For Frieze Los Angeles 2026, Ortuzar will present a solo exhibition of works by Los Angeles-based artist Linda Stark (b. San Diego, California). The presentation will bring together paintings and works on paper that foreground Stark’s enduring engagement with feminism, alchemy, and the balance between control and chance. 

Stark’s belief that “art is a space where the abject and sublime can co-exist” is vividly embodied in new works on paper from her tarot card series, which merge archetypal imagery with personal symbols. In The Empress with Perylene Heart Weave (2025), the Empress tarot card—an emblem of divine feminine energy, abundance, and fertility—is rendered in meticulous graphite and colored pencil. Nestled within the composition, Stark depicts her 2020 painting, Perylene Heart Weave, as a stand-in for the card’s heart shaped shield. The heart bleeds red drips—introducing chance operations into the carefully constructed image. Two new drawings titled “California” (2025) feature the title’s slanted word in her own script. Stark says, “It’s a big word and doesn’t fit in the square, so I tilted it on the diagonal which better suits the spirit of California. It’s a dynamic place.” The letters are pierced at points where the cursive lines intersect to insinuate wounding. Punctured from the back with a small nail, an eruption is formed on the face which she rims with red paint. The perforations transform these drawings into bodily gestures that bind vulnerability and resilience into a single surface. 

Talismanic portraits of her beloved feline companions are the most prominent example of Stark’s engagement with inner states and the metaphysical. Her practice is influenced by Surrealism, and she shares an intuitive ideation process with women painters such as Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton. These works incorporate halations and golden lemniscates—symbols often associated with divinity. In Bastet (2016), Stark renders her black cat’s head with white whiskers, encircled by the scalloped edges of an opalescent flower. For Lion (Big Studio Cat) (2023), she depicts the plaster sculpture that presides over her studio as a protective presence. In both works, a halation edges these portrayals—achieved through a gradual, arduous wet-on-wet process—suggesting a threshold between the earthly and the transcendent.

Oil paint, in Stark’s hands, is material for time, touch, and devotion. This approach is evident in her Rotation series, where the canvas is incrementally turned between the drips of paint that flow across the surface and off the edge. In works such as Peppermint Rotation Diptych (1993), white and red striped drips gather at the center, forming abstract protrusions suggestive of the body––nipples, navels, or, in her words, “erotic bumps.” In Goodbye (a door opens) (1997), paint is gradually peaked in layers, forming a concentric, organic spiral derived from the interior pattern of a Stapelia bloom, and reminiscent of a mandala.  A shaped panel modeled on Marlo Thomas’s 1960s television hairdo is the inspiration for That Girl (1997), which Stark made sculptural through drips of black oil paint built up as ribbons of hair. The work exemplifies Stark’s sustained engagement with honoring the feminine, evident throughout her career, including earlier works such as Coat of Arms (1991), in which the artist recasts the female reproductive system as a heraldic device.

Linda Stark lives and works in Los Angeles. Stark has recently exhibited solo projects at Ortuzar, New York (2024); David Kordansky, Los Angeles (2020); Jenny’s, Los Angeles (2017); and Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California (2013). Recent group exhibitions include “Ordinary Extraordinary,” Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California (2024); “New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century,” Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California (2021–2022); “Made in L.A. 2018,” Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); “Painting: Now and Forever, Part III,” Matthew Marks Gallery and Greene Naftali, New York (2018); and “Forms of Identity: Women Artists in the 90s,” Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California (2017). Her work is in the public collections of the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California; Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California; and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut.