Johyun Gallery, Frieze London 2024.
Photo: Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Frieze and Linda Nylind.
The Buzziest Artworks and Booths at Frieze London 2024
The most talked-about artworks and booths at Frieze London and Frieze Masters, which brought together more than 270 galleries across the two editions from October 9-13
Returning to Regent’s Park with a bold new design for Frieze London and a new curatorial direction for Frieze Masters, Frieze opened last week to an enthusiastic crowd of art lovers, collectors, critics, curators, and artists. Presenting more than 270 galleries over the two fairs from October 9 to 13, Frieze London gave more prominence to its curated sections in a new layout by the design practice A Studio Between and Frieze Masters revealed a refined architectural plan by Annabelle Selldorf.
“This year’s architectural and curatorial innovations continue to push the boundaries and, together, the two events offer an unparalleled opportunity to experience a wide breadth of works, across generations and geographies,” Kristell Chadé , Executive Director of Fairs, Frieze, shared with Galerie.
Delving into the latest contemporary art at Frieze London and viewing Frieze Sculpture in Regent’s Park while walking to Frieze Masters to survey centuries-old art alongside more recently created works, Galerie looked and listened to compile a curated list of our favorite, buzziest artworks and booths at the fair.
Nils Alix-Tabeling, La déesse de Montbouy, 2024. Photo: Nils Alix-Tabeling. Courtesy Public, London
1. Nils Alix-Tabeling at Public, Frieze London
One of the most eye-catching booths at Frieze London’s moved-to-the-front-of-the-fair Focus section (dedicated to solo and dual-artist presentations by galleries formed in or after 2012) was Public’s solo show of surreal sculptures by French artist Nils Alix-Tabeling. Best known for his mixed-media sculptures and installations exploring pagan traditions, witchcraft, and the occult, the artist uses myth and folklore to reimagine a future for queer and female voices of rebellion. The finely crafted sculptures on view take their point of departure from a pre-roman pagan temple dating to 8 BC in Montbouy, France, with La Déesse de Montbouy giving form to the Great Mother goddess. With the face of a Celtic Sheela Na Gig, mystical adornment with river water pearls hanging from web-like tripe casings, wings of an angel, and campy footwear, the fascinating figure becomes a gate-keeper to keep heteropatriarchal society at bay.
Installation view, Billy Childish, Lehmann Maupin, Frieze London. Photo: Courtesy of Billy Childish and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
2. Billy Childish at Lehmann Maupin, Frieze London
A celebrated British painter, musician, filmmaker, poet, and advocate for amateurism, Billy Childish has become an international cult figure for his introspective, autobiographical, and emotional paintings, writing, and music. Considered an influence on the confessional style of art by Tracey Emin, with whom he had a long-term relationship during the 1980s, Childish has written and published several novels and more than 40 volumes of confessional poetry, recorded more than 170 LPs, and painted hundreds of canvases over the past 50 years. Presenting a new group of lively landscape and portrait paintings, most of which were sold within hours of the fair’s opening, the seasoned artist set up a studio in the gallery’s booth to create even more paintings under the watch of his adoring fans.
Installation view, Tau Lewis, Sadie Coles HQ, Frieze London. Photo: Courtesy of Tau Lewis and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Katie Morrison
3. Tau Lewis at Sadie Coles HQ, Frieze London
A standout in “The Milk of Dreams,” Cecilia Alemani’s engaging exhibition highlighting women artists in the 2022 Venice Biennale, Tau Lewis quickly became known for her giant masks constructed from foraged textiles and artifacts. Stitched together like 3D quilts from scrap fabrics, furs, and leathers, they took inspiration from Yoruba masks and the writings of Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka to connect to an ancestral past. Since then, the Toronto-born, Brooklyn-based artist has expanded her sculpted and painted assemblages to include a variety of symbolic figures and wall works. In a wide corner of the gallery’s booth, Lewis used upcycled materials to convey a sense of healing and shared history with African diasporic communities while keeping their methods of art-making and survival at the center of her regenerative process.
Eva Švankmajerová, Spící Venouš (Sleeping Venus; after Giorgione), 1969. The Gallery of Everything, Frieze Masters. Photo: The estate of Eva Švankmajerová. Photo: Tate (Joe Humphrys and Josh Croll)
4. Eva Švankmajerová at The Gallery of Everything, Frieze Masters
A Czech painter, ceramist, set designer, and poet, Eva Švankmajerová was a key member of Prague’s Surrealist Group. Married to the Surrealist filmmaker Jan Švankmajer, with whom she collaborated on several films, she passed from breast cancer in 2005 at age 65 but left behind an impressive body of work. She began painting in the 1960s, after her husband gave her two books on the works of Henri Rousseau and Salvador Dalí. At Frieze Masters, the gallery presented paintings from her breakthrough Emancipation Cycle series, which were shown together for the first time since their creation. Parodying the canvases of Rousseau, Manet, and other male artists, Švankmajerová replaced men in the paintings with women. Her 1969 painting Spící Venouš (Sleeping Venus; after Giorgione) was acquired at the fair for the Tate’s collection as one of four artworks purchased through the Frieze Tate Fund.
