The Standout Presentations at This Year’s Fairs in London
This year marked Frieze London’s 20th anniversary, with the most international edition of the fair to date and a new artist-led section, with more than 160 leading galleries spanning 40 countries. Below, we’re sharing some of the best of Frieze London and Frieze Masters.
Clearing Gallery presents Marguerite Humeau at Frieze London 2023, photo by Ophelia Sanderson.
Best of Frieze London: Marguerite Humeau at Clearing Gallery
Delicate, woven with minute detail and handiwork, Marguerite Humeau’s work on view in a solo presentation at Clearing Gallery brought together a strange mixture of mechanic biomimetic devices and embroidered astronomical mappings. Inspired by the artist’s ambitious 160-acre land art project Orisons (2023), it compresses seamlessly into 50 meters of space as a synecdoche of both her project and what it stands for.
Scattered about the floor, kinetic wind-activated devices made of recycled steel sprouted from cast bronze root networks against a backdrop of embroidered constellation-like wall artworks. Ethereal, muted tones and intricate lines and curves emanate from the space, reminiscing on nature, its complexities, and hidden-away wonders. Replete with secret subtleties and symbols, the wall-works shed concealed maps of the Orison’s land sewn on textiles, referencing once more to the artist’s research-intensive earthwork in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, giving the artist new grounds to pose tribute to both the transience and resilience of nature while questioning our place in it.
Hauser & Wirth presents Barbara Chase Riboud at Frieze London 2023, courtesy of Hauser & Wirth.
Barbara Chase Riboud at Hauser & Wirth
This year, Hauser & Wirth returned to Frieze with a solo booth of works by the acclaimed Paris-based, American virtuoso sculptor, Barbara Chase-Riboud. The artist’s debut with the gallery, having announced a representation of her earlier this year, coincided with the artist’s landmark exhibition at the MoMA “The Encounter: Barbara Chase-Riboud/Alberto Giacometti.”
Standing eight feet tall was a trinity of black bronze sculptures, sleek, erect, towering over the audience, their surfaces rippled like a waterfall in vertically stacked tiles. The focal point of the presentation, each sculpture is representative of one of the first-known female poets from across the ancient world. It was derived from the rarely-seen series of 16 sculptures, “Standing Black Women of Venice,” (1969-2020) spanning four decades of the artist’s prolific, boundary-breaking career. Based on modules originally created for the artist’s floor work Bathers (1969-72), the work is comprised of reassembled bronze plaques in various grid configurations. The artist used a sand-casting method to produce a glossy and polished bronze surface, its folds and creases a signature to the artist’s practice, here creating a sense of suspended water. Set against a backdrop of six pearl-white recent wall works on black walls, the works made from silk pierced on paper in her signature automatic writing are laden with symbols and affiliations, reminiscent of her passion for both handwriting and hieroglyphics.
While in-depth in both research and concept, imbued with historical and literary references, they appear minimalistic, emanating a cool and meditative ambiance throughout the booth, that offers a much-welcomed respite from the unending flood of colors, shapes, sizes, and textures that inundate the surrounding space. Free from all muss and fuss, the artist’s refined approach is one applied aesthetically and conceptually, focusing her energies on sculptural elements and complexities rather than societal reflections, working against traditional oppositions of weight and volume, space and depth, masterfully creating the impression of constant movement, embodying monumental women that Chase-Riboud memorializes as she subverts traditional boundaries.
Timothy Taylor presents Eddie Martinez at Frieze London 2023, courtesy of Timothy Taylor.
Best of Frieze London: Eddie Martinez at Timothy Taylor
A kaleidoscopic floor-to-ceiling collage of unscripted disorderly sketches and gestures on scraps of paper by Eddie Martinez was layered across four walls filled Timothy Taylor’s booth at Frieze London. Surprisingly, a majority of the works were not for sale. 20 sellable framed works on paper (2021–2022) hung next to over 2000 unsellable pieces. Every inch of space was covered, almost studio-like. Curated by Claire Gilman, Chief Curator of the Drawing Center in New York, the presentation was built on Martinez’s 2017 solo exhibition at the Center, where, like here, his work seems more about the process than the final output.
