This year’s Frieze Masters offered a beautiful juxtaposition of the natural and mechanic. Photo by Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy of Frieze and Hugo Glendinning.
London’s art world has come alive once more for Frieze week. The Big Smoke is glittering with new shows, drinks receptions and VIP dinners and along with thousands, I went to pray at the feet of art and commerce at Frieze London 2024. The habitual hum of excitement bordered on anxiety this year as a depressed art market and an expanded Art Basel Paris (due to start in a few days) invited talk about London’s rivalry with the City of Lights. Is this the beginning of Brexit’s wrestling of the European art crown from London’s hands? Frieze director Eva Langret, showcasing a vibrant and varied London art scene, seemed to successfully make the case for why not.
“Frieze was never just a trade fair,” Langret told The Art Newspaper this week, but also an opportunity for “the many conversations that you can anchor around the galleries and the many ways in which they work for the artists.” Indeed, I found much to enjoy—particularly, as is always the case with art fairs, the opportunity to discover exciting artists and galleries I had never heard of. Of course, I would be remiss not to snark that if Frieze truly wishes to be more than a trade fair, they will need to consider adjusting ticket prices to encourage wider participation.
A redesigned floor plan by A Studio Between prioritized the new and emerging galleries in the Focus section, who, rather than sulking somewhere near the back of the tent, were able to greet visitors immediately. Like last year, they impressed with innovative booths. The Focus section is known for being experimental—the galleries in this section are looking to make a name for themselves. Placed along a central corridor, we were able to interact with them repeatedly whilst navigating the fair. I was particularly excited to see Xxijra Hii steal focus with Hannah Morgan’s alabaster carvings, steelwork, pewter casts, frogged clay and soundscape. I’d previously seen a very small show in Xxijra Hii’s boxy garage-like space in Deptford, their strong showing at Frieze is a testament to the breadth and depth of the London art scene even in a struggling art market and amongst omnipresent funding cuts.
Other standouts in the Focus section included Eva Gold’s sensitive text-based work at Rose Easton (You were disgusting and that’s why I followed you, 2024), Sands Murray-Wassink’s tongue-in-cheek illustrations at Diez (Culture is not a competition, 2024) and Nils Alix-Tabeling’s camp insectile sculptures at Public Gallery. Further into the fair, the blue-chip galleries presented solid, predictable booths, showing off big names—Georg Baselitz held the fort at the White Cube and Chris Ofili at David Zwirner.
Harlesden High Street’s booth at Frieze London. Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy Linda Nylind / Frieze.
For all the talk about Paris and London, Mumbai and New Delhi were the cities at the top of my mind this Frieze London. Indian galleries took pride of place at this year’s fair and ran with breathtaking displays. Vadehra Art Gallery from New Delhi showcased an incredible cabinet of curiosity and banality by Atul Dodiya (Cabinet VI and Cabinet VIII), including pipes, photographs and vaguely animist figurines. Jhaveri Contemporary showcased the textile work of Sayan Chanda (Dwarapalika II, 2024) and Gidree Bawlee (Kaal (Pala) 2023), which blended together into a sublimely sensate and textural experience.
Outside the tent, there were great improvements in the sculpture park this year. Arresting, thoughtful pieces responded deftly to their environment, working with organic forms and pagan imagery to transform a jubilantly sunny Regent’s Park into an other-worldly spectacle. Visitors were greeted by Leonora Carrington’s bronze sculpture The Dancer (2011) upon entering, the figure (half-bird, half-man) melted into bucolic surroundings. Carrington‘s Dancer was swiftly followed by two bronze pillars by Theaster Gates, The Duet (2023). The works in the park were so well integrated into the grounds that the trees that littered the lawn felt like sculptures themselves, blurring the line between the natural and the man-made; one work actually hung from a tree. My favorite by far was Albany Hernandez’s Shadow (2024). This was a shadow painted under a tree in the park using water-based grass paint. The paint marked the tree’s 10:30 a.m. shade; when I arrived around 3 p.m., the tree had two delicate shadows.