Installation view, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Pace, Frieze Masters, Studio. Photo: Photo by Damian Griffiths. Courtesy of Nathalie Du Pasquier and Pace
5. Nathalie Du Pasquier at Pace, Frieze Masters
A founding member of the avant-garde design group Memphis, Nathalie Du Pasquier turned to painting as her primary focus and passion in 1987. Since working in various media since then, the Bordeaux-born, Milan-based artist has explored representational and abstract two- and three-dimensional forms. Her one-person exhibition at the gallery in Studio, a solo section of Frieze Master curated by Sheena Wagstaff, Former Chair of Modern and Contemporary Art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, traced the evolution of her practice from early architectural works and still-life wooden assemblages to her most recent abstract paintings and works on paper. The arresting display also featured an artist-curated selection of contemporary and historical works that have influenced her practice, including collages by Louise Nevelson and an eight-panel Chaekgeori, a traditional genre of painting that originated in 17th-century Korea.
Installation view, Libby Heaney, Ent- (non-earthly delights), 2024. Gazelli Art House, Frieze Sculpture. Photo: Photo: Linda Nylind. Courtesy Linda Nylind/ Frieze.
6. Libby Heaney, presented by Gazelli Art House, Frieze Sculpture
An award-winning British visual artist with a PhD and professional research background in Quantum Information Science, Libby Heaney earned an MFA in 2015 from Central St. Martins, focusing on AI and hybrid digital-physical works. One of 22 leading international artists hailing from five continents, whose work was sited throughout the Regent’s Park’s historic English Gardens, Heaney presented an interactive sculpture that remixes The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch with quantum computing. Her steel and fiberglass sculpture, Ent- (non-earthly delights), consists of three physical parts and two immersive AR experiences activated through QR codes. Through a series of ghostly, sci-fi animations, she allowed viewers to interact with the sculpture in the park and take the imagery on their devices to place in other realms, giving us a peek into where visual media is headed.
Ryan Gander, A Moving Object, or Short termism, 2024. Photo: Ryan Gander Studio. Courtesy of Ryan Gander and Esther Schipper
7. Ryan Gander at Esther Schipper, Frieze London
A philosophical artist working in a wide range of media, Ryan Gander makes artworks that materialize in different forms – from paintings and sculpture to video, animatronics, graphic design, installation, performance, and more—yet are hard to categorize in the context of most artistic movements. The recipient of honorary doctorates from two British universities and an OBE for services to contemporary arts, the London and Suffolk-based artist has become internationally known for his witty, thought-provoking artworks. At Frieze London, his dropped ice cream cone, cast in bronze and realistically painted, held its position in the gallery’s booth like any other displayed artwork but ironically looked out of place. Part of a series of abandoned ice cream cones and bars, it’s based on the artist’s actual observation of a child dropping an ice cream cone with regret—a marker of how life can change in a moment.
Installation view, Ayla Tavares, HATCH and Galeria Athena. Photo: Photo: Julian Bloom at exhibitiondocumentation. Photo: Julian Bloom. Courtesy of Ayla Tavares, HATCH and Galeria Athena
8. Ayla Tavares at HATCH and Galeria Athena, Frieze London
A new section at Frieze London this year, Smoke, focused on artists working with ceramics. Organized by Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum curator Pablo José Ramírez, the intriguing survey explored clay art from a Global South perspective, highlighting several Indigenous and diasporic artists. Standouts included Ayla Tavares’ site-specific installation with an organically shaped ceramic piece submerged in water, surrounded by abstract vessels and wall-works shaped to the size of her open palms, at Hatch Gallery and Galeria Athena. Other notable presentations were Karla Ekaterine Canseco’s baroque clay and metal sculptures inspired by the myth of the Xoloitzcuintli, a hairless Mexican dog that guides the dead to the underworld, at Murmurs, and Yeni Mao’s fragmented stoneware cylinders, supported by blackened iron armatures, which evoked both figurative forms and timeless artifacts, at Make Room.
Installation view, Carol Bove, Gagosian, Frieze London. Photo: Carol Bove. Photo: Maris Hutchinson. Courtesy Gagosian
9. Carol Bove at Gagosian, Frieze London
In one of the most striking presentations at Frieze London, Carol Bove exhibited nine ten-foot-tall abstract sculptures that collectors reportedly scooped up within hours of the fair’s opening at $850,000 a pop at Gagosian. Displayed in a booth without walls at the center of the last section of the fair—where the high-profile galleries had been relocated in the new design , even though it didn’t deter buyers from running straight there—the sculptures were arranged like they were titled, Grove I–Grove IX. Incorporating a chain, a painted disc, or a painted and partially crumpled square-profile stainless-steel tube, the elements were impeccably attached to towering, raw steel fragments. Creating a metaphoric forest in a park-positioned art fair, the artist’s colorful installation challenged viewers to re-imagine the industrial-age past in a more contemporary, digital-age realm.
Nengi Omuku, Swing Low, 2024. Kasmin and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, Frieze London, Artist-to-Artist. Photo: Courtesy of Kasmin and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery.
10. Nengi Omuku at Kasmin and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, Frieze London
In the Artist-to-Artist section, offering solo presentations selected by world-renowned artists, Yinka Shonibare chose Nigerian artist Nengi Omuku. Employing pre-colonial fabric made from wild silk, Omuku reverses the stitching and assembles strips to create a new surface on the back of the fabrics for her otherworldly pictures. Painting hazy, featureless people in mottled landscapes, she’s discovered a means to merge the present with the past. She sources her subject matter from Nigerian press photos and archival imagery, while also working with models—placing them in lush, imaginary backgrounds. Rather than presenting her paintings on traditional stretcher bars, Omuku suspends the stitched, painted fabric from hanging rods away from the wall so that the original textiles can be glimpsed. Finding a spiritual connection with the vintage material, the Lagos-based artist creates ethereal allegories that imaginatively explore her colorful cultural heritage and her country’s current state of social unrest.
Cover: Johyun Gallery, Frieze London 2024.
Photo: Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Frieze and Linda Nylind.
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