See the Best Moments at Frieze Sculpture in London’s Regent’s Park
Ahead of Frieze London, the outdoor exhibition returns for its third year featuring the work of 14 artists
The global art calendar is far from lacking fairs year-round, regional or blockbuster as well as long-established or experimental. Few of them however enjoy the surrounding views of a lush park like Frieze London. Since its inception in 2003, the British-born mega fair which also mounts annual editions in New York, Los Angeles, and Seoul calls each year Regent’s Park home inside a starchitect-designed tent that has become synonymous with the fair’s sleek brand. The fair’s footprint at the 410 acre royal park grew in 2012 with the addition of Frieze Masters which is connected to the main show through a 20-minute walk on the park’s tree-lined English Gardens. Making the crisp fall stroll between two fairs even merrier is Frieze Sculpture, the annual collateral public exhibition of large scale three dimensional works peppered along the stretch of a neon yellow and dark ruby foliage. This year, it takes place from September 17 through 2 November 2025.
Turkish-born London-based curator Fatoş Üstek helms the outdoor exhibition for the third year with 14 artists, including Erwin Wurm, David Altmejd, Henrique Oliveira, Abdollah Nafisi, Elmgreen & Dragset, Reena Saini Kallat, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. The strength of the repertoire stems from the diversity of the artists’ backgrounds and career points, as well as the similarly varying galleries they are represented by, from powerhouses like Thaddaeus Ropac, Pace, Nature Morte, and White Cube to beloved tastemakers such as Tehran’s Dastan Gallery, in addition those that do not necessarily participate in the fair, such as Istanbul’s Galeri Nev and Hidde van Seggelen from Hamburg.
Üstek cherishes her project’s broad accessibility within a beloved park and tells Galerie, “It is very important for me that Frieze Sculpture is the only free activity within the fair and opens as early as the park and similarly closes at the same time in the evening.” The curator believes the show has a “different register” for the locals as well as the flock of global visitors, partially thanks to its longer run between mid September into early November. “We are open for eight weekends so there is a stronger possibility to visit us,” Üstek says and notes that her project is now an essential part of the annual London Sculpture Week which runs for ten days at the end of September. “Last year, we also started organizing symposiums about looking at art though the context of publicness and outdoor experience,” she adds.
As fall washes over the British capital with its amber colors and brisk weather, this year’s Frieze Sculpture taps into the season’s eerie atmosphere with the theme of “In The Shadows.” Benefitting from the surrounding fauna’s dramatic optics—think creeping saplings, ghostly bushes, and long stretching paths—the show invites viewers to meander through the sculptures with a searching eye for the shadows. “In autumn, shadows lengthen,” reminds Üstek and suggest to pay attention the park’s real inhabitants, like the animals, the trees, and the light. Art history’s entangled relationship with shadows as abstracted avatars of the human form is yet another draw in the curator’s fascination for the subject. She even believes that shadows are essential in grasping a sculpture’s physicality as well as emotional essence: “To understand the volume of a work, we not only look at its cast form but we also notice its attached shadow.”
Üstek’s sentiment humorously evident is Erwin Wurm’s Ghost (Substitutes) (2022), a larger-than-life aluminum sculpture of a two-piece suit, finished with a pair of shoes. Ghostly and light-hearted, the cobalt blue sculpture stands on the grass without a body, with the jacket’s lumpy collar and the pants’ stillness hinting at a spectral presence. A sense of bygone physicality also lingers in Elmgreen & Dragset’s Life Rings, Fig. 3 2023, a connected chain of lifebuoys rising from the earth up towards the sky. The voluminous pile of the ubiquitous striped rings immediately reminds of a seashore or a boat where their presence is overlooked yet crucial. Rendered here in stainless steel, the commonly plastic or foam objects echoes with emergency as much as obscurity, similar to the artist duo’s attribution of eeriness to other mundane, often domestic, relics.
A shadow’s lingering nature is embodied in Istanbul-based artist Burçak Bingöl’s cubic sculpture Unit Terrenum Rosa (2025). The one-meter-cubic block contains clay from the the Regent’s Park itself as well as the ancient Turkish city of Cappadocia which is famous for its cone-shaped fairy chimney forms. The earthliness of the surface is interrupted by an array of porcelain bits which feature roses collected by the artist at the garden of the British Consulate in Istanbul and Queen Mary’s Rose Garden also from the Regent’s Park. “I want people to use the platform as a space of contemplation and reflection on different crises around the world,” Üstek says, “but in subtle ways, reflected through the artists’ minds.”
Frieze Sculpture is on view at Regent’s Park until November 2.