Gagosian’s booth at Frieze Masters. Photo by Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy of Frieze and Hugo Glendinning.
At the other end of the sculpture park, Frieze Masters opened with a beautiful juxtaposition of the natural and mechanic. Gagosian’s slick booth of metallic sculpture by John Chamberlain and furniture by Marc Newson stood next to a wooden booth with work much softer in feel at Hauser & Wirth, with broad-ranging paintings from the 19th and 20th Centuries, including Philip Guston and Édouard Manet. In typical showman style, David Aaron followed up last year’s towering T-Rex “Chomper” with an enormous Egyptian sarcophagus from the 7th Century BCE. Thaddeus Mosley at Karma in the ‘Studio’ section—which featured solo shows of living artists and considered their studio practice—seemed like an anchor point in the fair. This is due to the booth’s central placement but also its visual impact. The booth was vast and striking; Mosley’s robust wooden towers, pulling from modernist abstraction and African sculpture, made an imposing statement.
One prominent theme with Masters was the rediscovery of important female artists, with lengthy biographies getting ample space in numerous galleries: Eva Švankmajerová was spotlighted by The Gallery of Everything, Feliza Bursztyn at The Mayor Gallery and Alice Baber at Luxembourg + Co.
All in all, the Frieze fairs were good this year—fun, even. Frieze London celebrated the contemporary art scene in London whilst showcasing talents from across the globe, particularly works by Indian stars. Frieze Masters returned to its rightful place as Frieze London’s drab older sister whilst also reintroducing some unsung talents. The sculpture park, for once, held its own and felt like a destination in and of itself. The stark October sun was shining over an overexcited city, and London, it seemed, was well and truly alive.
Frieze Art Week has officially kicked off in London with its first openings, as the local community and international visitors gear up for the launch of Frieze London and Frieze Masters tomorrow (October 9). Despite the buzz that some global collectors might skip London in favor of Paris due to the challenge of committing to a full two-week marathon of fairs, the city’s art scene—through its galleries and institutions—has once again curated an impressive lineup that makes a stop in the British capital worthwhile, even if just for a few extra days before heading to the next art week or fair. To help you navigate this year’s Frieze offerings, Observer has compiled a list of the top show openings to check out in London.
Mire Lee’s Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern
Visceral and uncanny, Mire Lee’s art probes the boundaries between the technological and the human. Selected for the prestigious annual Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern, she has transformed the Turbine Hall into a surreal landscape of hanging fabric sculptures and epic mechanical installations, reimagining the space as a living factory populated by alien forms and mysterious processes.
Drawing on the building’s history as a power station, Lee reflects on its monumental scale and how it mirrors humanity’s relentless drive for dominance and control over nature. She has reconfigured the hall into an industrial womb—an environment where human desires and ambitions echo through sprawling mechanical systems. Crafted from industrial materials like silicone, chains, and eerie fluids, her “skin” installations stir a complex interplay of emotions, provoking awe and disgust, desire and repulsion. The work explores horror not merely as fear, but as a gateway to alternative possibilities and future potentialities, as once theorized by Foucault. As Lee expressed in a statement, “Ultimately, I am interested in how behind all human actions there is something soft and vulnerable, such as sincerity, hope, compassion, love and wanting to be loved.”
Exploring a non-human concept of the body, the Korean artist’s intricate installations challenge the technological illusion of solidity and permanence, confronting viewers with the inevitable decay and deformation of all subjects over time. By staging this perpetual state of transformation and metamorphosis within a post-apocalyptic setting, the artist engages with a new notion of hybridity—one that blurs the line between the products of the Anthropocene and the unknown entities and processes that will ultimately supersede them.
Mire Lee’s “Open Wound” opens tomorrow (October 9) and is on view at Tate Modern through March 16.
“Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look” at the National Gallery
Detail from David Hockney’s My Parents (1977). Courtesy London’s National Gallery
Don’t miss this rare conversation at the National Gallery, which explores the inspiration David Hockney drew from the enigmatic paintings of Renaissance master Piero Della Francesca. This one-room capsule project creates a space for slow contemplation, juxtaposing two of Hockney’s works—one portraying his mother and father, and the other depicting his friend, curator Henry Geldzahler, alongside the thread that connects them: Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ. Part of the National Gallery’s Bicentenary celebrations, the project illuminates the connections that weave through art history, highlighting how it’s been a continuous journey of confrontations, inspirations and exchanges, where artists revisit and reinterpret recurring themes and archetypes according to the aesthetics and sensibilities of their own era.
Opening just ahead of Frieze Art Week, Whitechapel Gallery has set up a compelling dialogue between two artists who, despite distinct geographical and cultural backgrounds, have similarly sought to redefine the relationship between artist and audience by fostering greater interaction and a more participatory approach.
Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, a pioneer of the “Neo-Concrete Movement” (1959-1961), anticipated the notion of Relational Art by developing a new, organic concept of the artwork—one that could fluidly respond to the phenomenological space of the senses. Her creations evolved into “social sculptures” designed to engage and transform through direct interaction, unfolding within the temporal space of community and social cohesion. “Lygia Clark: The I and the You” traces her artistic journey from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, exploring how her radical approach emerged in response to a turbulent period in Brazil’s history.
In parallel, Venice Golden Lion-winner Sonia Boyce explores similar themes of manipulation and inhabitation, inviting viewers to engage, touch and experience her work in unscripted, immersive ways. “Sonia Boyce: An Awkward Relation” is conceived specifically to resonate with Lygia Clark’s exhibition, showcasing the strong synergies between the British and Brazilian artists’ experiential, participatory practices.
George Rouy’s debut solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth London, “The Bleed, Part I.” Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Following the announcement of his representation just a few months ago, the highly sought-after George Rouy is making his debut with Hauser & Wirth in London. The painter’s meteoric rise stems from his ability to resonate with a new generation of collectors, offering a visual language that captures the tensions and contradictions of the body and psyche as they navigate the physical and digital realms.
“The Bleed, Part I” showcases Rouy’s latest body of work, where he delves further into themes of collective mass, multiplicities, and human movement across different modes of existence. Playing between the “void,” where the psyche expands and projects itself, and the “surrounding,” where the physical body is in constant negotiation with external forces, Rouy’s paintings depict the push-and-pull between these realms, producing figures that are simultaneously fragmented and whole. This tension suggests the potential for a new hybrid human experience, oscillating between the linear constraints of the body and the quantum possibilities it can access.
The exhibition will continue with “Part II” at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, launching during Frieze L.A. and underscoring the gallery’s commitment to positioning Rouy as “a leading figure of the new generation of painters.”
George Rouy’s “The Bleed, Part 1” is on view at Hauser & Wirth London through December 21.
Suspended between a dreamlike world, a sentimental dimension, and a poetic space of literary references, Dominic Chambers’s paintings capture moments of joy, leisure, love, and life. His vibrant canvases are defined by intentionally surreal palettes that heighten the emotions and atmosphere of each scene. Since graduating from Yale, the young artist has swiftly risen to prominence, making his debut at Lehmann Maupin in New York soon after. Now, for his first solo show at the gallery’s London location—his U.K. debut—Chambers presents an expansive new body of work, including paintings, works on paper and color studies. His visual language has already evolved into something more allegorical, shifting from human-centered scenes to lyrical or oneiric landscapes where figures often float, yet the mood and feeling remain the true protagonists.
