This year, the world-famous exhibition was more compact. As experts from the art world explain, this is due to the fact that it is becoming increasingly difficult for European galleries to come to London in order to showcase works by the best artists from all over the world. Its confident competitor is Art Basel Paris (which, by the way, takes place from October 18 to 20). Nevertheless, there is definitely something to see at Frieze London. To make it easier to navigate the fair’s pavilions, check out our guide, and then feel free to make your own discoveries.
Many of the artists with whom Esther Schipper has worked since the 1990s, including Angela Bullock, Dominique Gonzalez-Förster, Liam Gillick, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, are central figures in a radical rethinking of the notion of ‘exhibitions’ as a form of art presentation.
This year’s Esther Schipper Gallery Pavilion features Turner Prize winner Martin Boyce. His work Like Snow brings together major themes of the artist’s practice – the psychological experience of space, the ‘decay of nature and architecture’, the reduction and distortion of forms, and the material manifestations of time. Like Snow is a wooden panel painted in black, blue and green colors – small holes are carefully drilled into the canvas and custom white steel letters are attached. Like Snow fascinates with its laconic forms and evokes the desire to explore the layering of different techniques, colors and materials.
The other diamond in the Esther Schipper Pavilion at 2024 is Ryan Gander, who lives and works in Suffolk. He is one of the most important artists of our time. Over the past two decades, Gander has built an international reputation for an extensive and pluralistic body of work that materializes in a variety of forms, from sculpture, dress and writing to architecture, painting, publications and performance. His work A Moving Object, a small overturned ice cream cone, epitomizes the artist’s childhood “overturned” dream. His work always has small details that simplify realities, explaining that everything in this world is not forever.
Founded in Paris in 2010, mor charpentier gallery represents both emerging and established artists whose conceptual practices draw on the social realities, history and politics of contrasting geographical regions. By promoting practices internationally, the gallery seeks to expand knowledge of the most important debates of our time.
So in 2024, Spanish artist Lara Almarcegui presented a conceptual work dedicated to the problems of the climate crisis. The black letters printed on a white paper poster say that people do not think about the crisis until it knocks on the door. Through the simplest possible execution, viewers see a profound and defiant message – paying attention to how much material was used to build the Frieze Art Fair pavilion. “A luxury exhibition that describes how many tons of different material used to build the pavilion,” commented Fedor Pavlov-Andreevich.
Tracey Emin is without exaggeration one of the most colorful artists of our time. Viewers are often witnesses to the existential longing captured in her paintings and sculptures, solidified on the shores of unhappy love and personal life tragedies of the artist. In her work, the threshold between physical pain and psychological discomfort seems to be in another dimension of being. Her paintings are born without preliminary sketches, without a pre-formed understanding of the final form. In 2024, half of the pavilion at Galleria Lorcan O’Neill is occupied by Emin’s work – 4 canvases, 1 small bronze sculpture and 1 neon sign – neon became mainstream among artists after Emin presented her work.
The gallery was founded in 1984 and first presented its exhibition program in a Victorian London house in the East End district. Throughout its 40 years of operation, Maureen Paley’s primary goal has remained the same: to promote great and innovative artists.
At 2024 Frieze London Maureen Paley presented a work by renowned German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans Michael & Stefan. The frameless poster, placed on ordinary clips, shows an intimate kissing scene between two men – a testament to the bold depiction of queer, eroticism and tenderness that Tillmans has become famous for over the past decade. The photographer uses portrait photography to document intimate relationships between people in his circle. His photographs are defined by candid portrayals of his peers, many of whom were involved in the underground scenes of London and Berlin, cities between which he divided his time in the late 90s.
Xavier Hufkens is one of Europe’s leading contemporary art galleries. Founded more than three decades ago, it maintains a diverse program that includes solo exhibitions by several generations of leading artists. The gallery’s history began in 1987, when Xavier Hufkens opened an art space in a renovated warehouse in the center of Brussels. In its early years, it focused on mid-level and emerging artists and is known for introducing some of the most influential contemporary artists to Brussels at a time when they were still relatively unknown. British sculptor Anthony Gormley, whom the gallery still represents, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Rosemarie Trockel all exhibited for the first time in Belgium at Xavier Hoofkens.
Xavier Hufkens is exhibiting at Frieze London this year with works by Linda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, Matt Connors, Sayre Gomez, Giorgio Griff, Thomas Hausago, Mark Manders, Paul McCarthy, Kassi Namoda, Constantin Nitsche, Ken Price, Joan Zemmel, Danh Vo and Katie Wilkes.
The Modern Institute Gallery Was founded in Glasgow in 1997. It collaborates with 54 internationally renowned and emerging artists, works with both public and private exhibitions of artists worldwide, runs a program in its two spaces in Glasgow, and curates projects in galleries and institutions around the world. The Modern Institute currently represents four Turner Prize winners and three nominees, and promotes the development of a younger generation of artists.
At this year’s fair, The Modern Institute. presents new works by Tony Swain. Swain alters and merges printed images with painted images, using them as a tool to reconfigure the original information. His paintings evoke ghostly images and representations through repetition, layering ink on the printed page, and stitching together newspaper fragments to create utopian panoramas. Swain’s collection of primary materials is categorized in his studio and consciously registered for use in future works, and the technique is already perfected.
