Merikokeb Berhanu and Fred Tomaselli at Frieze Los Angeles

For the 2026 edition of Frieze Los Angeles, James Cohan will present a suite of new paintings by Merikokeb Berhanu. This mark’s the artist’s first presentation in Los Angeles, following her New York gallery debut with James Cohan last fall.  

Merikokeb Berhanu (b. 1977, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) explores spiritual transcendence and environmental consciousness through the synthesis of bold abstract gestures and biomorphic forms. The artist creates paintings that blend influences ranging from pan-African pictorial traditions to global modernist movements within dense geometric patterns of resonant symbolism. This distinctive language speaks to Berhanu’s lived experience within the African diaspora following a relocation to the United States in 2017. Her work draws on centuries of image-making to probe the tensions between the natural world and the manmade, commenting on the complexities of contemporary urbanization and the profound interconnectedness of all living things.  

Alongside this solo project, the gallery will present a significant early example of Fred Tomaselli's ongoing series Chemical Celestial Portraits. Chemical Celestial Portraits, Time's Arrow Version, 2014, is a suite of 12 hand-embellished photograms, collages and drawings that reflect the artist's typical amalgamation of the mystical, the absurd, and the hallucinatory. These unconventional portraits of friends and family members are based not on their appearance and accomplishments but instead on their astrological and pharmacological identities, what the artist has called their "inner and outer space."

On a black ground, Tomaselli inscribed a constellation of white dots, each bearing the name of a specific drug - some recreational, others pharmaceutical. The arrangement of the white dots is derived from the star map for the sitter’s sign, which is in turn derived from their date of birth. Each dot is named after a different drug or medication consumed by the sitter over the course of their lifetime, recorded in a questionnaire administered by the artist

Chemical Celestial Portraits, Time's Arrow Version is the only singular installation that represents one full calendar year, with each of the 12 photograms corresponding with 12 signs of the zodiac.