FRIEZE LOS ANGELES: Booth F01
Make Room is pleased to present new sculptures and paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Erica Mahinay, whose practice occupies the intersection of gestural abstraction and phenomenological inquiry. Her abstractions and multi-component sculptural assemblages function as extended meditations on embodiment and material consciousness.
Her paintings emerge from layering techniques rooted in classical underpainting, beginning with earth-sourced pigments, burnt sienna, burnt umber, and dutch brown, that establish a chromatic foundation she activates through responsive gestures. For Frieze LA 2026, she debuts paintings incorporating striped compositional elements that create flickering fields of self-imposed containment and rupture. Transparent washes allow underlying layers to shimmer through, functioning as both formal strategy and philosophical proposition. When confronted with the question "Is painting a window or a wall?" Mahinay playfully celebrates material presence while conjuring visually penetrable space. Yet ultimately, these works operate as language itself—bridging the gap between subjective awareness and objective understanding. At once, windows and walls but furthermore, mirrors for engaging with vastness, solitude, mortality, and the infinite.
The presentation marks significant expansion into three-dimensional form through selected sculptures from her Unfinished Forms series, developed at Cerámica Suro in Guadalajara. The central work, scaled to the human body, extends her investigation of visceral response into sculptural space. Invoking the vessel's historical role as container for sustenance, ritual, and cremated remains, signifiers of culture, civilization, and the marking of human passage, this empty lower-body figure, seated, legs crossed, rests next to a pair of ceramic arms that cradle a translucent swirling colored glass. In place of faces, these glass "mirrors" offer not reflections but images of fluid color suggestive of shifting psychological states and creative transition. The work articulates profound pause, a posture of contemplative repose that demonstrates her concerns with physiological response, gesture as communication, and the balance between instinct and intention.
Through her omnipresent hand, evident in pressing, smearing, and wiping away, Mahinay creates surfaces that record the physical choreography of making. Her signature method of touch and erasure summons what she terms "limbic resonance," a bodily recognition of gesture as visual language preceding verbal articulation. Together, the striped paintings and sculptural assemblages extend this investigation across dimensions, inviting viewers to project their own embodied experiences onto works that bear the temporal markers of creation and contemplative engagement.
Given her inclusion in Made in LA 2023: Acts of Living at Hammer Museum, a recent exhibition at Josh Lilley in London, and her upcoming show with Galerie Greta Meert in Brussels, Mahinay stands at a pivotal moment in her career. Make Room is proud to support her work, recognizing an artist whose practice continues to gain significant institutional recognition.
Erica Mahinay (b. 1986, Santa Fe, New Mexico, US) creates paintings that oscillate between the architectural and abstract. Full of distinct character, each work utilises a unique ratio of materials and motion, colour and light. Her highly physical artistic process uses her own body as a tool for creation: from limbs to fingertips, the artist engages with her canvases in an intuitive way as she navigates self expression. Mahinay's initial touch emanates across the canvas in a shimmering mass, and through her vulnerability with a process that can be spontaneous or ritualistic, she explores what it is to be human.
Mahinay constructs her paintings by dripping or pouring paint, using rollers and brushes, scrawling with an oil stick and tossing dry pigment onto wet surfaces. Her dynamic technique layers paint and then wipes it away – resulting in a luminescent skin – a bedrock of optical colour that glows beneath the surface. This is followed by a more gradual, contemplative dialogue as a composition evolves, a call and response approach in the pursuit of illusionistic space. Her aqueous painterly style produces a gestural aesthetic, where meditative strokes are juxtaposed with frenetic mark-making.
Erica Mahinay lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, US and her BFA from Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City. Mahinay has had recent solo exhibitions at Josh Lilley, London; T293, Rome; Lyles and King, New York and F&deO, Madrid. Recent group exhibitions include Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; LA Dreams 3 Light Touch, CFHILL, Stockholm; What Dreams May Come, Make Room, Los Angeles and Once the Block is Carved, There Will Be Names, Galerie Greta Meert, Brussels. Her work is held in public collections including the Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles and the Pinault Collection, Paris. In 2026, Mahinay is an Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California.