Frieze art fair is now a global behemoth, with fairs in New York, Los Angeles and Seoul, and recent takeovers of another New York event, the Armory Show, and Expo Chicago. But on its 20th anniversary the fair – called Frieze London since its sibling Frieze Masters arrived in 2012 – is reassuringly similar to that first edition in 2003.
Of course, there have been tweaks, and thankfully the diversity of artists and galleries represented is infinitely richer than it was back then. But Frieze effectively got the practical basics of the fair right first time. This year, as last year, painting again feels especially abundant — it’s the safest bet for galleries in difficult economic moments. There’s also a conspicuous absence of some of the bright and/or showstopping sculpture and installations that have punctuated Frieze in the past (see last year’s Anthea Hamilton pumpkins, or Pierre Huyghe’s hermit crab in 2011).
And while yesterday’s VIP day didn’t feel as insanely busy as others in the fair’s history, there remains an undoubted buzz as most of London’s contemporary art scene, and plenty of international visitors, descend at once on the Regent’s Park tent. Masters, meanwhile, without the endless renewal of contemporary art, feels like it might need a more radical shake-up. Still, amid the hundreds of booths, both fairs have clear standout moments – here are this year’s highlights.
Frieze London
Sophie von Hellermann
Pilar Corrias, London
Von Hellermann’s title for her group of works, Dreamland, is both a specific place and an indication of her latest paintings’ ethereal atmosphere. Set on a wall painted by Von Hellermann with windswept patches of paint, the canvases picture Margate, where Von Hellermann has a studio, and reflect poetically on the Dreamland amusement park, pictured from a seagull’s eye view in Mid Flight. The paintings’ confectionary hues belie a certain elegiac quality, though, as Von Hellermann reflects in two of the paintings on the death of a friend.
Fabian Knecht
Alexander Levy, Berlin
For this stand, part of the Artist-to-Artist project, Olafur Eliasson chose Fabian Knecht, whose work at first appears to be abstract hanging textiles. But they are in fact camouflage nets that Knecht has brought back from Ukraine, which he has visited to join in resistance efforts, alongside Ukrainian artist friends. He took professional nets with him and exchanged them for these homespun examples, made from swatches of clothing, into which, he says, hope and faith are woven as well as scraps of fabric.
Leilah Babirye
Stephen Friedman, London
Babirye’s work in wood, ceramics and found materials addresses queerphobia in her native Uganda. An insulting term for LGBTQ people in the Luganda language is “abasiyazi” literally meaning sugarcane husk, but indicating “trash”, Babirye says. Hence, she adorns her bold wooden and ceramics figures, with rubbish, including spoons, tires and various bits of bicycle as an act of defiance. Meanwhile, a group of small ceramic heads look on, forms of deity, the artist says, to protect her queer protagonists.
Fred Eversley and Deana Lawson
David Kordansky, Los Angeles and New York
An unlikely pairing of artists 37 years apart which works beautifully. It was Lawson, a photographic artist, who invited Eversley, a veteran of the Light and Space sculptural movement, whose concern with minimal form, spectacular surface and modern material is exemplified in his Untitled (cylindrical lens) sculptures, which seem uncannily to capture light within them.
While Lawson’s analogue photographs document Black experience in the US, they too dwell on light, and particularly the effects of mirrors, including, in Approaching Ivanpah, the reflections of a vast solar farm shot from the air.
Larry Achiampong
Copperfield, London
Achiampong is a lifelong video gamer who has explored this obsession, and particularly its racial and gender biases, across numerous works. But this is perhaps his most detailed focus on the subject. It’s a reconstruction of a gaming room in Ghana, where Achiampong’s parents were born, complete with a sofa, a beanbag and armchair, and various classic games consoles. On the walls, Achiampong adopts the style of ubiquitous painted adverts in African countries to reimagine gaming characters that exemplify the endemic whitewashing in gaming culture.
Frieze Masters
Juvenile T-Rex
David Aaron, London
Frieze Masters makes a big thing of its stretch from the ancient to the modern, but this colossus must be its one of its oldest ever objects. Yes, it’s a dinosaur, and it dates from the Cretacious period, some 65 million years ago. Dug up in Montana a few years ago, its skull is 90 per cent complete and 50 per cent of its body is intact – which explains its $20m price tag. It makes the objects around it, from ancient Egypt, Rome and elsewhere, look positively contemporary.
Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man with a Feigned Oval
Salomon Lilian, Geneva
While not quite the kind of knock-your-socks-off masterpiece that currently fills the walls of the National Gallery’s magnificent survey of the Dutch master, this is still an undoubted highlight of the fair. Shown alongside several other old masters on the booth, it’s more understated in its handling than many of Hals’s dazzlingly virtuosic works, but there are plenty of fine details, including in the delicate rendering of the beard and the ruff. The sitter is unknown – we only know that he’s 50 years old from the inscription – but may have been a Mennonite, accounting for Hals’s relatively sober treatment.
Franz West
Gagosian, London
While Gagosian’s booth of gaudy Damien Hirst garden paintings at Frieze London further confirms his work’s epic descent from grace, the gallery’s booth at Masters is among the best. The artist Oscar Murillo has selected works on paper and a couple of sculptures by Franz West, the sardonic Austrian maverick, and they reflect West’s anarchic spirit across five decades, from tiny cartoonish pencil drawings from the 1970s to lewd interventions into advertising images, and a series of West’s absurd posters for his own shows.
Faith Ringgold
ACA Galleries, New York
Following on from her stunning recent retrospective at the Musée Picasso in Paris, this is a neat grouping of some of the major series in Ringgold’s six-decade career. Among them are early paintings exploring white supremacy and the racial divide in the US, a marvellous group of Seventies works, including the Feminist Series thangkas, in which Ringgold used the form of these Thai textiles while including quotes from key feminist thinkers and activists, including Amy Jacques Garvey and Sojourner Truth.
Arlene Shechet
Pace, London
Part of a new series for the fair called Studio, selected by former Tate and Metropolitan Museum curator Sheena Wagstaff, intended to focus on the intimate spaces in which artists make their work, this booth features two bodies of work: exquisitely delicate cast paper vessels from Shechet’s 1997 Once Removed series, and an extraordinarily boldly coloured group, Together, with forms like folded bodies, beautiful matte surfaces and occasional liquid globules of ceramic glaze. The latter works were made during the pandemic, so what are they doing here at Masters? Well, they riff on the luminous colours of medieval Books of Hours, two of which sit in a vitrine.