Rough and ready, vivid and varied, when you zoom in and introspect the thousands of drawings at hand, the works showed a tendency towards forceful, sometimes brash, expressive brush strokes in contrasting paintbox colors, sometimes figurative, cartoonish, or simply abstruse while always saturated with a touch of bold. Some seemed to have been stalled in the sketch’s conception stages, some in transition and preparation, and some somewhere towards the end. Martinez’s power seems to work best when all combined, revealing his riotous diaristic inputs paired with their more heavily painted finalized product, allowing the viewer unique access to the abundant connections within Martinez’s exuberant output.
Stephen Friedman Gallery presents Leilah Babirye at Frieze London 2023, photo by Ophelia Sanderson.
Leilah Babirye at Stephen Friedman Gallery
Against a backdrop of vividly painted red walls, Stephen Friedman’s booth immediately drew viewers in, hijacking their attention with bold wooden large-scale sculptures of semi-abstract masks, turquoise ceramic heads of weathered surface, and acrylic portraits of brightly adorned folk with vividly colored hair, clothes and makeup. The work of the Ugandan multidisciplinary artist Leilah Babirye is informed by an array of African and European traditions, reconstructing everyday materials into new objects.
At Frieze London were various items of debris from the streets of New York such as wire, metal spoons, and nails that are welded, burnished, and woven, or fired and then splattered with glaze. Forced to flee her home in Uganda due to its severe anti-LGBQ legislation, the artist envisages characters from her ongoing series “Queer Identity Card” where subjects are allowed to pose for passports as themselves, freely and fully as they are and want to be, jewels, makeup, died hair and all. The artist’s first bronze “Gyagenda” can also be found outside, across the lawn of the Regent’s Park, part of Frieze Sculpture.
Pace presents Arlene Shechet for Frieze London’s “Studio,” photo by Damian Griffiths, courtesy of Pace.
Best of Frieze Masters: Arlene Shechet at Pace Gallery
New this year to Frieze Masters is the curated section “Studio,” curated by the Met’s Sheena Wagstaff. The focus on the artist’s place of making found no better home than in Arlene Shechet’s fragmented chromatic sculptural garden. Pace Gallery brought together her “Together” and “Once Removed” series, in collaboration with Sam Fogg and his medieval illuminated manuscript, Book of Hours, which conceptually and visually inspired the artist’s practice. Against a backdrop of earth-green tinted walls, a polychromatic spectrum of abstract, saturated, moss-like textural forms morphed from geometric to biomorphic as you walked throughout the room. From afar, the iridescent surfaces sheen like velvet, turning rigid as you close in towards them.
Bold and effusive, the ceramic bodies seemed almost life-like, breathing through fur-like pores akin to the phylum Porifera, drooping, slug-like off their steel supports from cantilevered postures. Intertwined were some of the artist’s earlier works from 30 years ago, vases she likes to call “Buddhist Temples as Vessels,” or “domestic sacred spaces” which she believes are the most “perfect type of sculpture,” “as common as they are unique.” Paper molds imbued with the floor plans of Buddhist temples, the works were reminiscent of blue and white porcelain, revealing a stretch of works and trials within the artist’s career that are very much incremental to the process of finding oneself as an artist, and which, perhaps like the sculptures themselves, “are never fully formed,” continuing to grow and evolve, remaining constant in its movement and transition.
Best of Frieze Masters: Ettore Sottsass at Friedman Benda
For Friedman Benda’s inaugural participation at Frieze Masters, the gallery presented a selection of seminal works by the esteemed Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass (1917-2007) from his experimental years between 1955 and 1966, most not yet shown in the UK. Exploring the remarkable creativity of the early years of the designer’s career, the show included key works from across different media, including ceramics, furniture, and painting—many of which belonged to the artist’s personal collection.
On display were some of his most widely known works, including the “Tondo” series (1959), showing the breadth of Sottsass’s ceramic experimentations, while several others reveled in the boldness of his furniture creations, juxtaposing natural wood with the brightest of colors, and included works from the original Tufarelli residence. Bringing his powerful artistic vision to a comprehensive range of disciplines—architecture, ceramics, furniture, glass, painting, photography, and industrial design—Sottsass was one of the most significant counterforces to modernism in design history, grounding the idea that design could have a remarkable range of expression.
