Frieze Masters 2025 unfolds as a study in how history endures through reinvention. This year’s edition turns the lens inward, treating the studio as both theatre and time capsule—a place where artistic memory is rehearsed, refracted, and renewed. Curated by Sheena Wagstaff with Margrethe Troensegaard, the Studio and Spotlight sections draw connections between gesture and genealogy, from Old Master resonance to postwar experimentation and contemporary introspection. Across the fair, artists and galleries engage the past not as inheritance but as provocation, revealing how creation itself remains the most enduring act of remembering.
Gagosian
Glenn Brown, “Rabbit Hole,” 2025. Oil, acrylic, and India ink on panel, in frame, 39 7/8 × 29 5/8 × 2 in. (101.43 × 75.35 × 5 cm). © Glenn Brown. Photo: Glenn Brown Studio. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
At Gagosian, Glenn Brown transforms the fair’s Studio section into a hall of mirrors reflecting art history through distortion, wit, and seduction. His new paintings, drawings, and the sculpture Swig (2025) collapse centuries of visual language—from Raphael and Fragonard to Auerbach and Baselitz—into swirling, iridescent compositions that feel at once erudite and delirious.
“Glenn Brown transforms the fair’s Studio section into a hall of mirrors reflecting art history through distortion, wit, and seduction,”
Brown’s antique frames function as conceptual borders between past and present, while his characteristic doubling and linework suggest a painter channeling multiple spirits through one hand. Presented alongside historical drawings from the Brown Collection, this installation reads as both homage and transfiguration: a performance of painting’s own memory.
Vadehra Art Gallery
Anju Dodiya, “A Measure of Happiness,” 2025. Watercolour, charcoal, and soft pastel on fabric stretched on board, 96 × 60 in. Courtesy of the artist and Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi.
Anju Dodiya, “Relay (for Mike Kelley)”, 2012, watercolour, charcoal, and soft pastel on paper, 72 × 45 in., courtesy of the artist and Vadehra Art Gallery.
Vadehra Art Gallery’s presentation of “Ancestral Log” by Anju Dodiya reimagines the Studio section as an interior theatre of the psyche—an arena where memory, myth, and selfhood collide. Executed in watercolor, charcoal, and pastel on paper and fabric, her compositions stage female protagonists who navigate the shifting borders between the intimate and the archetypal. Works such as A Measure of Happiness (2025) and Relay (for Mike Kelley) (2012) merge fragility with defiance, translating introspection into form. Through this constellation of charged images, Dodiya reimagines the studio as a site of emotional inheritance and creative reckoning, asserting how contemporary figuration can reclaim vulnerability as an act of power.
Hauser & Wirth
Francis Picabia, “Les rochers à Saint-Honorat (The Rocks at Saint-Honorat),” ca. 1924–1925, Ripolin and oil on canvas, 89.5 × 117 cm (35¼ × 46⅛ in), © 2025 ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, photo: Thomas Barratt.
Hauser & Wirth showcases a harmonious dialogue between modernist innovation and contemporary reflection, anchored by Francis Picabia’s luminous Les rochers à Saint-Honorat (ca. 1924–25). The booth gathers works by Louise Bourgeois, Marcel Duchamp, Lee Lozano, Gabriele Münter, and Alina Szapocznikow, tracing a century of experimentation in form and material. Within this wider presentation, Swiss-born artist Nicolas Party curates a refined selection of paintings by Arnold Böcklin, Hans Emmenegger, Ferdinand Hodler, and Félix Vallotton, exploring the landscape as both mirror and myth of national identity. “Landscape,” Party reflects, “is not only a subject but a cultural construct—something that reflects and produces identity.”
“Landscape is not only a subject but a cultural construct—something that reflects and produces identity,”
Nicolas Party
Together, these parallel threads reveal Hauser & Wirth’s gift for staging art history as a living conversation between past and present.
Brun Fine Art
An Italian specimen marble top, probably Naples, circa 1800, rectangular top with marble samples arranged geometrically, 4 cm thick, 160 × 84.5 cm (5 ft 3 in × 2 ft 9¼ in), courtesy of Brun Fine Art.