Drawing its title from the Greek word meraki, meaning “to pour one’s soul into one’s work,” the exhibition takes this notion as a springboard to explore how the concept of the soul—or one’s interiority—intersects with devotion and creativity. Rich in both art historical and religious references, the works tap into a more spiritual dimension, expanding beyond the sentimental intimacy that defined his earlier pieces. Deeply influenced by Magic Realism, Chambers’s paintings detach themselves from material reality, moving fluidly between inner, outer and otherworldly realms, exploring symbols, signals and intermediaries that guide us in navigating the layers of human experience.
Dominic Chambers’s “Meraki” is on view at Lehmann Maupin through November 9.
Rirkrit Tiravanija at Pilar Corrias
“A MILLION RABBIT HOLES” marks Rirkrit Tiravanija’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias
As a pioneer of Relational Art, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work carries an inherently political charge, as demonstrated by his latest show at Pilar Corrias London. In “A MILLION RABBIT HOLES,” Tiravanija explores the deepening polarization and disillusionment surrounding the U.S. election, touching on globally pervasive sentiments as the world’s balance grows increasingly fragile. Transforming the gallery walls with forest-like wallpaper, he creates an immersive environment reflecting the charged atmosphere of American politics in the lead-up to the election, inspired by his experiences in Upstate New York.
Known for his groundbreaking installations centered around cooking and communal sharing, Tiravanija’s practice emphasizes human connections over traditional notions of art as static objects. His works often subvert societal hierarchies and behavioral norms, inviting audiences to participate actively—whether through interactions with others or through the artist’s facilitation. In his London exhibition, visitors are plunged into a world of paradoxical propaganda, surrounded by an intentionally illusory, pastoral setting that underscores the fiction of contemporary politics and the false promises of a better future.
Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “A MILLION RABBIT HOLES” is on view at Pilar Corrias, London, through November 9.
Tracey Emin at White Cube
Tracey Emin’s “I followed you to the end” at White Cube, London. Courtesy of teh Artist and White Cube.
Since her rise to fame as the queen of the Young British Artists with her unforgettable My Bed (1998), Tracey Emin has captivated international audiences with her provocatively raw yet deeply human art, addressing the peaks and valleys of existence—love, desire, grief and loss—with an unflinching honesty. Her autobiographical approach has laid bare the intensely personal yet universal experience of being a woman, capturing everything from the awakening of sexual desire and the claiming of one’s pleasure to the visceral trials of violence, shame, illness, abortion and menopause. This turbulent inner world of emotions, passions, and sensations is instinctively translated onto Emin’s canvases through bold, unplanned strokes that channel her emotional energy directly onto the surface.
Emin has never hesitated to confront the most profound physical and psychological challenges, chronicling the unique struggles of the female condition in today’s world. Her latest show in London continues the journey she began with her recent exhibition at White Cube New York last year, presenting a powerful new series of paintings and sculptures that delve into themes of love and loss, mortality and rebirth.
Every time Anna Weyant stages an exhibition, it becomes evident that beneath the buzz surrounding her private life, there’s an undeniable technical mastery that continues to evolve while remaining deeply engaged in a dialogue with art history. Drawing as much from the refined elegance of Flemish portraiture as from the dramatic chiaroscuro of Caravaggio, Weyant’s paintings are not only visually captivating but also deeply intriguing. They meticulously uphold the Western canons of beauty and “good painting”—executed with precision—but simultaneously disrupt this perfection with uncanny elements that provoke the viewer to question these very ideals.
Rendered in somber tones and pale hues, her figures often play tragicomic roles, suspended in a dreamlike, timeless space. These doll-like girls move through her canvases with a fierce presence, yet subtly reveal a concealed inner struggle—suggesting a fragile, unspoken vulnerability. They project an image of strength, wielding their allure with confidence, but betray an underlying trauma or insecurity that compels them to seek validation and admiration externally. This tension resonates perfectly with the exhibition’s title, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” Marking her London debut, the show makes these dynamics of concealment and performance even more apparent. The feminine attributes of her meticulously rendered classical bodies are only glimpsed through small windows, partially obscured by a fabric blind or a newspaper—introducing a fresh psychological layer to her latest body of work.
