Felix and the Return of the Boutique Hotel Art Fair

Feature image: Tropicana Pool at Felix Art Fair. Photograph by Erhan Us.

Founded in 2019 by collector Dean Valentine and gallery–owner brothers Al and Mills Morán with the goal of making art fairs 'fun and genuine' again, Felix Art Fair’s 8th edition took place February 25–March 1, 2026. The event was hosted at The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, with hotel rooms on the 11th–12th floors and poolside areas allocated to galleries. This is an iconic location; it hosted the very first Academy Awards in 1929 and is said to have inspired David Hockney’s paintings of the Tropicana Pool in the 1960s.

The fair drew nearly 60 galleries, including 20 participating for the first time, with an international scope including galleries from France, the UK, Italy, Korea, and Japan, alongside a strong Los Angeles/New York presence.

One of the most notable new features of this year’s edition was The Felix Podcast, hosted by Dean Valentine and journalist Janelle Zara. The podcast discussed current issues in the art world throughout the fair, emphasizing that Felix is not merely a sales venue but also a platform for thought.

The fair was founded to prevent young galleries from being crushed under massive booth fees. Renting hotel rooms instead of traditional booths lowers costs and allows galleries to bring bolder, more experimental works.

The natural limitations of the rooms encouraged creative use of spaces such as restroom walls and poolside lounge areas. Seeing artworks in hotel restrooms is rare outside the U.S. Beyond the personal dimension, this approach also reflects institutional considerations, providing a model for efficient use of limited spaces. Art placed on tables or beds doesn’t detract from the experience; it adds an experimental atmosphere.

An example of excellent use [06:15] of transitional and interior spaces is Bloom[er] by Green Yoon at Cevera Yoon Gallery [06:31]. Whether due to the artist’s enigmatic presence, the viewer’s intended immersion in the work, or a deliberate disavowal effect, no textual information about the piece is provided on the website despite full access to content online.

Across the fair, a recurring issue appeared: many artworks at professional exhibitions were detached from their labels. This reduces the experience to a store–like browsing activity. For instance, at Moran Moran Gallery [09:05], a text–based work initially caught my attention, or fabric works placed across from TVs in rooms, but the artists’ names were missing. The gallery website [under Felix page] similarly presents only one image with many artist names, rather than a PDF of all works. The same applied at Carlye Packer [12:10], where I could not find artist names/links/documents online.

In this context, galleries may rely on papers placed near works, but in fast–paced environments where visitors come and go quickly, the most efficient way to make the artwork accessible is to position information next to the piece. You can't simply expect the visitors to take and keep the handouts from every gallery and carry them during the whole event. Respecting the artist and the work before the viewer is shown by telling the story of the work. Gallery staff may be too limited or exhausted to assist, and visitors inquiring about prices while artworks are scattered risk disregarding the artist’s process entirely.

In contrast, the Corbett vs. Dempsey presentation offered easy access to artist information. While not every work had labels, seeing Celeste Rapone’s work [12:24] sparked curiosity about her story. Her practice merges figurative storytelling with formal experiments, translating psychological tensions of everyday life into visual language. Autobiographical details, art history references, and mundane objects converge in her work, exploring anxiety, longing, and nostalgia specific to the millennial generation.

Rapone’s paintings are mostly set in eerily flattened interior spaces. Within these cramped and confined rooms, the figures contort their bodies into impossible positions, stretching toward the boundaries of the space; their limbs extend to touch the edges of the canvas or push against the frame. This tension is a core aspect of the artist’s exploration of the boundary between figuration and abstraction, with the figures functioning both as subjective narrative agents and as formal elements of the composition.

The figures are often depicted amid ordinary activities: reading, working, preparing food, or simply lost in thought. However, these scenes emphasize the act of being observed more than conveying a specific narrative. In doing so, Rapone’s paintings create a space that both records the small moments of everyday life and interrogates the ways in which these moments are represented.

At Gattopardo and Tyler Park Presents [16:45] TPP, I encountered Daniel Ingroff’s [17:14] Marrow, which evoked a mystical sensation and drove me to research the artist. Ingroff’s painting practice reconstructs images as narratives, experiences, memories, and dreamlike states. He often starts from photographic sources, such as his personal iPhone archive, internet images, vintage magazines, and photographs, combining them into heterogeneous visual pools that result in compositions rich with personal and cultural references.

Many compositions are hybrid scenes combining different sources. For example, some paintings are based on model photographs from mid–century magazines with homoerotic undertones like Physique Pictorial, while others incorporate internet or nature images. These are merged with landscapes or portraits from his personal environment to create new, often imaginary spaces. Symbolic and intuitive motifs [hands, shadows, shells, landscape fragments, or layered imagery] construct a personal iconography while offering universal associations. The resulting scenes are intimate, subtly humorous, sometimes melancholic, and occasionally eerie, blurring the boundary between everyday reality and imagination.

Presented by Adams and Ollman, Nao Kikuchi [18:35] reduces built–environment elements to abstract, stylized architectural signs or fragments. Her small–scale ceramic works draw from spatial details like room layouts, tile patterns, stairwells, or window sequences. Through layered colors, surface textures, and referential forms, Kikuchi reinterprets the experience of urban space, producing visual traces akin to marking the steps of her presence and movement as a map of the environment.

Instead of leaving many TVs in the rooms unused, galleries could have pre–emptively allocated video art [by announcing open calls and/or choosing among their portfolio pool] or gallery/artwork information designed for full–screen display, including at least the gallery logo. Works chosen solely for sales purposes, combined with anonymity, sometimes made the views from upper–floor rooms more interesting than the artworks themselves.

The ground–floor rooms, converted into exhibition spaces, lacked clear entry and exit directions, as visitors could enter both from the pool and the corridor. Despite this, crowd management was slightly more effective and spacious than on the 11th–12th floors. Even during opening/preview hours, the density [considering room sizes and elevator queues] reached an uncomfortable level. Weekend and general admission days' crowding remains unpredictable.

In terms of visual language, fairs can vary significantly among themselves. For many visitors, Felix stood out for the predominance of pastel tones in works that were generally priced higher than at the other six fairs this week, yet lower than at Frieze.

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