Frieze London 2024: highlights from the fair & the
fringe
We
visit Frieze London, the huge art fair that pops up in Regents Park once a year,
to discover artists & work that intersects with architecture, built environment
issues & landscape.
As we did last year (see 00139) recessed.space went along to the huge white tents in Regents’ Park to take a look at the annual behemoth that is Frieze London art fair. Since its first edition in 2003, the event has grown to global importance & is now the trigger for a whole week of cultural events across the capital with an ever-growing fringe of parallel exhibitions, other art fairs & events.
Under pressure from rival art fairs & an increasingly difficult time for the market, Frieze commissioned architecture practice A Studio Between - led by Richard J McConkey, a longtime collaborator on the design of Frieze London - to reconfigure & reimagine the huge, temporary building. With a new approach & entrance, where the fair previously opened into the largest, blue chip galleries, it now gives this prime real estate to the youngest, emerging galleries. The Gagosians & White Cubes still get the largest stands, but are now at the deepest of the four sequential tents.
Other tweaks to the spaces, pathways & spillout areas by the architects give a feeling of a lot less congestion, while the entire fair is now constructed of a modular system that can be disasembled & reused for other events.
www.frieze.com/fairs/frieze-london
www.astudiobetween.com
Photos of Frieze London courtesy A Studio Between & © Leon Chew
Drawing of Frieze London courtesy & © A Studo Between
HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE FRINGE
Jonas
Wood
Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill
The son of an architect, Jonas Wood’s paintings carry a strong domestic vernacular through depictions of scenes including the artist’s childhood home. Tableaux of everyday surroundings, composed & captured moments, are then set against more pictorial scenes including a Japanese garden with a temple, always with a cartoonish, slightly surreal twist on reality.
www.gagosian.com/artists/jonas-wood
Exhibition open until 23 November. Details at: www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2024/jonas-wood
Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill
The son of an architect, Jonas Wood’s paintings carry a strong domestic vernacular through depictions of scenes including the artist’s childhood home. Tableaux of everyday surroundings, composed & captured moments, are then set against more pictorial scenes including a Japanese garden with a temple, always with a cartoonish, slightly surreal twist on reality.
www.gagosian.com/artists/jonas-wood
Exhibition open until 23 November. Details at: www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2024/jonas-wood
A MILLION RABBIT HOLES by Rirkrit Tiravanija
Pilar Corrias, Conduit Street
In the basement space of Pilar Corrias’ new Cowie Montgomery Architects-designed HQ, Argentinian-born Rirkrit Tiravanija has created an unexpected, uncanny & unsettling space entered through a timber door. A MILLION RABIT HOLES is charged with US politics ahead of the Presidential election, the walls plastered with an upstate New York scene. Phrases a stencil-cut into coated stainless steel, wood is stacked across a purple carpet & the whole things is akin to a David Lynch moment of things not being as they seem.
www.pilarcorrias.com/artists/rirkrit-tiravanija/2
Exhibition on until 09 November. Details at: www.pilarcorrias.com/exhibitions/462-rirkrit-tiravanija-a-million-rabbit-holes
Pilar Corrias, Conduit Street
In the basement space of Pilar Corrias’ new Cowie Montgomery Architects-designed HQ, Argentinian-born Rirkrit Tiravanija has created an unexpected, uncanny & unsettling space entered through a timber door. A MILLION RABIT HOLES is charged with US politics ahead of the Presidential election, the walls plastered with an upstate New York scene. Phrases a stencil-cut into coated stainless steel, wood is stacked across a purple carpet & the whole things is akin to a David Lynch moment of things not being as they seem.
www.pilarcorrias.com/artists/rirkrit-tiravanija/2
Exhibition on until 09 November. Details at: www.pilarcorrias.com/exhibitions/462-rirkrit-tiravanija-a-million-rabbit-holes
Frank Auerbach: Portraits of London
Offer Waterman / Francis Outred
Comprising loans from museums & private collections, this collection of Frank Auerbach’s deep, textured paintings focuses on the artist’s gaze upon London’s changing cityscape & urban scenes. Abstracted yet recognisable glimpses of Oxford Street, Euston & Hampstead Heath, as well as the streets of Mornington Crescent & Camden Town around Auerbach’s studio, the exhibition not only offers a framing of how the artist looked at the city, but also how London has changed since the 1950s & 60s.