“Calder: Extreme Cantilever” at Ben Brown London. Courtesy of Ben Brown.
Opening on Frieze Masters Night at Ben Brown Fine Arts, this exhibition reunites Alexander Calder’s three unique cantilever sculptures for the first time, presented alongside a curated selection of oil paintings, works on paper and historically significant artifacts. The centerpiece sculptures—Extreme Cantilever, More Extreme Cantilever and Extrême porte à faux III—are on loan from the Calder Foundation and distinguished private collections, showcasing the artist’s boundless imagination and intuitive genius that firmly position him as one of the 20th Century’s leading innovators. More importantly, this grouping captures a pivotal evolution in Calder’s formal and conceptual approach to spatial abstraction, shaped by the seismic impact of the Second World War. Confronted with a world grappling with collective trauma, Calder responded with sculptures that became strikingly evocative, featuring increasingly complex forms that seem to encapsulate the anxieties of an era—a resonance that remains poignant amid today’s renewed geopolitical uncertainties.
“Calder: Extreme Cantilever” opens tomorrow (October 9) and runs on November 22 at Ben Brown Fine Arts in London.
“Enchanted Alchemies: Magic, Mysticism, and the Occult in Art” at Lévy Gorvy Dayan
Geltrude Abercrombie, Lady with Black Braid; Oil on Masonite, 8 × 10 inches (20.3 × 25.4 cm). Courtesy of Lévi Gorvy Dayan
As interest in Surrealism, now 100 years old, continues to rise, Lévy Gorvy Dayan’s latest exhibition in London delves into themes of magic, mysticism, and the occult through a collection of masterpieces primarily by Surrealist women artists such as Gertrude Abercrombie, Eileen Agar, Leonora Carrington, Elda Cerrato, Ithell Colquhoun, Leonor Fini and Monica Sjöö, placed in dialogue with contemporary figures like Francesco Clemente, Chitra Ganesh, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Bharti Kher, Linder and Goshka Macuga. Blurring the boundaries between spirituality, mysticism, and hallucination, the show provides a sweeping exploration of the human imagination across cultures and eras.
Organized into three thematic chapters—“Occultism and Dreams,” “Magic and Mysticism” and “Alchemy: Enchantment and Transformations”—the exhibition examines how artists over the past century have engaged with occult and esoteric traditions to shape and reshape their personal, cultural and historical narratives. The timing feels particularly relevant as society experiences a renewed fascination with alternative knowledge and spirituality in an era that has “killed its idols” yet still searches for new belief systems amid a pervasive sense of irrationality and uncertainty.
“The meat and bones in my practice is somewhere between texture and storytelling,” artist Nicole Eisenmanonce said. A New York Times critic called her “Kafka with a paintbrush, mindful of the nightmares of history and partial to somber, social-realist colors.”
The artist’s first exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Paris, titled “with, and, of, on Sculpture,” explores the multiplicity of her output, from a monumentally scaled cortège to accessible line drawings. In tandem, a major survey exhibition, “Nicole Eisenman: What Happened“—organized by Museum Brandhorst and Whitechapel Gallery—is on view until September 22 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, spanning 100 works produced from 1992 to today.
It’s not Eisenman’s first outing in France. A show of her paintings, juxtaposed alongside work by Edvard Munch and Käthe Kollwitz, was displayed at the Fondation Vincent Van Gogh in Arles in 2022: “Heads, Kisses, Battles.” (The artist has spoken admiringly of Van Gogh’s wildly gestural canvases: “You can look at Van Gogh’s paint marks and almost shake his hand.”)
