The buzz was palpable at the opening day of the Felix Art Fair (until 23 February) on Wednesday, as steady streams of visitors floated through the hallways of the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel in West Hollywood. The fair occupies three floors, including the very cool cabanas around the pool area. Many visitors were carrying cocktails from the pool bar, and looking very nonchalantly Los Angeles. Around 60 galleries have taken rooms and suites to display their wares, with 30 of them showing at the fair for the first time.
After the wildfires that engulfed parts of the city in January, Felix was the first fair of Los Angeles’s art week to firmly commit to forging ahead. “We had our intuition that there was enough time between the fires and the fair,” says Mills Morán, one of the founders of Felix and a co-owner of the gallery Morán Morán. To come to their decision, the fair’s organisers canvassed their art-world colleagues. Morán says: “It was a consensus that they were asking us to move forward. Everybody needed a little more support—including handlers, collectors, artists and fabricators. All the way down the line, everybody wanted to get back to work.”
On the fair’s opening day, sales appeared robust and were reported by every exhibitor The Art Newspaper spoke to—nearly a dozen. Perhaps that is because the preview crowd was in the mood to buy and works on view are generally accessibly priced, from several hundred dollars to just below $20,000.
Paintings of human figures remain popular. One standout is Jeanine Brito’s meticulously painted Costume Department (2024), a large, full-length portrait of a nude woman wearing clown makeup, in Nicodim’s room. A lively installation in a hallway by A Hug from the Art World stopped many a visitor. Socko, a Korean artist based in New York, is a fan of art history, and selected 100 artists to honour in his small, round paintings, priced at $2,500 each. Each painting depicts a well-known artist in a cartoon style, including Andy Warhol, Yayoi Kusama and Agnes Martin. According to a gallery representative, around 45 of them had been sold by the end of the VIP preview.
Ceramic sculptures by Bari Ziperstein in the garden area of Charles Moffett's cabana Photo by Silvia Ros, courtesy Charles Moffett
Ceramics are especially ubiquitous at the fair. New York-based dealer Charles Moffett filled his cabana’s garden area with new works by Bari Ziperstein, one of Los Angeles’s best known art potters. (She also has a commercial line.) Two of her colourful vessels, with designs referencing the Vienna Secession, were sold during the preview, for $14,000 and $18,000. Moffett also sold two paintings by Hopie Hill (for $5,000 and $8,000) and six paintings by Maggie Ellis (for prices ranging from $8,000 to $18,000).
Meanwhile, the non-profit Tierra del Sol gallery, which champions art by those with disabilities, is showing Angel Rodriguez, an artist who makes ceramics and paintings (priced from $400 to $2,500). Most of his small paintings sold during the preview, while his three table-top works depicting sports arenas in ceramic and paper remained available. “He’s still a young artist,” says gallery director Paige Wery, “so his works are quite reasonably priced.”
On one of the hotel’s upper floors, Albertz Benda is showing works by three artists who use ceramics: Tony Marsh, Sharif Bey and Tanya Aguiñiga. Marsh’s signature style is exquisitely perforated pieces in white, and all five of his works were sold by the end of preview day, ranging in price from $8,000 to $25,000. For the gallery’s associate director, Kate Moger, all this indicates “a growing excitement for the medium, with interest on par with paintings from collectors and curators alike”.