Exhibition on until 07 December. Details at: www.waterman.co.uk/exhibitions/95-frank-auerbach-portraits-of-london-presented-by-offer-waterman-francis-outre
Offer Waterman / Francis Outred
Comprising loans from museums & private collections, this collection of Frank Auerbach’s deep, textured paintings focuses on the artist’s gaze upon London’s changing cityscape & urban scenes. Abstracted yet recognisable glimpses of Oxford Street, Euston & Hampstead Heath, as well as the streets of Mornington Crescent & Camden Town around Auerbach’s studio, the exhibition not only offers a framing of how the artist looked at the city, but also how London has changed since the 1950s & 60s.
Exhibition on until 07 December. Details at: www.waterman.co.uk/exhibitions/95-frank-auerbach-portraits-of-london-presented-by-offer-waterman-francis-outre
Installation images from 'Frank Auerbach: Portraits of
London', at Francis Outred / Offer Waterman, © Frank Auerbah, Courtes
Frankie Rossi Art Project. Photographer: Prudence Cuming Associate
Julian Charrière, Controlled Burn, 202. Courtesy of Viv arts, photography by Igancio Badiola
Controlled Burn by Julian Charrière
viv arts
For the launch project of viv arts, an organisation created to present digital artworks in unexpected spaces, French-Swiss artists Julian Charrière’s film Controlled Burn fills the James Cubitt designed Romanesque Revival Welsh Chapel in Soho. In near darkness, the half-hour film takes us to three atmospheric & loaded locations – a Belgian factory, an oil platform in the North Sea & coal mine in Germany – with the artist filling each place with exploding fireworks. Sublimely shot from a drone, the films play in reverse with surround sound recordings, conjuring feelings of cosmic cataclysm, the big bang, post-industrial resonance & collisions between nature & technology. The film spills from the screen to fill the building’s dome & as light from explosions strobe the space, the architecture momentarily shows itself to create conversations with the places depicted in the work.
www.julian-charriere.net
Exhibiting until 12 October, details at: www.vivarts.io/projects/controlled-burn
viv arts
For the launch project of viv arts, an organisation created to present digital artworks in unexpected spaces, French-Swiss artists Julian Charrière’s film Controlled Burn fills the James Cubitt designed Romanesque Revival Welsh Chapel in Soho. In near darkness, the half-hour film takes us to three atmospheric & loaded locations – a Belgian factory, an oil platform in the North Sea & coal mine in Germany – with the artist filling each place with exploding fireworks. Sublimely shot from a drone, the films play in reverse with surround sound recordings, conjuring feelings of cosmic cataclysm, the big bang, post-industrial resonance & collisions between nature & technology. The film spills from the screen to fill the building’s dome & as light from explosions strobe the space, the architecture momentarily shows itself to create conversations with the places depicted in the work.
www.julian-charriere.net
Exhibiting until 12 October, details at: www.vivarts.io/projects/controlled-burn
HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE FAIR
Dastan
Gallery
Presenting a range of artists from Iran, Dastan Gallery mix politics with aesthetics & art history. Reza Aramesh’s marble underwear is scattered on the floor, pieces that are currently filling Venetian church for the Biennial and which speak to the violence and dehumanisation of political imprisonment. Shahryar Hatami’s work on paper references an historic story by Ferdowsi in which the future Sasanian king cruelly punishes his wife, abstracted and concealed within poetic ink. Andisheh Avini’s series of inkjet works on brass read like historic miniature paintings, the artist exploring his own mixed identity through Persian calligraphy, decorative motifs, and abstracted place.
