LONDON.- Gagosian will participate in the 2025 edition of Frieze London with a presentation of new works by Lauren Halsey.

Born in South Central Los Angeles and based there, Halsey is known for large-scale works and immersive installations that draw on the histories, architecture, social contexts, and vernacular poetics of her community. Her practice positions the people, institutions, public spaces, everyday objects, and colloquial symbols of her upbringing and present as critical nodes in the creative place-making strategies of these neighborhoods. She places their expressive cultures and designs into a dynamic exchange with Afro-diasporic mythologies, funk music and aesthetics, personal memory, and collective history. Ultimately, she provides viewers with new ways of imagining and experiencing the plenitude and vibrancy of Black life.

Halsey’s installation for Frieze is an ensemble of several components. In the center, a six-foot-tall plaza sign honors the textual iconography, color palettes, and creative wordplay found on Black- and Brown-owned business signage in working-class neighborhoods. “Bling Tax and Things” and “Affordable Black Art,” among others, serve as reminders of the continued importance of non-white businesses and cultural institutions in communities navigating the realities of gentrification, skyrocketing rent, and economic displacement. Surrounding the plaza sign are monochrome protruded engravings (2022–): sculptural reliefs that assemble a historical, contemporary, and mythic graphic record of South Central LA. These engravings also conjure up the cosmological carvings of ancient Egyptian and Mesoamerican civilizations. While their textual inscriptions appear almost hieroglyphic—transforming signage from South Central businesses, institutions, and protests into ciphers that reveal vital and necessary messages—it is the faces, spaces, and histories that these works reference that illuminate alternative constructions of the past, present, and future. Lastly, dense compositions of wallpaper on the structure’s exterior showcase the multiplicity and abundance of Blackness and Afro-diasporic expressive life via its innumerable forms, colors, textures, bodies, complexions, and frequencies.

The installation offers a portal into Halsey’s latest exercise in world-building and fantastical flight. It also extends concepts of the artist’s other projects, notably emajendat (2024–25) at Serpentine in London and sister dreamer, lauren halsey’s architectural ode to tha surge n splurge of south central los angeles, a sculpture park that will open in Los Angeles in spring 2026. “It grows out of my ongoing desire to find, or perhaps to create and design, a vocabulary and practice that exists somewhere beyond celebration and preservation,” Halsey explains. “It’s my dreamscape for a plaza that honors the businesses that still exist, as well as those that are no longer with us, commemorating their palette and that of the larger community and its members. But which also activates and immerses those who experience the space, most especially people from my neighborhood, transporting them into the realm of imagination, and into all that connects us, all that we share.”