10 Highlights to Look for at Frieze London and Frieze Masters
From museum-worthy Old Masters to captivating solo presentations by contemporary art stars, here are the standout gallery booths to see in Regent’s Park this season
As the international art world converges at Regent’s Park for Frieze London and Frieze Masters, the 2026 edition—running October 14–18—promises a compelling mix of historical treasures, daring curatorial sections, landmark solo presentations, and a slew of rising new talents to discover. Here are the ten standout presentations and works to put on your radar.
1. Alice Neel at Victoria Miro & David Zwirner | Frieze Masters
In an exciting joint presentation, mega galleries Victoria Miro and David Zwirner are teaming up for a dedicated solo booth celebrating the legendary painter, Alice Neel. Aligned with the fair’s “Queering Modernism” theme this year—the fair’s new curatorial thread conceived by Anke Kempkes to re-evaluate 20th-century visual canons—the stand spotlights Neel’s uniquely radical and intimate approach to portraiture. On view will be her seminal portrait of poet Allen Ginsberg, exhibited alongside intimate, seldom-seen depictions of her Greenwich Village inner circle. The works are drawn from the acclaimed exhibition curated by Hilton Als: “At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World,” which debuted at David Zwirner Los Angeles in 2024 and was subsequently on view at Victoria Miro in London in 2025.
“Bringing our galleries together places Neel’s portraits of queer sitters in a new light, celebrating her openness to people who were often overlooked at the time,” says Glenn Scott Wright, president of Victoria Miro. “We’re especially excited to show Neel’s painting of John Cheim, the gallerist and co-founder of Cheim & Reid. He worked at Robert Miller Gallery, which represented Neel late in her career, and in 1985 he organized and curated her solo exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. A relatively late work, it contrasts the intensity of focus on his face with the looser, more abstract handling of his clothing and feels both intimate and powerful.”
2. Dalton Paula at Lisson Gallery | Frieze London
Posing the poignant question “Who nourishes freedom?” the Brazilian artist and researcher Dalton Paula transforms Lisson’s stand into a site of historical reclamation. The solo presentation features six new large-scale canvases alongside an evolution of his iconic “Retrato Silenciado (Silenced Portrait)” series—painted directly onto the covers of antique encyclopedias—inspired by 19th-century abolitionist lawyer Luiz Gama.
3. Shinro Ohtake at Take Ninagawa | Frieze London (The Code Universe Curated Section)
A highlight to look out for at the fair’s new “Code Universe” thematic section, which is curated by Carol Yinghua Lu (director of Beijing’s Inside-Out Art Museum), is Take Ninagawa. The Japanese gallery is presenting a selection of multidisciplinary works by legendary Japanese artist Shinro Ohtake, celebrating his tactile, layered assemblage techniques that explore ideas of mass culture and the evolution of digital imagery in a decidedly analogue fashion.
4. Marina Perez Simão at Pace Gallery | Frieze London
Pace will debut a suite of vibrant new canvases by the rising star Brazilian painter Marina Perez Simão in a custom-made architectural environment designed for the visitor to have an intimate experience with the works. Known for her fluid, ethereal landscapes that hover between abstraction and landscape topography, Simão’s latest body of work continues to explore the possibilities of color through three distinct spectrums: magenta, blue, and gray. Moving away from pop culture pinks toward natural earth pigments, Simão drew inspiration from NASA’s discovery of GJ 504 b—a pink gas planet shrouded in salt clouds—creating paintings she describes as “vague descriptions of strange worlds.”
“So much of the art fair experience is necessarily fast-paced, but this presentation rewards slowing down,” Samanthe Rubell, president of Pace, tells Galerie. “The architecture creates a sense of focus that allows Marina’s paintings to unfold gradually, and I’ve found that the longer I spend with them, the more they reveal. Rather than moving from one work to the next and one booth to the next, visitors are invited to immerse themselves in a distinct environment. If people leave remembering not only individual paintings, but also how they felt in the space, I think the presentation will have succeeded.”
