth that the city had been rehearsing in silence. Los Angeles, often dismissed for being too scattered, too "Hollywood", too distracted, was already an important center of contemporary art. The arrival of Frieze simply made it official. As usually happens, the fair quickly surpassed its own frame, expanding to a week of duration, dominated by openings, dinners, detours and exhibitions that unfold through a city that refuses to be visited without digressions. You plan to go somewhere and end up somewhere else, unequivocally Los Angeles.

This year, Frieze Los Angeles presents several emerging participants, including El Apartamento, Bradley Ertaskiran, Cardi Gallery, Fort Gansevoort, Josh Lilley, Lomex and Nicodim. They are joined by galleries returning after a year's absence, including Gallery Hyundai, Sprüth Magers, Craig Starr Gallery and Various Small Fires. To expand the global reach of the fair, a solid cohort of international galleries from Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, North America and Africa will arrive, including Bank, Dastan, Taka Ishii Gallery, Johyun Gallery, Kaikai Kiki Gallery, Tina Kim Gallery, Kukje Gallery, Mendes Wood DM, Proyectos Monclova, Nara Roesler and Southern Guild, among others. At the same time, Frieze LA continues to highlight emerging practices through Focus, its section dedicated to new and experimental voices. Curated for the third consecutive year by Essence Harden, recently appointed curator of EXPO Chicago, Focus will feature bold individual presentations from an expanded group of 15 galleries based in the US. UU that have been operating for 12 years or less.

The first edition of Frieze LA took place at the Paramount Pictures studios, a place that seemed more like a meeting place than a meeting place, where art was staged in a historical setting. In 2023, the fair moved west, to Santa Monica, where it has since become the centerpiece of Los Angeles' unofficial art week. This February, Frieze returns for its seventh edition, from February 26 to March 1, 2026. What makes this year's edition particularly attractive is its environment. On this occasion, Frieze LA lands at the Santa Mónica Airport, a place suspended between departures and arrivals, located between what Marc Augé describes as a contemporary "no place". The choice is surprisingly appropriate. Augé refers to airports as not paradigmatic places, spaces defined by transit, anonymity and contractual encounters; organizing an art fair here feels less like a provocation than like a silent logic that reflects the fair and the venue itself as places of accelerated circulation where objects, people and conversations are in constant motion.

Within this logic, we could argue that the free zone of the airport becomes a useful metaphor. In Duty Free Art , Hito Steyerl examines how contemporary art increasingly reflects the conditions of tax-free commerce, detached from national frameworks and circulating through fairs, free ports and duty-free zones where value is abstracted, differentiated and infinitely portable. Art, like luxury goods in transit, exists in a state of suspension, possessed but invisible, purchased but not yet delivered. The airport environment of Frieze LA not only houses the fair, but also stages the conditions that support it. This year, for Frieze Los Angeles, The art world briefly lands on its favorite track, rehearses its familiar choreography, reviews its documents and prepares for the next destination.