Visit Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in Booth A13

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is pleased to return to Frieze Los Angeles with Sun, Moon, Stars, a group exhibition focused on celestial subjects in twentieth and twenty-first century American art. Produced amidst landmark advancements in the fields of astronomy and physics, the Space Race, the burgeoning environmental protection movement, and proliferating interest in Eastern spiritual systems, the works on view illuminate the century’s rapidly evolving fascination with the cosmos. Featured artists include Ruth Asawa, Hannelore Baron, Mary Bauermeister, William Baziotes, Romare Bearden, Harry Bertoia, Lee Bontecou, Joseph Cornell, Beauford Delaney, Claire Falkenstein, Morris Graves, David Hare, Hans Hofmann, Alfred Jensen, Raymond Jonson, Yayoi Kusama, Ibram Lassaw, Norman Lewis, Alfonso Ossorio, Agnes Pelton, Richard Pousette-Dart, Theodore Roszak, Betye Saar, Pavel Tchelitchew, Alma Thomas, Bob Thompson, Charmion von Wiegand, William T. Williams, and Hale Woodruff.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery’s presentation expands upon three exhibitions currently on view in PST ART: Art & Science Collide, namely Mapping the Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Pacific Standard Universe at the Griffith Observatory; and Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945-1990 at the Palm Springs Art Museum. Exploring the “intersections of art and science, both past and present,” PST ART: Art & Science Collide is the latest iteration of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time initiative—now called PST Art—which takes place every five years at dozens of venues across Southern California.

Highlights of Sun, Moon, Stars include Expanding Oval in Gold (1970) by Claire Falkenstein (1908–1997), an exemplary painting from her celebrated Moving Point series, a body of works begun in the 1950s characterized by dynamic calligraphic fields of marks that coalesce into larger streams of interlocking sinews. Expanding Oval in Gold corresponds to Falkenstein’s monumental, nine-panel painting Orbit the Earth (Moving Point) (1963), currently on view in Particles and Waves. Exhibition co-curator Sharrissa Iqbal writes, “Falkenstein’s reflective metallic marks trace pathways across the work’s panels, insinuating the trajectory of a celestial object or spacecraft around the Earth.” Orbit the Earth (Moving Point) is one of seven works by Falkenstein featured in Particles and Waves, which brings together several generations of abstract artists whose work was concerned with light, energy, motion, and time.

Similarly, A Glimpse of Mars (1969) is a major painting by Alma Thomas (1891–1978) that embodies the chromatic richness of the “Red Planet.” Painted in the same year that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, A Glimpse of Mars expresses Thomas’ wonder and awe at “the vastness and incomprehensibility of space,” as she put it, through her iconic marks of vivid color. Abstraction also proved the ideal language to express a cosmic blend of human ritual and spiritual cosmology for Charmion von Wiegand (1896–1983). Von Wiegand’s Vajrayana (1969) is a hard-edged geometric abstraction rendered in a radiant palette that incorporates symbols central to the rites of Vajrayana, a strain of Buddhism practiced in Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, and Mongolia. A longtime devotee of Buddhism, von Wiegand forged a singular approach to her abstraction centered on the affinities between Western modernism and Eastern spirituality—a synthesis encapsulated in Vajrayana.

Another major painting on view in Booth A13 is The Sun (1945) by Pavel Tchelitchew (1898–1957). The Sun is a supreme example of Tchelitchew’s “Flowers of Sight” works, which simultaneously resemble a human eye, a flower, and the radiant flares of the sun. “The eye is a net through which light braids its beams, outward through timeless, interstellar space; inward to a no less complex vastness of our human cellular universe,” wrote the legendary connoisseur Lincoln Kirstein in response to the series.

Optics and distortions were likewise the underlying premise of an expansive body of work that Mary Bauermeister (1934–2023) began in 1963 known as her “lens boxes.” Arranging magnifying lenses of various sizes and strengths within and outside of wooden boxes that enclose a complex assemblage, her lens boxes address the continually fluctuating nature of human perception and the transformative nature of artistic creation. Around 1980, Bauermeister began incorporating these lenses into a small body of unique, functional tables, one standout example of which, Horizontal Sculpture for Daily Use (2018), is included in the presentation. In addition to the magnifying glasses of her lens boxes, this table features elements from two other major series of her oeuvre, namely her stone pictures and pencil sculptures. Created late in her life, Horizontal Sculpture for Daily Use constitutes a culmination of the prevailing ideas of Bauermeister’s career. “I like it when I can put things into perspective,” Bauermeister stated of her lens works. “Whenever I write or draw something and put several lenses over it that magnify everything or turn it upside down, I make it polysemic. That’s what I’m all about.”

Finally, and significantly, the gallery’s Frieze LA 2025 exhibition features a rare early assemblage by Betye Saar (b.1926) titled I Love You Calif. (1966). This tribute to California is a love letter, a personal expression of affection, for the place in which she was born, raised, and continues to live. The work exemplifies Saar’s approach to artmaking, in which a multitude of carefully selected found objects are imbued with new meaning through their recontextualization. Constructed entirely of cut outs from found metal objects, I Love You Calif. assembles a quintessentially Californian scene referencing the state’s freeway system, idyllic weather, surf culture, and natural beauty. Like Betye Saar, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery loves Los Angeles and wants to support the city’s artistic community in the remediation of the city from the recent fires. As such, upon the sale of I Love You Calif., the gallery will be donating a portion of sale proceeds to the LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund, a Getty-led coalition of major arts organizations and philanthropists providing emergency relief for artists and arts workers in all disciplines whose residences and/or studios have been impacted by the devastating Eaton and Palisades fires in Los Angeles.