3 Artists at Frieze Los Angeles Catching the Eye of Top Tastemakers
Written By David Roff
As Frieze Los Angeles 2025 takes over Santa Monica Airport, the city’s art world pulses with fresh energy, drawing collectors, curators, and creatives eager to discover the next big thing. The fair continues to celebrate LA’s dynamic cultural landscape while bringing together top international galleries and a thrilling lineup of contemporary artists.
Among the many artists on view, a few have already sparked conversations among tastemakers. Whether through bold material experimentation, striking conceptual depth, or sheer visual magnetism, these three artists have emerged as must-sees at Frieze LA 2025.
1. Jesse Mockrin / Night Gallery
Jesse Mockrin’s luminous oil paintings reimagine details from European Old Master works, reframing historical narratives to challenge contemporary ideas of gender, time, and artistic appropriation. Through techniques of fragmentation and recomposition, she disrupts traditional hierarchies of beauty and the male gaze, rendering androgynous figures that exist in ambiguous, otherworldly spaces. Her controlled, glowing surfaces and eerily bloodless subjects blur the lines between flesh and sculpture, while sumptuous fabrics and dramatic compositions heighten the psychological tension in her work. Often presented as diptychs or triptychs, Mockrin’s paintings invite an active viewing experience, where bodies extend across frames, dissolving boundaries of time and identity.
Jesse Mockrin, Old Magic, 2025, oil on linen, 60 x 44 in
2. Genesis Belanger / PERROTIN
Genesis Belanger’s sculptural practice explores the psychology of consumer culture, crafting meticulously staged tableaux that both reference and critique the aesthetics of capitalist production. Utilizing a diverse range of materials—including porcelain, stoneware, metal, wood, upholstery, and paint—she constructs objects that serve as stand-ins for human emotions and experiences. Her work interrogates the manipulative power of advertising, the compulsions of consumption, and the erosion of privacy in an increasingly digital world. Through uncanny, psychologically charged compositions, Belanger highlights the ways we navigate modern anxieties and the coping mechanisms we employ. Her sculptures blur the line between desire and unease, inviting viewers to reconsider the influence of commercial imagery on our daily lives.
Genesis Belanger, To Better Days Ahead, 2025, porcelain, powder coated aluminum, powder coated steel, hardware, 36 x 30 x 28 in
Genesis Belanger, Broadway in Summer, 2025, porcelain, stoneware, plywood and poplar panel, wood veneer edge, and structural epoxy, 38 1/2 x 30 in
Genesis Belanger, Broadway in Fall, 2025, porcelain, stoneware, plywood and poplar panel, wood veneer edge, and structural epoxy, 38 1/2 x 30 in
3. Ariana Papademetropoulos / MASSIMODECARLO
Papademetropoulos is best known for her hyperreal, dreamlike paintings that merge mythology, femininity, and Jungian archetypes into surreal narratives. A graduate of the California Institute of the Arts and the Universität der Künste in Berlin, she draws inspiration from medieval and Renaissance iconography, reinterpreting traditional symbols through a contemporary lens. Her work blurs the boundaries between reality and illusion, creating portals into fantastical worlds where the familiar becomes uncanny. Through meticulous detail and an ethereal color palette, Papademetropoulos constructs immersive, psychologically charged scenes that invite deeper exploration. Her paintings act as windows into altered states, offering a poetic meditation on history, symbolism, and the subconscious.
Ariana Papademetropoulos, Vapers, 2025, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 in
Ariana Papademetropoulos, Psychic Specific (4), 2025, telephone booth and recorded voice, 38 1/4 x 28 x 12 3/8 in
Ariana Papademetropoulos, TBT, 2025, oil on canvas, 40 x 50 in
From boundary-pushing installations to thought-provoking paintings, this year’s edition offers a feast for the senses.