www.dastan.gallery/artists/236-reza-aramesh
www.dastan.gallery/artists/367-shahryar-hatami
www.dastan.gallery/artists/274-andisheh-avini
Presenting a range of artists from Iran, Dastan Gallery mix politics with aesthetics & art history. Reza Aramesh’s marble underwear is scattered on the floor, pieces that are currently filling Venetian church for the Biennial and which speak to the violence and dehumanisation of political imprisonment. Shahryar Hatami’s work on paper references an historic story by Ferdowsi in which the future Sasanian king cruelly punishes his wife, abstracted and concealed within poetic ink. Andisheh Avini’s series of inkjet works on brass read like historic miniature paintings, the artist exploring his own mixed identity through Persian calligraphy, decorative motifs, and abstracted place.
www.dastan.gallery/artists/236-reza-aramesh
www.dastan.gallery/artists/367-shahryar-hatami
www.dastan.gallery/artists/274-andisheh-avini
Galerie Capitain
Cologne-based Galierie Gisela Capitain presented a range of their artists, with Kristi Cavataro’s untitled sculpture taking a prime spot at the stand’s corner. At first reading as a simple & minimalist tubular form, there is clearly a great skill in the creation of this stained glass form. There is an exactitude & neatness in the artist’s transformation of the ancient craft into this carefully measured interlocking form. Recently featured in a Palazzo in Naples the gallery uses for showing work – where this work sang when hit by an Italian sunshine that doesn’t quite match the uniform light of Frieze’s tent in an October London – Cavataro is set to have a solo exhibition in Cologne next year.
www.galeriecapitain.de/artist/kristi-cavataro
Cologne-based Galierie Gisela Capitain presented a range of their artists, with Kristi Cavataro’s untitled sculpture taking a prime spot at the stand’s corner. At first reading as a simple & minimalist tubular form, there is clearly a great skill in the creation of this stained glass form. There is an exactitude & neatness in the artist’s transformation of the ancient craft into this carefully measured interlocking form. Recently featured in a Palazzo in Naples the gallery uses for showing work – where this work sang when hit by an Italian sunshine that doesn’t quite match the uniform light of Frieze’s tent in an October London – Cavataro is set to have a solo exhibition in Cologne next year.
www.galeriecapitain.de/artist/kristi-cavataro
Hot Wheels
The winner of the best stand of the Frieze Focus section was Hot Wheels with their presentation of sculptures by CFGNY, an artist collective comprising Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, Kirsten Kilponen & Tin Nguyen. Their work explores how Asian cultural identity is adopted, used & abused by other cultures, using broad mediums in their installations. Here, CFGNY show several porcelain sculptures, considering how Western manufactures tried to replicate Chinese processes for a mass market. These disfigured, unusual forms derived from plaster casts of negative spaces of Chinese-made household objects, disposable tat & discount store purchases. Set against them are cardboard architectures as reconstructed fragments of colonial domestic settings that once presented Asian-made goods as status of American success.
www.hotwheelsgallery.eu
www.cfgny.us
The winner of the best stand of the Frieze Focus section was Hot Wheels with their presentation of sculptures by CFGNY, an artist collective comprising Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, Kirsten Kilponen & Tin Nguyen. Their work explores how Asian cultural identity is adopted, used & abused by other cultures, using broad mediums in their installations. Here, CFGNY show several porcelain sculptures, considering how Western manufactures tried to replicate Chinese processes for a mass market. These disfigured, unusual forms derived from plaster casts of negative spaces of Chinese-made household objects, disposable tat & discount store purchases. Set against them are cardboard architectures as reconstructed fragments of colonial domestic settings that once presented Asian-made goods as status of American success.
www.hotwheelsgallery.eu
www.cfgny.us
Selma Feriani Gallery
For the second year, Frieze host the Artist-to-Artist section in which a world-renowned artist gets to choose artists from specific galleries for a solo booth as an act of forging new connections across the globe. Zineb Sedira, who presented the excellent French Pavilion for 2022’s Venice Biennale, selected Algerian artist Massinissa Selmani. His work presents weird, humorous & sometimes sinister urban situations, in cartoon-like form but with a punchline left pregnant in the air. The ingredients of the drawn situations are taken from news and media, but placed together to form incongruous new narratives.