During a press visit at the Parisian Hauser & Wirth earlier this month, Eisenman explained that she works between two Brooklyn-based studios, for painting and sculpture respectively, reflecting her “bifurcated practice.” The spaces are a seven-minute bike ride apart, but she is not zig-zagging between them: “When I’m making paintings, I don’t tend to go to the sculpture studio for six, eight months. And then when I’m making sculpture, the paintings go into the attic and I lock the door and I don’t pay attention to that. It goes back and forth, usually six or eight months on, flip-flopping.”
Directly greeting the visitor as they step into Hauser & Wirth’s ground floor is Archangel (The Visitors), an imposing painting that Eisenman started last summer. “It’s gone through a few iterations before arriving at this one. And I’m not sure I’m totally done with it either—there may be more.” The canvas depicts the opening of an exhibition of sculptures, with, overhead, a “military looking animal hanging down, which is inspired by a sculpture that I’ve been obsessed with for a very long time… by two Dada artists called [John] Heartfield and [Rudolf] Schlichter.”
Those artists showed Prussian Archangel, a pig-headed mannequin in a World War I outfit suspended from the ceiling, at the First International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920. As fascist politics rise—France is still reeling from the omnipresence of the far right in the recent European elections, and a snap election awaits yet—the painting is a queasy harbinger of what looms.
The figures in Archangel (The Visitors), milling between sculptures, feature people the artist knows and people she made up; the visitors in the rear of the painting entering the space were inspired by attendees of the Degenerate Art exhibition, a show masterminded by Adolf Ziegler and the Nazi Party in Munich in 1937. Eisenman stated: “The painting acts as a kind of parentheses of this period between the Dada art show and the Degenerate Art show—which took much of that work and reframed it as degenerate.”
Neighboring this unsettling work is Eisenman’s partial but still large-scale installation Procession (2019), which premiered in an even larger form at the 2019 Whitney Biennial. (Upstairs, a preparatory study for the installation is on view.) It was part of a colossal composition sprawled across a terrace at the Whitney, inspired by mass protests. From the excerpt on view here, which cuts across the entire ground floor, Eisenman remarked that the leader’s fists may be in the air, but it’s “not such a strong fist—kind of a tired fist that needs help.”
However, she noted that “it’s interesting for me to see this piece taken out of that grouping… it becomes less about the protests and a little bit more personal—how couples behave.” Here, she laughed. “At some point, you have to pull the other person along, or the other person’s a weight… persevering and slogging through, trudging together.”
Nearby are bright, much less representational paintings, Shape Driven Head 1-3, which Eisenman links, process-wise, as hewing more closely to her sculptural practice. She cited John Chamberlain as a meaningful equivalent: “how he makes pieces of metal smushed together—I think about this kind of process. With painting, it’s a matter of layering: of addition and subtraction.”
This is very different from how she created Archangel (The Visitors), where “there’s really a lot of plotting. It’s related to a process that’s probably more like a fiction writer, how a fiction writer would construct a narrative.” She discussed how a preparatory collage study, on view upstairs, was helpful and formative in graphing that plot: “I can move things around and decide what’s where. It’s kind of like an analog version of Photoshop, where you can have things move around and change sizes without having to redraw the whole thing every time. It’s like a really utilitarian drawing.”
One floor up, a variety of media are on display, everything from an artist’s book called “Alt Faces,” to a plaster bust of faux Gallic sophistication (Dame Francaise Chic), to a bronze sculpture (Mad Cat) topped with a helmet made from the seat of a custom Herman Miller chair, to an oil painting announcing raw squiggly CUBIST FEMALE INNARDS in all caps, to an amusing pencil drawing about life in Eisenman’s studio (an orbit of cartoon bursts including a lightbulb of insight, demarcations for internet breaks and a despondent list of NO IDEAS, BAD IDEAS, DUMB IDEAS and OLD IDEAS).
Eisenman’s ability to make at once uncanny sculptures, iconographic drawings and politically powerful paintings yields a complex ensemble. Time and again, she is a maestro at mixing malaise and playfulness and astute observations about human fallibility.
