Santa Monica Post Office, a new satellite fair, will launch next month during Frieze Los Angeles, with 26 exhibitors taking over an Art Deco former post office in downtown Santa Monica. The choice of venue, on the far west side of the city, puts it a good distance from many of the major museums and gallery districts, but a short 11-minute drive from Frieze Los Angeles’s venue, Santa Monica Airport.
The fair will run three days, 20-22 February, with an inaugural lineup of 22 galleries and four project spaces. They include international galleries like Sprüth Magers and Tanya Leighton Gallery, many mainstays of the Los Angeles and New York art scenes—like Michael Benevento, Chris Sharp Gallery, PPOW and Theta—as well as closely watched spaces from Toronto, Tokyo, San Francisco, Milan and elsewhere.
Most will put on solo presentations in an open-plan arrangement, rather than the traditional fair-stand format. Sprüth Magers is showing works by the late artist Kaari Upson; Theta will bring works by the Pictures Generation artist Nancy Dwyer and Dallas’s Tureen gallery will offer paintings by Lula Broglio.
Chris Sharp, owner of the namesake Los Angeles gallery, is the fair’s founder and based his approach on a boutique expo he previously organised in Paris to coincide with Art Basel’s fair there, Place des Vosges. “The fair landscape has gotten really complicated,” Sharp told Artnews. “The fee structure [of larger fairs] is somewhat prohibitive and I wanted to create an alternative to that.”
At Santa Monica Post Office, commercial galleries will pay $6,000 to participate, while project spaces pay $2,000, small fees compared the the five- and six-figure stand costs at the world’s biggest fairs. That high cost of participation puts enormous pressure on exhibitors to make significant sales and recoup their expenditures, a system that has become particularly onerous amid the slowdown in the art market over the past two years.
While there has been speculation in the trade about consolidation among art fairs—Endeavor, the entertainment conglomerate that owns Frieze, announced last year that it was exploring the possible sale of the art fair and media company—this year’s Frieze Week in Los Angeles is shaping up to be one of the biggest. Beyond the main fair and three satellite fairs—the Felix Art Fair, the Spring Break Art Show and now Santa Monica Post Office—the long-running LA Art Show will once again coincide with Frieze this year.
