Los Angeles’s next generation of dealers forges new paths – The Art Newspaper

A string of high-profile gallery closures in Los Angeles not too long ago set off alarm bells and sparked headlines a couple of potential cooling of the native market. However on the bottom this week, sellers gathered at Frieze Los Angeles paint a extra nuanced image, particularly for a brand new technology of youthful galleries and collectors doubling down on native ties, experimentation and new approaches to standard art-market knowledge.

Elements of Los Angeles are nonetheless rebuilding from the lethal wildfires a yr in the past that threatened to close down the earlier iteration of Frieze Los Angeles altogether, and the extreme escalation of raids, arrests and deportations by federal regulation enforcement on the route of the Trump administration have destabilised communities throughout the area. Up to now yr, Michael Werner Gallery, Sean Kelly, Tanya Bonakdar and Southern Guild have shuttered their West Coast outposts, whereas established native galleries like Blum and LA Louver closed their public industrial programming.

The seller Hannah Hoffman says she doesn’t see the latest wave of closures as a referendum on the native artwork market. Since founding her gallery in 2013, she has been via a number of boom-and-bust cycles in Los Angeles, she says.

“I see it as a mirrored image of the fantasy folks have about what this place is. [Los Angeles] holds a powerful picture in our creativeness,” Hoffman says. “However the actuality is that it is a place that’s a extremely tight-knit neighborhood—you must be current. It’s onerous for galleries, when that is their second or third or fourth house, to have these direct relationships.”

Hollywood looms giant in narratives about Los Angeles, even for artwork sellers. The shrinkage of the leisure trade has put strain on Los Angeles’s economic system as a complete. Leisure contributes greater than $115bn yearly to the bigger regional economic system and helps greater than 680,000 jobs, in accordance with 2024 information from the Los Angeles Financial Growth Company (LAEDC). In line with Luminate, a Hollywood information firm, Los Angeles noticed a 24% drop in main scripted tv and movie productions in 2025 in comparison with the earlier yr.

Final yr, California governor Gavin Newsom signed a $750m movie and tv tax credit score to assist maintain leisure tasks in Hollywood. It greater than doubled the tax credit California affords to productions shot within the state. However there’s continued concern that rising consolidation within the leisure trade will proceed to push jobs and tax income out of Southern California. On the day of the VIP preview, Netflix introduced it had backed out of its bid to accumulate Warner Bros Discovery, paving the way in which for a Paramount Skydance takeover if accepted by regulators.

Adept galleries adapt

“There are issues which can be structurally a difficulty now within the leisure enterprise, which is core to the city’s id and to the precise base of town’s economics,” the Los Angeles seller Charlie James says. “It’s been basically altered by these takeovers by tech firms—a few of our shoppers are within the artistic neighborhood that’s concerned in movie and tv, and that enterprise is the other way up.”

Nonetheless, LAEDC’s annual financial forecast report launched this week signifies the general regional economic system continued to develop final yr regardless of disastrous impacts from the wildfires, violent immigration crackdowns and supply-chain and commerce points brought on by federal tariff insurance policies. The gross Los Angeles County product—an area model of a gross home product, the whole worth of all items and providers produced—grew by 2.2% in 2025, up from the 1.1% progress price in 2024 and the 1% progress price in 2023.

“The coolness available in the market hit us late, however there was a concavity final yr that took maintain in late spring into early fall,” James says. “That was perceptible and peculiar, however issues bought proper in December, and the yr’s began nicely, thank goodness.”

Amid the altering panorama and recalibrating artwork market, Los Angeles galleries are making changes to maintain their companies dynamic. In September, Hoffman merged her eponymous Los Angeles gallery with the New York seller Bridget Donahue to kind a coast-to-coast enterprise. At this yr’s Frieze, the primary because the gallery’s merger, the Hoffman Donahue stand is entrance and centre on the truthful entrance. Partnering has allowed for a extra sustainable enterprise, Hoffman says: “It turned very obvious that we might do extra collectively than we might do on our personal.”

Up to now few years, Los Angeles has been house to a rising group of younger collectors who’re institutionally minded and concerned with museum boards and acquisition committees, Hoffman says. “These are collectors who possibly missed that Covid bubble by way of their very own arc as a collector, and as an alternative have come into the dialog within the final yr or two,” she says. “They’re not solely every growing collections that really feel deeply private and completely different from each other, however in addition they have a shared worth system that we’re all collaborators.”

Emma Fernberger, who was beforehand a director at Bortolami in New York, based her gallery in Los Angeles solely two years in the past and is exhibiting at Frieze Los Angeles for the primary time. The Fernberger stand within the Focus part is devoted to Greta Waller, a Los Angeles-based artist who for a decade has additionally labored as a paramedic. The stand consists of sprawling work of the Los Angeles skyline and ethereal renderings of ice. Fernberger says the temper amongst Los Angeles’s industrial galleries felt extra “energised” within the lead-up to Frieze, which creates an vital second for town’s galleries.

Fernberger, a self-described “everlasting optimist, possibly to a fault”, provides that 2025 was “an actual grasp class in being nimble” for native sellers. “Each artist I present, I’m a fan first, gallerist second,” she says. “I’ve to be actually captivated with what I present. In any other case, it simply doesn’t work.”

Gratitude for rising pains

Sara Lee Hantman’s gallery Sea View can also be collaborating in Frieze for the primary time and exhibiting within the Focus part. Its stand, devoted to the work of Zenobia Lee—who has a concurrent solo present on the gallery’s house base in Hollywood (till 28 March)—is successful with collectors, Hantman says. The stand offered out in the course of the VIP preview, with works priced between $7,000 and $20,000.

“There’s a new technology of sellers who’re prepared to take dangers each structurally and programmatically, and performance in several ways in which won’t have been profitable or revered in earlier generations of artwork galleries,” Hantman says. “However now there’s a little bit extra room for experimentation and for folks to strive one thing new.”

Younger galleries are nonetheless beholden to Los Angeles’s infrastructural constraints, together with its dependency on vehicles and the ensuing site visitors jams. Final yr, Sea View relocated from a Modernist home designed by the Cuban American artist Jorge Pardo in East Los Angeles to an area in Hollywood close to a cluster of established galleries together with Jeffrey Deitch, Lisson Gallery and Regen Initiatives. As a lot as she liked the unique house, Hantman says, the gallery can now obtain extra guests in a single day than it did in a whole month at its earlier location. The shift has been profitable, she says, and adapting is essential for galleries to outlive.

“I’m actually enthusiastic about this new technology of galleries, and even the post-gallery pop ups,” Hantman says. “Rising pains is a extremely great way of placing it—we wouldn’t be making an attempt these new fashions out if it wasn’t for a bumpy trip. That is an thrilling time to be a part of the Los Angeles artwork world, and I’m glad I didn’t look ahead to a greater time.”