5. Tamo Jugeli at Bukia Vakhania | Frieze London (Focus Section)
Fresh off being named Frieze London’s 2026 campaign artist, New York-based, Tbilisi-born painter Tamo Jugeli transforms Bukia Vakhania’s stand into an intimate, domestic sanctuary designed as an antidote to the standard fair white cube space. To ground the booth in London’s cultural heritage, Jugeli, who was a Galerie Artist to Watch in 2023, wrapped the space in William Morris’s 19th-century Pure Brer Rabbit Arts and Crafts wallpaper, illuminated by ambient sculptural lighting from Georgian designer Lado Lomitashvili. Framed within this setting is a grouping of four new canvases—each reflecting the balance of abstraction and figuration that she is known for.
“The idea of creating a domestic setting came from Tamo herself and grew naturally out of the way she thinks about painting, space, and place,” says Natia Bukia, co-founder of the gallery. “An art fair can be such an accelerated environment, so we wanted to create a space where people could experience the works in relation to light, pattern, scale, and the surrounding objects, as you would living with art at home. A key work that is not to be missed is Passerby (2026). Here, there is an immediate sense of a figure, but the longer you look, the less certain that figure becomes.”
6. Paul Robas at Alice Amati | Frieze London (Artist to Artist Section)
In the fair’s must-see Artist-to-Artist section—where established talents handpick emerging voices—rising British painter Louise Giovanelli has nominated emerging art star Paul Robas for a solo stand. Exhibited with Alice Amati, the Vienna-based Romanian artist builds multi-layered works in acrylic and ink that explore themes of memory and perception. Sharing Giovanelli’s obsession with surface, light, and subtle psychological tension, Robas’s dreamlike, shifting compositions resist simple reading.
7. Márcia Falcão at Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel | Frieze London
Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel presents a solo booth of major new paintings by Brazilian art star Márcia Falcão. Rooted in her upbringing on the outskirts of Rio, Falcão combines dense, tactile brushwork with expressive, bodily compositions to interrogate the female form against an urban landscape. To express the reality of contemporary Brazilian life, Falcão reclaims Baroque traditions and subversive art historical motifs—reinterpreting iconic archetypes from Rubensian figures to John Everett Millais’s Ophelia and the classical Pietà.
“Falcão’s unruly brushstrokes are fast and somewhat violent, making use of a reduced palette of browns that depict both the physical and the psychological body,” the gallery’s founding director, Marcia Fortes, tells Galerie. “Frieze’s international audience will feel in the flesh the power and boldness of her work.” Don’t miss the painting Venia, which translates to reverence in Latin. “It is the most distinct from the body of work presented, the difference being the high contrast in the spatial relation of the body. The distortion is not in the gesture itself but in the contrast.”
8. Ibrahim El-Salahi at Vigo Gallery | Frieze Masters
Vigo Gallery pays homage to Ibrahim El-Salahi with a museum-quality solo booth featuring rare, 1950s Slade-period works from the artist’s family collection—material that has never before been available on the market. A pioneer of African modernism and the Hurufiyya movement, the legendary Sudanese master was the first African artist granted a Tate Modern retrospective. The interesting presentation offers a look at his formative years in London, charting how he developed his signature artistic language, fusing Western art, Islamic calligraphy, and traditional African symbols.
9. Anish Kapoor at Galleria Continua | Frieze Masters
Galleria Continua spotlights the sculptural work of Anish Kapoor’s, showcasing his deeply pigmented red-glazed ceramic works. A highlight of the presentation is Untitled (1994), in which a smooth, glossy dome of deep crimson glaze erupts from a bed of raw, sculpted earth. Representing a pivotal era in Kapoor’s exploration of visceral presence and materials, the work offers a tactile counterpoint to his later reflective steel installations.
10. Anthony van Dyck at Colnaghi | Frieze Masters
Visit Colnaghi to view Anthony van Dyck’s breathtaking, nearly two-meter-tall Portrait of a Nobleman (c. 1627–32). Full-length portraits of this scale from Van Dyck’s private market inventory are incredibly rare, with most examples found in the collections of institutions like the National Gallery in London, the Prado, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art.