Good morning!
I have been thoroughly reviewing and reading through so many LA art fair and exhibition previews, and I am pleased to share the selections below. In fact, I have chosen too many to share and now my introduction paragraphs are threateningly nearing the email length limit.
I would like to refer my subscribers to an art appraising service for your insurance policy needs: contact AAA accredited appraiser Bibi Zavieh at bzavieh@newcube.art. I have worked with Bibi for several years, and her expertise in contemporary art appraising is unmatched!
Enjoy all the artworks below and please contact me with interest or if you would like to see additional examples of the artists’ works. Wishing everyone a healthy and happy long weekend!
Ridley Howard
Spritz, 2025
Oil on linen
8 x 10 inches (20.3 x 25.4 centimeters)
$8,500
“In paintings ranging from jewel-like to large-scale, abstract to figurative, Ridley Howard explores the nuances of color, shape, and composition with exquisite sensitivity. All of his works—whether precisely composed geometric abstractions, land- and cityscapes, portraits of individuals, or scenes of couples making love—are, at their core, color studies. Howard strips his subjects down, forgoing narrative and visual details, transforming them into pristine, velvety planes of pigment and collections of shapes.” - Artsy
Akira Ikezoe
Not So Still Life with a Digestive System, 2024
Oil on canvas
36 x 26 inches (91.4 x 66 centimeters)
$9,000
“Akira Ikezoe (b. 1979) is a New York-based artist born in Kochi, Japan. Ikezoe creates works in diverse disciplines, including drawing, painting, video and performance, in relation to the balance between the forces we think of as outside or before ourselves, and the “civilizing” of ourselves. In Ikezoe’s works, the human figure is presented as his alter ego and woven into a metaphysical and mythological context that depicts a timeless melting point between human and natural boundaries.” - Proyectos Ultravioleta
Oona Brangam-Snell
Pompeii, 2023
Felted wool, machine-embroidered polyester
52 x 31 inches (132.1 x 78.7 centimeters)
$10,000
“Oona Brangam-Snell’s work highlights the enduring significance of traditional symbols and their continued relevance in contemporary iconography, especially in a time when fabric design is increasingly shaped by digital technology and mass production. Drawing inspiration from centuries of textile craftsmanship, she approaches her designs as paintings first, before bringing them to life as machine-loomed and hand-embroidered tapestries. Her art emphasizes the rich history of textile production while exploring how these traditions intersect with modern techniques and the digital age. Through this process, Brangam-Snell reflects on the evolving relationship between art, culture, and technology.” - Mrs Gallery
Barbara Wesołowska
Begging to Dissolve, 2024
Oil, shellac and gold leaf on linen
25.8 x 17.7 inches (65.5 x 45 centimeters)
$15,200
“Her work identifies most closely with the traditional practice of figurative painting. Through intuitive application of paint and layered surfaces she draws the viewer into a psychologically intense narrative, in conversation with this tradition, which unfolds across the paintings. The depicted figures are ambiguous and often distinguished by expressions that are in between different emotional states. Always suspended in a sort of abstract or dream-like landscape, they emerge from color stains like ghosts transforming themselves into another character…There is also a strong influence of religious iconography, to which the artist was exposed growing up in Poland.” - Underdog Collection
Anastasia Komar
Striatum II, 2024
Acrylic and electroplated polymer on board
15 x 22 x 4 inches (38 x 56 x 10 centimeters)
$9,000
“Anastasia Komar’s practice is informed by her research into the intersection of art and contemporary bioengineering, seeking to elucidate aspects of our reality that increasingly affect the human experience but elude comprehension. Referencing science, theology, and history, Komar combines acrylic painting executed in a wide gamut of short, vivid, and luminescent brushstrokes with advanced polymer sculptures that echo forms at once biomolecular, mythological, and mammalian.” - Swivel Gallery
Maria Szakats
Untitled II, 2025
Mohair on canvas
8 1/2 x 11 3/8 inches (21.5 x 29 centimeters)
$3,000
“Maria Szakats, [is] an Austrian artist based in Paris. Her first solo exhibition in the United States, Hover evokes a state of suspended transformation, where images seem to form and dissolve in a perpetual flux. Her embroidered and brushed mohair surfaces create compositions that resist stillness—hovering between presence and disappearance. At the core of Hover is an exploration of floral motifs—orchids, peonies, dahlias, fire lilies, and tulips— woven into a personal and allegorical language. Flowers, long imbued with symbolic weight in art and literature, have served as emblems of transience, beauty, and mourning. In Szakats’ work, they become agents of transformation, rooted in the artist’s own deep memory.” - Megan Mulrooney Gallery
Madeline Hollander
Puppis, February, 2025
Watercolor, colored pencil, archival watercolor paper mounted on wood panel, map pins
16 x 20 inches (41 x 51 centimeters)
$3,500
Madeline Hollander
Ursa Major, April, 2025
Watercolor, colored pencil, archival watercolor paper mounted on wood panel, map pins
16 x 20 inches (41 x 51 centimeters)
$3,500
“The eighty-eight watercolors which comprise Hollander’s Day Flight correspond to the International Astronomical Union (IAU)’s officially recognized constellations. Rather than follow the arbitrary and accepted patterns drawn up by astronomers, which flatten each star onto a single plane, Hollander has created a celestial route in three-dimensions, moving from closest to farthest star, demarcated by map pins. For her presentation at Frieze Los Angeles, the watercolors representing each constellation has been organized by month, functioning as a calendar of the night sky over the course of a year.
A color-coded system nested throughout Hollander’s artworks offers a language decipherable to the artist through her synesthetic connection between color, language, and gesture. Their border’s candy stripe patterns spell the month in which each constellation appears clearest in the night sky, with the central curlicued ribbons’ alternating colors unfurling each constellation’s name in this same cryptic color-coded alphabet.” - Bortolami Gallery
Mariel Rolwing Montes
Exit 106 and Yosemite Sam, 2025
Oil and acrylic on canvas
64 1/2 x 83 1/2 inches (164 x 212 centimeters)
$11,000
“The spaces Rolwing Montes renders are equally possible in reality as they are digitally. She depicts thresholds and loci of change in the form of grids, screens, and windows, further exaggerating the distance between registers. This rhythm of gridding and pixelization, resolution and distortion, is Rolwing Montes' solution for describing one fundamental structure of reality: the grid. Initially inspired by the construction of Peruvian textiles and her familial roots to the Andes, the artist began to notice the grid as a functional bridge between ancient technologies, like weavings and petroglyphs, to contemporary modalities, such as the ever-present screen. It becomes a place of connection, then, as the underlying structure of both our material and digital world…Mariel Rolwing Montes is a painter from Brooklyn, she lives and works in New York. She received her BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons the New School for Design in 2017 and is currently an MFA graduate candidate The Hunter College MFA Program in Studio Art, 2025.” - Blade Study Gallery
Minh-Lan Tran
First break, 2024
Egg, pigment, paper, fabric and oil on linen
70 ⅞ x 43 ¼ inches (180 x 110 centimeters)
€19,000
“Minh Lan Tran works to give form to such presences in order to lay them to rest. The artist crafts her own egg tempera in a process borrowed from traditional techniques used for early Byzantine icon paintings—an era in which theories of the image and the ethics of representing the divine began to be negotiated. She breaks the methods apart as she shreds, burns, and battles her surfaces that look like the slits of a veil.” - Francis Irv Gallery