From Richard Prince’s $5 Million Muscle Car to Bunny Rogers’s Inner World, Here Are 5 of the Best Artworks at Frieze LA

With blue skies, a warm breeze, and movie stars lurking around
every corner, it was hard not to feel at least a bit of a thrill at
this year’s edition of Frieze Los Angeles, where a line of
sunglasses-wearing VIPs stretched across the Paramount Studios lot,
waiting to get into the packed vernissage. So what did dealers
bring this year to proffer their cool, budding Hollywood (and
Silicon Valley) clientele? Here is a sampling of some of the most
absorbing work on view in the aisles.

Barkley
Hendricks
Father, Son, and… (1969)
Jack Shainman – New York
Price: “Major paintings by Hendricks range from $1.5
million to $5 million”

In his twenties, after graduating from the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts but before enrolling at Yale,
Barkley Hendricks spent some time working as an arts and crafts
teacher for the Philadelphia Department of Recreation, sharing his
creativity with members of the community in public parks. During
this time—well before he had established his now-famous style of
portraiture—he became captivated by the geometries of the
basketball hoops he would see on a daily basis, with the
rectilinear backboards and round rims mixing in his mind with art
history, from hard-edge abstraction to the Renaissance masterpieces
he encountered while traveling around Europe in the mid-‘60s.

The paintings that resulted have rarely been seen
since—there are a few in private collections, while most are still
held by the artist’s estate—but they will now be the subject of a
show at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York this May. This devotional
twist on the subject, whose rounded contours call to mind the Ghent
Altarpiece, is a preview of coming attractions, and a sign that
this much-loved artist—who died in 2017—has plenty of unexplored
layers to delve into.

Richard
Prince
Untitled (2008)
Gagosian – worldwide
Price: $5 million

You can’t get more all-American male than Richard
Prince’s leering, preening enactions of machismo, from the
elliptical pickup lines/brags that he leaves as comments on
attractive young women’s Instagram feeds (the subject of his
current “portraits” at Gagosian’s LA gallery) to his walloping
muscle car anchoring the gallery’s Frieze booth. Simultaneously a
sculpture and a painting of a souped-up Ford Mustang—which admirers
of the artist’s appropriated cowboy photographs may take as an
intertextual horse reference—this extremely cool object would look
great parked in the oversized living room of a female studio exec’s
Hollywood Hills home. These times call for new drivers behind the
wheel.

Bunny
Rogers
Study for Joan Portrait (Pulling Tights)
(2020)
Société – Berlin
Price: $80,000 to $90,000

With her Oscars performance last week, Billie
Eilish’s captivating sensibility—hypersensitive, at once guarded
and vulnerable, defiantly self-determined—may have reached its
biggest mainstream audience to date. That sensibility—which one
might describe as a generational thing—is also alive and well in
art, specifically in the work of the artist Bunny Rogers. Known for
her queasily surreal, playfully dystopian sculptures,
installations, poetry, and performances, Rogers has also for
several years been making a kind of self-portraiture using the
characters of the short-lived cartoon series “Clone High”
(2002–03), which starred angsty young reincarnations of people like
Gandhi, Cleopatra, and Abraham Lincoln. For her guise, the artist
has adopted the moody goth clone of Joan of Arc.

Having just turned 30, Rogers, who lives in New York
with her parents, has evolved her treatments of Joan over time, and
now presents her as a digitally rendered object existing in a
virtual space, faceless and somewhat forlorn. The artist herself
has plenty to be cheerful about, however: for someone so young, she
has already built a formidable institutional career, appearing in
Performa last year, as well as in the Whitney Museum, the Louisiana
Museum of Modern Art, and now, a major survey at the Kunsthaus
Bregenz, which includes work relating to an abiding subject of
hers, the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School. The museum
describes the show’s mood as “Stygian.”

Friedrich
Kunath
We Aim to Live (2018)
Blum & Poe – Los Angeles
Price: $28,000

The German-born, LA-based artist Friedrich Kunath
grew up on the east side of the Berlin Wall and to this day,
perhaps relatedly, incorporates a sense of division in his
sculptures and paintings—they are both bleak and cheerful,
beautiful and horrid, candy-colored and sinister, with a distinctly
mordant sense of humor. In his solo booth with Blum & Poe, this
sculpture stood out: it seems as if a man has hung himself from a
tree with a noose (or tried to) and an elephant has uprooted that
tree, carrying it in its trunk as the two walk companionably
side-by-side. (The man seems highly appreciative.)

At a time when elephants are being slaughtered at an
agonizing rate in Africa—where one female of the species gained
heroic stature among some after she fought back, raising a hunter with her
trunk and then, after being shot, thrusting him below her to crush
him as she died—the notion of an elephant rescuing a human from
suicide is a resonant one. It reads as a parable of sorts, perhaps
for a moral approach to climate change. Why not let the elephants
lead the way?

Cory
Arcangel
Risks in Business/The King Checked by the
Queen (2019)
Greene Naftali – New York
Price: $70,000

The tech folks walking around the big Frieze tent
this week may have found reason to pause in front of a particularly
fascinating artwork by the artist Cory Arcangel. Inspired by Marcel
Duchamp’s love of chess, the piece consists of two video screens
that show two AI stealth bots (one named after the inventor of the
readymade’s birthday, rendered backwards, the other after his death
date) playing a virtual chess match by posting their moves “at” one
another in the comment section of prominent Instagram feeds
(“@__kxd._7881 Bxc6+” and so on). Played across the accounts of
users as diverse as Vladimir Putin, Equinox, Kim Kardashian,
Richard Branson, NASCAR, and Daisy Ridley, the game, which was
recorded last year, takes approximately 40 minutes and ends when
Duchamp’s birthday checkmates its opponents, sealing the victory
with a “.”

Arcangel, who lives in Stavanger, Norway, and barely
uses social media himself (he sticks to Twitter when he does), has
been mining the formal qualities of digital culture ever since his
breakout Mario Brothers cloud series. But here, he is taking a more
active approach by inviting his art to perform itself out there on
Instagram—it’s the online equivalent of street art. (Technically,
the chess game required the artist to hack Instagram, since bots
are usually banned by the platform.) One art advisor was cool on
the work, saying that it actually constituted the documentation of
a performance and not the performance itself, but that likely won’t
prove too much of a hurdle: a cross-section of tech impresarios and
VCs are said to be interested in the piece.

The post From Richard Prince’s $5 Million Muscle Car to
Bunny Rogers’s Inner World, Here Are 5 of the Best Artworks at
Frieze LA appeared first on artnet News.