Brun Fine Art offers one of the fair’s most atmospheric experiences: a booth inspired by the poetic interiors of Sir John Soane’s Museum, where Roman and Neoclassical sculpture, marble tables, urns, and architectural fragments converse in sculptural harmony. The highlight, an Italian specimen marble top from circa 1800, anchors the display as a meditation on material intelligence and the geometry of beauty. By staging antiquity within a modern spatial rhythm, the gallery transforms its stand into an architectural reverie—a place where the language of marble becomes both historical document and living art form.
Jhaveri Contemporary
Novera Ahmed, “Bangladesh,” 1971, bronze, 42 × 46 × 41 cm, Courtesy of Jhaveri Contemporary and Novera Ahmed.
Jhaveri Contemporary brings overdue attention to Novera Ahmed (1930s–2015), the pioneering Bangladeshi sculptor who bridged modernism, folklore, and dance. Her bronze La Danse du Soleil (1972) captures a figure suspended between balance and flight, embodying her lifelong fascination with rhythm as sculptural form. Trained in Europe yet grounded in Bengal’s vernacular traditions, Ahmed forged a language where abstraction meets myth—most strikingly in her serpent series, coiled with latent energy drawn from Hindu and Buddhist cosmologies. Created between Bangkok and Paris in the 1960s and ’70s, these works translate movement into monumentality. Her presentation at Frieze Masters reclaims her as a sculptor of global modernism whose art fused material, myth, and emancipation.
Secci Gallery
Titina Maselli, “Stadio III,” 1978, acrylic on canvas, 130 × 195 cm (51⅛ × 76¾ in), Courtesy of Secci Gallery.
In the Spotlight section, Secci Gallery unveils a vital rediscovery of Titina Maselli (1924–2005), whose postwar paintings capture the kinetic tension of modern life. Her subjects—footballers, boxers, and cityscapes—are not heroic but human, their movements frozen in a blaze of light. Stadio III (1978) epitomises her vision: a figure sprinting through space, both athlete and metaphor for existential struggle. Influenced by Futurism, cinema, and urban spectacle, Maselli’s art radiates a fierce autonomy, portraying modernity as both stage and solitude.
Pace Gallery
Peter Hujar, “Mario Montez Backstage at the Palm Casino Revue,” 1974, vintage gelatin silver print, 34.3 × 33.7 cm (13½ × 13¼ in), image; 43.2 × 35.6 cm (17 × 14 in), paper, © The Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy of Pace Gallery.
Pace dedicates its booth to photographer Peter Hujar, whose 1970s–80s portraits of New York’s drag and avant-garde performers remain among the most sensitive documents of that era. Taken backstage in East Village clubs, these 26 vintage prints—developed by Hujar himself—capture moments of metamorphosis: bodies in costume, faces between selves. In Mario Montez Backstage at the Palm Casino Revue (1974), the quiet before performance becomes a study in vulnerability and poise. Hujar’s lens is never voyeuristic; it is intimate, reverent, and humane, revealing the theatre of identity as an act of grace.
“Hujar’s lens is never voyeuristic; it is intimate, reverent, and humane,”
Stephen Friedman Gallery
Anne Rothenstein, “Unknown Territory 2,” 2022, oil on wood panel, 123 × 150.2 cm (48⅜ × 59⅛ in); framed: 126.5 × 154 cm (49¾ × 60⅝ in), courtesy of Stephen Friedman Gallery.
Stephen Friedman Gallery brings together six new paintings by British artist Anne Rothenstein, whose booth in the Studio section feels like an intimate journal of moods and impressions. Her figures—solitary, pensive, often caught between gesture and stillness—seem to exist within the threshold of memory. Drawing from Japanese Nihonga painting, wood engraving, and photography, Rothenstein’s works are luminous yet restrained, their color harmonies suggesting emotion distilled to essence. In this quietly magnetic display, the studio becomes an emotional landscape—where recollection, intuition, and painterly poise converge.
