Frieze Los Angeles Booth A7

For Frieze Los Angeles 2025, Night Gallery is delighted to present new sculptures by London-based artist Reza Aramesh and paintings by Los Angeles-based artists Sterling Wells and Ross Caliendo, Philadelphia-based artist Jesse Mockrin, and New York-based artist Robert Nava. These artists reconsider art history through the lens of 21st century concerns. They reconfigure past traditions as they attempt to find creative new ways forward.

Aramesh transforms reportage images from events of subjugation and displacement into marble sculptures that rework European forms. In his latest body of work, Aramesh creates sculptural fragments—a torso, two detached marble arms—as he explores literal and metaphorical expressions the fractured body. His works suggest vulnerability as they challenges perceptions of wholeness and identity. Aramesh reflects on how meaning and beauty persist even in imperfection. 

Wells works in plein air tradition. He renders L.A. detritus and waterways in lush watercolor, using water from the sites. To make his new work for Frieze Los Angeles, Sea Star Wasting Syndrome, Vista Point Tide Pools Palos Verdes Peninsula, Wells decamped to the titular shoreline and waded into its tide pools. The artist embraces such immersion throughout all his work and now explores the suffering sea stars at the edge of the vast and polluted sea. As Wells recently told Frieze Magazine: “I don't make work about Los Angeles's ecology; I am a part of Los Angeles's ecology.”

Caliendo rethinks landscape traditions and the relationships between painting and printmaking. Following the artist’s inaugural printmaking experience with Pace Prints, he has created diptychs for Frieze Los Angeles that feature two landscape images with surreal color palettes, textured surfaces, and slight variation. The works appear digitally manipulated, though they are in fact oil and acrylic.

Mockrin presents two paintings that will be on view in her forthcoming solo museum exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada (opening Sept. 13, 2025). Both works reference the ongoing fight to control women’s bodies. Natural Order and Old Magic take inspiration from art historical compositions as they depict women’s age old use of plants to support or terminate their pregnancies. Mockrin refutes contemporary ideas that birth control and pre-natal care are new inventions; her canvases argue for ancient traditions, in that they support a women’s right to choose.

Elements of cave painting, Egyptian art, and Pre-Columbian culture–as well as the oeuvres of Cy Twombly and Jean-Michel Basquiat–coalesce in Nava’s imagined monsters and mythologies for the digital age. His works for Frieze Los Angeles reprise his recurring motifs of dragons and lightning. Oil, acrylic, and grease pencil add texture to his fantastical scenes.

In art history, each of these artists finds guides for addressing difficult subjects, from environmental degradation to bodily autonomy. They ask what’s worth keeping, and what’s best left behind.