Opening
Saturday, November 15
4 – 7PM

On View
November 15 – December 20 2025

Wednesday – Saturday
Noon – 5PM

Marta
3021 Rowena Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90039

Historic furniture works presented in collaboration with Amsterdam Modern.

Chase Biado
‘On the Nature of Elves’

Marta is delighted to present Elf Houses, a joint exhibition of drawings by Chase Biado and lighting works by Antonia Pinter—the artistic duo that at times comprise the Los Angeles-based morphology A History of Frogs—alongside a selection of historic furniture works. The presentation, spanning floor, wall, and suspended space, offers a scenography of the domestic; a portrait of the interior evoked by representations of the exterior, envisaged in the realm of those fair and primordial creatures—the elves.

Anchored by 19 works on paper, selected from Biado’s larger Elf House oeuvre, each two-dimensional dwelling articulates the diversity of elfin existence—of the homes and landscapes they create and inhabit. There are houses surrounded by blooms and friendly trees. Houses made of stone and patchwork. Houses by lakes, in fields, and cantilevered over coasts. Houses that are shy, easygoing, occasionally disgruntled. Houses for small ideas and memories. Whether illuminated by summer moons or dark suns, situated beneath turtle or bird clouds, each domicile encloses the tender in the surreal; the earnest in the fantastical; the familiar in the dreamlike. With bold and gentle marks, the artist renders a world that removes the boundary between residence and resident, establishing the narrative psychologies of richly-imagined figures that remain just out of sight, elusive and intangible.

As visitors consider Biado’s manifold structures, Pinter’s five conical lights—a shape borne of the brass bells first presented with Marta in the original Elf House (2022)—provide gentle articulations of the three typologies of work displayed. Initially sculpted in wax then variously cast in bronze and aluminum, each form extends the artist’s language of small spheres through unique surface variations, offering patterns that evoke the pageantry of medieval and Elizabethan courts—the bells of a jester’s cap, the rows of buttons that detail a corset, the shining pearls that hang around a monarch’s neck or adorn her dress sleeves and hair. There is an air of Pierrot, the sad clown from the commedia dell’arte, whose oversized pom-poms sway against his smock as he pines for his love, Columbine, eternally lost to Harlequin.

With soft scalloped edges, the language of Pinter’s lighting elements find formal complement with the pairs of antique bobbin chairs placed within her and Biado’s shared suggestion of mythic domesticity, each turned segment composing arms, legs, and seat backing undulating like the hills behind A Quizzical House—a place known, like so many homes, by the key of its emotional register.

Available in tandem with Elf Houses, the exhibition: Elf House, the publication (First Edition, 2025). Compiling a series of 61 letter-size charcoal drawings produced over the past 1.5 years, Elf House creates a speculative history documenting a hidden taxonomy of elven domesticity. Biado’s whimsical, often meditative drawings are accompanied by the lyrical essay ‘On the Nature of Elves’ by the artist. Available at the gallery and via New Documents.

Chase Biado, Elf House
First Edition, 2025
132 Pages, Cloth Bound Hardcover
61 Plates w/ an Essay by the Artist
Published by New Documents
ISBN 978–1–953441–11–9

Chase Biado is an artist whose drawings and paintings explore the intersection of fantasy and lived experience through a distinctive visual language. He earned his BFA from Portland State University in Oregon in 2012. Solo exhibitions of Biado’s work have taken place at Asia Art Center, Taipei; The Pit, Los Angeles; Dimin, New York; and Noon Projects, Los Angeles, among others. Group exhibitions that have shown Biado’s work have taken place at: The Pit, Los Angeles; Dimin Gallery, New York; Herbert Art Museum, Coventry, UK; VODA, Seoul; Marta, Los Angeles; The Neutra VDL House, Los Angeles; Rusha & Co., Los Angeles; and Helen’s Costume, Portland, OR. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Antonia Pinter is an artist based in Los Angeles, California. Working between sculpture, functional objects, and jewelry, Antonia Pinter creates pieces that suggest narratives while preserving their mysteries. She has presented solo exhibitions at Marta, Los Angeles, and with the gallery at NADA, New York earlier this year. Pinter’s work has been included in group exhibitions at Sea View, Los Angeles; the Herbert Art Museum as part of the Coventry Biennial, Coventry, UK; Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery, New York; Massey Klein Gallery, New York; Dimin, New York; Marta, Los Angeles; NOON Projects, Los Angeles; BozoMag, Los Angeles; and The Valley, Taos, among others.