Hollybush Gardens Gallery was founded in 2005 by Lisa Panting and Malin Stahl and is now based in Clerkenwell. Since its inception, the gallery has maintained a commitment to curatorial discourse in dialog with an international and intergenerational cast of artists. Alongside its exhibition program, Hollybush Gardens hosts talks, performances and other events to support multidisciplinary practice.
At Frieze 2024, Hollybush Gardens Pavilion presents this year’s Turner Prize nominees Claudette Johnson and Jasleen Kaur with new works Hollybush Gardens. Reflecting on the complexities of family structure, Glasgow native Jasleen Kaur works with enlarged family photographs encased in orange ayrn-brew colored resin, obscuring people’s faces. Johnson, known for her large-scale works, brings her controlled approach to mark-making to a much smaller scale, capturing intimate views of figures. 2017 Turner Prize winner Lubaina Himid continues to explore street theater as a form of activism and presents a group of repainted sculptures composed of found and patterned carts, crates, wooden planks, and doors.
Goodman Gallery is one of the longest established international contemporary art galleries. Founded in Johannesburg in 1966, it works with artists who are both contemporary, influential and committed to changing attitudes and prompting social change. Founded during the apartheid era, the gallery offered a non-discriminatory space when museums served the interests of an autocratic government.
Since 2008, under the leadership of Liza Essers, Goodman Gallery has expanded this legacy, shifted focus, and introduced many critical curatorial initiatives and partnerships. Essers promotes a global outlook, initiating non-traditional interventions both within and beyond the traditional gallery space. This approach is combined with a discerning three-tiered focus: working with Southern Africa’s most important artists, both established and emerging, artists from the African continent and international artists who enter into dialog with the African context.
In the 20th anniversary of the gallery’s involvement with the fair, Lehmann Maupin returns to Regent’s Park with pavilions at Frieze London and Frieze Masters. At Frieze London, Lehmann Maupin will present a solo presentation of new landscape paintings by British artist Billy Childish.
Childish’s artistic practice encompasses poetry and prose, punk rock music, as well as photography, printmaking and painting. Known for his vibrant, emotionally charged paintings on warm linen canvas, the artist works quickly and intuitively on each one, sketching the basic composition in charcoal in a hand-painted frame and using a rich palette of oil paints to convey light, shadow, volume and form. The subjects of Childish’s paintings are often drawn from his immediate surroundings – the River Medway in South East England, self-portraits, the chalk cliffs of Margate and images of his family. The artist’s work also delves into the imaginary world: he finds inspiration everywhere from scenes from movies, historical photographs to his own inner dreams.
David Zwirner is a leading contemporary art gallery located in New York, London, Paris and Hong Kong, representing over seventy artists. Since opening in 1993 in New York, it has hosted extraordinary and innovative exhibitions in a variety of media and genres. In 2014, the gallery founded David Zwirner Books, an independent publisher with international distribution that publishes catalogs, monographs, historical overviews, and artists’ books, and in 2018 launched its Dialogues podcast.
At Frieze London, the gallery presents new paintings by Rose Wylie on the occasion of the artist’s ninetieth birthday, works by Stephen Shearer, as well as Francis Alas, Kathryn Bernhardt, Joe Bradley, Noah Davis, Marcel Dzama, Sasha Gordon, Barbara Kruger, Yayoi Kusama, Chris Ofili, Walter Price, Thomas Raff, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jordan Wolfson and Lisa Yuskavage.
White Cube’s exhibition program is presented in London, Hong Kong, Paris, New York, New York, West Palm Beach and online. Since its founding in 1993, the gallery has exhibited works by many of the most renowned contemporary artists and discovered new high-profile names in the art world.
A special work in Hall D19 was the golden American flag by Danh Vo, a Danish artist of Vietnamese origin working in Berlin. In his work, he explores questions of cultural and national identities. Executed on a cardboard box of Budweiser beer, the painting replicates the ornamentation of the original U.S. flag. While the original should have 50 stars (the number of American states), only 13 of them are shown on the front of the cardboard. To find out if the others are on the reverse side, you can only buy the work, which refers to the contemporary problems of consumer culture and consumerism in modern society.
Sadie Coles HQ specializes in presenting the work of established and emerging international artists. The gallery opened in London in 1997 – its exhibition of new paintings by American artist John Carrin was presented in parallel with British artist Sarah Lucas’ exhibition “The Law” on St. John Street. This marked the beginning of the gallery’s international program.
Since its inception, Sadie Coles HQ Gallery has worked in a variety of spaces and undertaken itinerant projects. In September 2013 Sadie Coles HQ opened its largest space in London’s West End with American artist Ryan Sullivan. In November 2015 a new space opened in Mayfair with an exhibition of paintings by Rudolf Stingel spanning both galleries. Sadie Coles HQ has recently taken on the representation of Alex Da Corte, Yu Ji, Lawrence Lek, Cathy Heck and Cathy Seib, who had her first solo exhibition at the gallery in November 2018. This year at Frieze London, the gallery is presenting several prominent names from the art world including Urs Fischer, Ugo Rondinone and Sarah Lucas.
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