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Wet Paint in the Wild: Gallerist Alex Shulan Works Hard and Plays Harder During Frieze Week in Los Angeles
The eye behind Tribeca's Lomex takes us through a week in his life.
Annie Armstrong
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Welcome to Wet Paint in the Wild, the freewheeling—and free!—spinoff of Artnet News Pro’s beloved Wet Paint gossip column, where we give art-world insiders a disposable camera to chronicle their lives on the circuit. To read the latest Wet Paint column, click here (members only).
Ah, sunny Los Angeles. Who’s a more ideal candidate to take over Wet Paint in the Wild during Frieze L.A. than New York’s own prince of darkness, Alex Shulan? Every time I’ve been around Shulan, he’s reliably dressed in head-to-toe black, and I’m an admitted fangirl over his black metal-laced programming at his Tribeca gallery, Lomex—which you’ll recall brought the sculpting career of the artist behind the movie Alien, H.R. Giger, to the cultural fore last year—and has championed other artists with reliably macabre milieus, such as Kye Christensen-Knowles and Phoebe Nesgos. Let’s take a peek at what Shulan’s week in the city of Angels looked like…
I arrived in Los Angeles for my second go-round of the Felix Art Fair at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel and met my old friend Joseph Geagan in my booth. He had just opened an exhibition by Georgia Gray at his space, the Gaylord, in Koreatown.
I hung a painting by Kathryn Kerr, a new artist that is joining my gallery, outside in the garden behind my booth.
Later that evening, after install, Joseph organized birthday drinks for Georgia at the Gaylord.
Artist Sam Anderson primps at the Gaylord.
Georgia Ford at the Gaylord.
Georgia Gray at the head of the table with the crowd at the Gaylord.
After the opening of Felix I was met by Marcus Chang and Sam Anderson. We gathered in the lobby of the Roosevelt.
I had no idea what this party was, somehow related to fashion or something and my friend De Se was DJing, but it was the first of several times I encountered male strippers this past week.
Dese Escobar in the DJ booth.
Later in the evening I ended up at a mansion rented by Matthew Brown and Clearing gallery. Here I am with Matthew (middle) and Clearing’s Olivier Babin (left).
On the third night of Felix, I was invited to the James Goldstein manor (designed by famed midcentury architect John Lautner) for a Frieze party. We had to take a bus from what was, to my understanding, the middle of nowhere, but the party itself felt like a set for a Samsung commercial. The view was amazing.
Commercial Street gallery proprietor & Hannah Hoffman director Tyler Murphy with Greene Naftali director Monika Senz.
On day three I visited Scott Cameron Weaver and Adam Stamp at O-Town House gallery. On view upstairs is an installation by Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff. Scott is one of my oldest friends and colleagues in the art world. I first met him over ten years ago when he was working at Galerie Neu in Berlin.
The following evening I organized a small dinner for friends of the gallery at Frank and Musso’s, one of the few restaurants I know about in Los Angeles. The food was awful but it was fun. Georgia Ford, Robert McKenzie, and Andrea Neustein are pictured.
The next day I toured around openings with Entrance gallery’s Louis Shannon. Here he is on the right—with Brooke Taylor and Lorenzo Bueno—at Room 3557, artist Omari Douglin’s new gallery.
Visiting Sara Lee Hantman at her new gallery, Sea View.
Later I went with Ralph Deluca and Willard Klein to an opening at Reena Spaulings’s Los Angeles space. Here they’re checking at a work by Seth Price—Willard works with Seth and helped produce the painting.
Somehow I ended up at an extremely raucous house party. There were so many people in the space that it became increasingly difficult for people to fit. Here is artist Lucy Bull moving a giant Parker Ito painting out of danger.
Avalon Lurks and De Se at the Gaylord, in front of a work by Robert Bittenbender.
For my last night in Los Angeles, at the suggestion of Fernando Mesta (who eventually no-showed), everyone convened at Tempo Bar, a queer nightclub with raucous drag shows. Here are John Tuite and Georgia Gray.
Me and Joseph Geagan at Tempo Bar. The next morning I was very happy to leave, after a successful outing at the fair and nearly a week of going out frantically to try to get good pictures for this piece.
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