www.selmaferiani.com/artists/38-massinissa-selmani/works
For the second year, Frieze host the Artist-to-Artist section in which a world-renowned artist gets to choose artists from specific galleries for a solo booth as an act of forging new connections across the globe. Zineb Sedira, who presented the excellent French Pavilion for 2022’s Venice Biennale, selected Algerian artist Massinissa Selmani. His work presents weird, humorous & sometimes sinister urban situations, in cartoon-like form but with a punchline left pregnant in the air. The ingredients of the drawn situations are taken from news and media, but placed together to form incongruous new narratives.
www.selmaferiani.com/artists/38-massinissa-selmani/works
Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix
Also in the Artist-to-Artist section is Lubaina Himid’s selection of Magda Stawarska’s work. Through a silkscreen printer wallpaper, three projections & three paintings, the artist’s exploration of urban thresholds, boundaries & surfaces is explored. A grid repeatedly tries to lock complex city façades, forms & moments but struggles against the ad hoc energy of the everyday. Stawarska is trying to find a delicate space where public order & rigidity sits against private & personal vibrancy, an impossible, transient moment that ends up in a flickering dual.
www.yamamotokeiko.com/artists/magda-stawarskabeavan
Also in the Artist-to-Artist section is Lubaina Himid’s selection of Magda Stawarska’s work. Through a silkscreen printer wallpaper, three projections & three paintings, the artist’s exploration of urban thresholds, boundaries & surfaces is explored. A grid repeatedly tries to lock complex city façades, forms & moments but struggles against the ad hoc energy of the everyday. Stawarska is trying to find a delicate space where public order & rigidity sits against private & personal vibrancy, an impossible, transient moment that ends up in a flickering dual.
www.yamamotokeiko.com/artists/magda-stawarskabeavan
Galeria Wschód
Founded in Warsaw & now with spaces in New York & Cologne, Wschód are presenting sculptures by Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw, looking at the architectural & infrastructural history of his hometown of Edmonton, Alberta. Drawing from industrial parks, shopping malls, oil refineries & suburbia, the artist creates abstractions of modernism & memory as compressions of everyday place into surreal object. They are hung like unexplained psychological urban diagrams upon a wall punched with bolts to add an industrial residue to the Frieze uniformity.
www.galeriawschod.com/artists/adam-shiu-yang-shaw
Founded in Warsaw & now with spaces in New York & Cologne, Wschód are presenting sculptures by Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw, looking at the architectural & infrastructural history of his hometown of Edmonton, Alberta. Drawing from industrial parks, shopping malls, oil refineries & suburbia, the artist creates abstractions of modernism & memory as compressions of everyday place into surreal object. They are hung like unexplained psychological urban diagrams upon a wall punched with bolts to add an industrial residue to the Frieze uniformity.
www.galeriawschod.com/artists/adam-shiu-yang-shaw
Galerie Noah Klink
Visiting Frieze from Berlin, Noah Klink present a minimalist installation from American artist David L. Johnson with work exploring neoliberal city making & hostile architecture. For his Loiter series, Johnson steals standpipe spikes from outdoor fire connections on private New York City buildings. Owners add these spiked additions to the standpipes to prevent individuals sitting & resting atop them. Challenging late-capitalism’s desire to control how urban spaces and citizen’s freedom to loiter and do nothing, Johnson not only releases the standpipe to be used as a space to stop in the city, but the spikes are also relocated to the gallery setting where they stand as conceptual statements of the world they have left.
www.noahklink.com
www.davidljohnson.nyc
Visiting Frieze from Berlin, Noah Klink present a minimalist installation from American artist David L. Johnson with work exploring neoliberal city making & hostile architecture. For his Loiter series, Johnson steals standpipe spikes from outdoor fire connections on private New York City buildings. Owners add these spiked additions to the standpipes to prevent individuals sitting & resting atop them. Challenging late-capitalism’s desire to control how urban spaces and citizen’s freedom to loiter and do nothing, Johnson not only releases the standpipe to be used as a space to stop in the city, but the spikes are also relocated to the gallery setting where they stand as conceptual statements of the world they have left.
