Installation view, Yu Hong: Islands of the Mind, Lisson Gallery, London, Sept. 27 – 9 Nov. 9.
Photo: Yu Hong. Courtesy Lisson Gallery
7 Not-To-Be-Missed Exhibitions During Frieze London
From Tracey Emin’s new paintings of sculptures examining love and loss, mortality and rebirth to Anna Weyant’s surreal, psychological studies at Gagosian
With Frieze London and Frieze Masters opening this week, London’s lively art scene is bubbling over with exciting exhibitions of contemporary and modern art. From Tracey Emin’s new paintings of sculptures examining love and loss, mortality and rebirth at White Cube and Francis Bacon’s self-portraits and portraits of friends and lovers at the National Portrait Gallery to Anna Weyant’s surreal, psychological studies at Gagosian and Urs Fischer’s visual mashups of a dystopian America at Sadie Coles HQ, these are the must-see shows during Frieze Art Week.
Tracey Emin, Blood-Blood and More Blood, 2024. Photo: White Cube (Eva Herzog)
1. Tracey Emin at White Cube
Ever an autobiographical artist, Tracey Emin’s art rises to a new level of intensity through her latest paintings, sculptures, and video in the exhibition “I followed you to the end,” her 14th solo show with the London powerhouse since joining the gallery as one of the most controversial YBAs (Young British Artists) in 1993. Featuring an arresting series of expressive canvases that reflect on a life slowly slipping away, bronzes that capture pure corporeal passion, and moving footage of the artist virtually bleeding for her art, the emotional exhibition reflects on Emin’s love and loss and her recent confrontations with mortality in the most compelling ways.
Through November 10
Francis Bacon, Head VI, 1949. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London.
2. Francis Bacon at the National Portrait Gallery
One of the most influential figurative artists of the 20th Century, Francis Bacon transformed the appearance of his subjects through a skillful use of paint. The exhibition “Francis Bacon: Human Presence” features more than 55 works exploring the artist’s profound connection to portraiture and how he challenged traditional definitions of the genre. Along with his self-portraits, the sitters in this sensational show include his friends Lucian Freud and Isabel Rawsthorne and lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer. The exhibition charts the evolution of Bacon’s practice, exploring how he embraced and challenged the conventional classifications of portraiture, placing his work alongside a painting by Rembrandt, an artist he admired, and photographs of Bacon by Cecil Beaton, Arnold Newman, Bill Brandt, and others.
Through January 19
Vincent Van Gogh, Olive trees with the Alpilles in the Background, 1889. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence
3. Vincent van Gogh at the National Gallery
Celebrating the National Gallery’s 200th anniversary and marking the centenary of the Gallery’s acquisition of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers and Van Gogh’s Chair, two of its most famous pictures, in 1924, the exhibition “Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers” brings together a curated selection of masterpieces by the beloved Dutch artist. Standouts include Starry Night over the Rhône from Paris’ Musée d’Orsay, The Yellow House from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, The Bedroom from the Art Institute of Chicago, and the rarely seen The Olive Trees from New York’s Museum of Modern Art, along with works on paper and other paintings that explore the artist’s creative process and his sources of inspiration.
Through January 19
Michael Craig-Martin, Eye of the Storm, 2003. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Courtesy Gagosian.
4. Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy of Arts
Is Michael Craig-Martin a Pop art practitioner or a Conceptual artist? Judging from his work over the past 30 years, most people might identify him as the former, but as this arresting retrospective reveals, he started his career—fresh out of Yale in 1966—creating Conceptual artworks. An influential artist and teacher in the UK, particularly to the YBAs, the Dublin-born artist famously claimed a glass of water was an oak tree in a 1973 work, before turning to wall works of everyday objects drawn with narrow tape and colorful, large-scale, minimalist and maximalist paintings. This lively overview also includes his giant sculptural line drawings of safety pins, umbrellas, and screws formed from powder-coated steel, which he has been making since 2011, and more recent digital artworks, including portraits of George Michael and Zaha Hadid and an immersive installation that engulfs the viewer in a world of animated objects.
Through December 10
Yu Hong, Metropolis Island, 2024. Photo: Courtesy Lisson Gallery.
5. Yu Hong at Lisson Gallery
A celebrated Chinese contemporary artist, Yu Hong studied painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where she continued to teach after graduating in 1988. Best known for her monumental allegorical paintings—her massive 2021 triptych The Ship of Fools, which references Hieronymus Bosch’s eponymous canvas but depicts a group of youngsters struggling to keep a boat afloat in dangerous waters, was a standout in the Unlimited section of Art Basel last year and is featured in her current Venice Biennale exhibition, organized by The Asian Art Initiative of the Guggenheim Museum. For her first solo exhibition in London, the Beijing and New York-based painter presents a selection of poetic landscape paintings of people in nature that poignantly reference art history while exploring the social tensions between isolation and togetherness.
Through November 9
Anna Weyant, Girl in Window, 2024. Photo: Maris Hutchinson. Courtesy Gagosian.
6. Anna Weyant at Gagosian
A talented painter of dazzling figurative pictures, Anna Weyant paints portraits and still lives as convincingly as the Old Masters yet with the irony of the best Pop artists. Inspired by the Dutch Golden Age painters, Modernist masters, and contemporary art stars—as well as movies, music, novels, and children’s books—Weyant filters her influences through her mental and visual sieves to create charismatic canvases ripe with dark humor. Her first solo exhibition in London, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves?,” follows a conceptual thread developed in “Baby, It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over,” her 2022 Gagosian debut in New York, and “The Guitar Man,” her 2023 debut in Paris, with playfully erotic pictures that smartly mix surrealism with symbolic psychological situations to construct secluded scenarios, which are meant to both attract and keep the wolves at bay.
Through December 20
Urs Fischer, Natural Diamonds, 2024. Photo: Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ.
7. Urs Fischer at Sadie Coles HQ
Mining the potential of materials—from clay, steel, and paint to bread, dirt, and produce—Urs Fischer creates witty works that perplex and befuddle. Through distortions of scale, illusion, and the juxtaposition of everyday objects, his sculptures, paintings, photographs, and large-scale installations explore themes of perception and representation while maintaining clever irreverence and sardonic humor. The large-scale paintings in “Scratch & Sniff, “his 12th solo show with the gallery, offer an anthology of the Swiss-born, New York-based artist’s spirited experiments in painting and installation. Combining painting, photography, and ink-jet printing, he dynamically layers eye-catching imagery from the underbelly of America to create a visual cosmic soup that’s simultaneously compelling and distasteful. Presented in the gallery’s expansive space with a printed vinyl floor and painted furniture to simulate the artist’s LA studio and accompanied by a free book of the pictures utilized in the paintings, the engaging exhibition is a portal into where the medium of painting is today and where it’s headed tomorrow.
Through November 9
Cover: Installation view, Yu Hong: Islands of the Mind, Lisson Gallery, London, Sept. 27 – 9 Nov. 9.
Photo: Yu Hong. Courtesy Lisson Gallery