www.noahklink.com
www.davidljohnson.nyc
Cristea Roberts Gallery
While not the loudest works in the gallery’s mixed-artist presentation, these small ink drawings by Irish artist Joy Gerrard are charged in politics & poetry. Exploring the social & cultural use of urban spaces, Gerrard meticulously recreates political demonstrations from around the world, with the four here marches for Palestine in Berlin & Washington DC, a New York protest against the Supreme Court abortion law & a celebration after France’s 2024 election results.
www.cristearoberts.com/artists/131-joy-gerrard
While not the loudest works in the gallery’s mixed-artist presentation, these small ink drawings by Irish artist Joy Gerrard are charged in politics & poetry. Exploring the social & cultural use of urban spaces, Gerrard meticulously recreates political demonstrations from around the world, with the four here marches for Palestine in Berlin & Washington DC, a New York protest against the Supreme Court abortion law & a celebration after France’s 2024 election results.
www.cristearoberts.com/artists/131-joy-gerrard
Ginny on Frederick
The frames are as much part of Charlotte Edey’s work as the surreal, dreamlike landscapes & architectures within them. With a practice rooted in drawing, but migrating into installation, glass & embroidery, Edey’s work carries an air of de Chirico & Dali without falling into the trap of cliché. For Frieze, Ginny on Frederick present a series of embroidered-bead works of impossible, beautiful-yet-sinister locations, set against vortexes of stained glass.
www.ginnyonfrederick.com
The frames are as much part of Charlotte Edey’s work as the surreal, dreamlike landscapes & architectures within them. With a practice rooted in drawing, but migrating into installation, glass & embroidery, Edey’s work carries an air of de Chirico & Dali without falling into the trap of cliché. For Frieze, Ginny on Frederick present a series of embroidered-bead works of impossible, beautiful-yet-sinister locations, set against vortexes of stained glass.
www.ginnyonfrederick.com
Kalfayan Galleries
Born in Alexandria, Farida El Gazzar explores collective & personal memories through architectural & landscape moments of Athens, where she lives, that speak to nostalgic recollections of her Egyptian past. Developed from a series of works created over Covid lockdown, when restricted to her immediate neighbourhood, El Gazzar extracts moments of modern architecture & nature which collectively form dreamlike imaginings of places distant in geography and time. The colours add to the unreality, where the magic hour of natural light collides with the manmade colours of architecture & hues of artificial lighting.
www.kalfayangalleries.com/index31en.htm
Born in Alexandria, Farida El Gazzar explores collective & personal memories through architectural & landscape moments of Athens, where she lives, that speak to nostalgic recollections of her Egyptian past. Developed from a series of works created over Covid lockdown, when restricted to her immediate neighbourhood, El Gazzar extracts moments of modern architecture & nature which collectively form dreamlike imaginings of places distant in geography and time. The colours add to the unreality, where the magic hour of natural light collides with the manmade colours of architecture & hues of artificial lighting.
www.kalfayangalleries.com/index31en.htm
Frieze is the leading platform for modern and contemporary art, bringing together galleries, collectors,
scholars, and art enthusiasts. In addition to its five international art fairs – Frieze London, Frieze Masters,
Frieze New York, Frieze Los Angeles, and Frieze Seoul – Frieze publishes three magazines: Frieze, Frieze
Masters Magazine, and Frieze Week.
www.frieze.com
A Studio Between is a London-based, multi-disciplinary studio working between Interiors & Architecture,
Furniture & Design with a focus on hospitality, arts, and people-focused spaces. Formed in 2022, the studio
is led by Richard J McConkey, former Head of Hospitality at Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby’s Universal
Design Studio and has completed award-winning projects for global clients such as Villa Copenhagen, Frieze
Art Fair, Ace Hotel & At Six in Stockholm. Intuitive and progressive, the studio approaches design with the
belief that care translates. Their ambition is to drive world-class design, but in a quietly radical way.
www.astudiobetween.com
www.astudiobetween.com
