This year’s Frieze London 2025 feels like a turning point—one about presence, perception, and renewal. Across the fair, artists are redefining materiality as a language of consciousness: sculpture breathes with mythic resonance, painting turns inward toward memory and care, and installation becomes a site of collective reflection. Themes of ecology, ancestry, and transformation pulse through the booths, revealing art’s ability to respond to instability not with noise, but with nuance. Each presentation in this Whitewall preview—spanning the poetic, the political, and the profoundly human—invites a slower gaze, one that listens as much as it looks.
Your Guide to Frieze London 2025
White Cube
Howardena Pindell, “Tesseract #21,” 2024, acrylic on canvas, 165.1 × 241.3 cm; 65 × 95 in. Photo © Christopher Burke Studios. © the artist. Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.
At Frieze London 2025 (Stand D21), White Cube unites Sara Flores, Marguerite Humeau, and Howardena Pindell in a lyrical exploration of materiality, mythology, and inherited knowledge. Humeau’s bronzes—including Coeur de Marie (2022), inspired by the bleeding-heart flower—translate emotion into sculptural myth, merging biology and metaphysics. Pindell’s intricate abstractions, such as Night Flight (2024), layer punctured paper and sewn acrylic into tactile constellations of endurance and visibility. From the Peruvian Amazon, Flores’s wild-cotton canvases—Untitled (Pei Maya Kené, 2024–25)—chart Shipibo-Konibo cosmologies through vegetal dyes and geometric precision. Together, these works renew the idea of art as re-enchantment, where body, nature, and spirit coexist in restorative balance.
Gagosian
Lauren Halsey, “Untitled,” 2025, polymer-modified gypsum and stain on wood, 239.7 × 239.7 × 7.6 cm; 94 3/8 × 94 3/8 × 3 in. Photo © Jeff McLane. © Lauren Halsey. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.
For Frieze London 2025, Gagosian transforms its booth into a vibrant portal of South Central LA imagination with a solo installation by Lauren Halsey. Rooted in her community’s architecture, poetics, and vernacular design, Halsey reimagines Los Angeles as both archive and dreamscape. At its centre, a six-foot plaza sign emblazoned with “Bling Tax and Things” and “Affordable Black Art” pays homage to the city’s Black- and Brown-owned businesses—symbols of resilience and creativity amid urban flux. Surrounding reliefs translate street signage into cosmological hieroglyphs, while vivid wallpapers celebrate the multiplicity of Black life. Extending ideas from her emajendat project at the Serpentine and anticipating her 2026 sculpture park in LA, Halsey’s installation becomes a living testament to memory, pride, and visionary community.
Vadehra Art Gallery
Shrimanti Saha, “The Star Gazer,” 2025, oil on linen, 107.9 × 132.1 cm; 42.5 × 52 in. Courtesy of the artist and Vadehra Art Gallery.
Vadehra Art Gallery unveils Sometimes, Ceaselessly, You Run Towards, a resonant reflection on feminine agency within South Asia’s shifting cultural terrain. The presentation amplifies voices that confront systemic inequities—from gendered violence and censorship to urban bias and inherited mythologies—through deeply personal vocabularies. Among the highlights, Shrimanti Saha’s The Star Gazer (2025) intertwines dreamlike figuration and allegory, evoking inner worlds of resistance and transformation. Across painting, sculpture, photography, and installation, the booth gathers a chorus of female perspectives, reframing myth and memory as sites of renewal and reclamation.
What Not to Miss at Frieze London 2025
Thaddaeus Ropac
Megan Rooney, “Signals and Warnings,” 2025, acrylic, oil, pastel, and oil stick on canvas, 199.6 × 152.3 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac, London.
Robert Rauschenberg, “Polls,” 1987, acrylic, silkscreen ink, and scrap metal on stainless steel, 121.9 × 121.9 cm; 48 × 48 in. Photo © Simon Cherry. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation / ARS, New York 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac, London.
At Booth D22, Thaddaeus Ropac stages a cross-generational exchange on material innovation, identity, and abstraction. A centrepiece, Robert Rauschenberg’s Polls (1987), captures his pivotal shift to metal supports—silkscreening his own photographs onto stainless steel to merge image, reflection, and industry. Presented in the centennial year of his birth, it reaffirms Rauschenberg’s enduring dialogue between art and technology. Megan Rooney’s Signals and Warnings (2025) pulses with chromatic energy, translating psychic and environmental tensions into painterly form. Joined by works from Tom Sachs, Mandy El Sayegh, Zadie Xa, and Gilbert & George, Ropac’s display celebrates experimentation as the enduring rhythm of contemporary art.
Hauser & Wirth
Lee Bul, “Perdu CCXII,” 2025, mother-of-pearl, acrylic paint on jute canvas, aluminum base panel, and stainless-steel frame, diptych, 226.6 × 163.3 × 4 cm; 89 1/4 × 64 1/4 × 1 5/8 in. © Lee Bul. Photo: Jeon Byung-cheol. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Avery Singer, “Lost Boccioni,” 2025, acrylic on canvas stretched over aluminum panel, 241.6 × 215.9 × 5.4 cm; 95 1/8 × 85 × 2 1/8 in. Photo © Lance Brewer. © Avery Singer. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Hauser & Wirth presents a vibrant cross-section of contemporary practice that bridges material experiment and inner reflection. Lee Bul’s Perdu CCXII (2025)—a gleaming diptych of mother-of-pearl, acrylic, and jute—extends her exploration of utopia and corporeality, its iridescent surface oscillating between organic delicacy and engineered form. Avery Singer’s Lost Boccioni (2025) reinterprets Futurist dynamism through her signature digital-to-painterly process, collapsing technology and time into a single plane. Surrounding these focal works are new pieces by George Rouy, Christina Kimeze, Allison Katz, Anj Smith, Jeffrey Gibson, Takesada Matsutani, and Cindy Sherman, among others—each broadening the conversation between figuration, identity, and invention. Together they embody the gallery’s global vision of experimentation and embodied imagination.
Perrotin
Danielle Orchard, “A Shade Garden,” 2025, oil on canvas, 174 × 204 cm; 68 × 80 in. Photo © Charles Benton. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
At Frieze London 2025, Perrotin stages dual solo presentations by Danielle Orchard and Susumu Kamijo, complemented by works from Bharti Kher, Oli Epp, and others from the gallery’s roster. Orchard debuts four new paintings that reconsider the female nude as an active subject of reflection and intimacy. Works such as A Shade Garden (2025) and Pollinators (2025) fuse modernist architecture of form with psychological nuance, transforming domestic experience into radiant meditations on care and renewal. Kamijo’s new poodle paintings, poised between play and tension, merge abstraction with instinctive gesture, nodding to Bacon and de Kooning. Together, these artists encapsulate Perrotin’s refined sensibility—where wit, emotion, and painterly precision meet in contemporary harmony.
Pace
William Monk, “House of Nowhere III,” 2024–2025, oil on canvas, 22.5 × 30.3 × 2.2 cm; 8 7/8 × 11 15/16 × 7/8 in. © William Monk. Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery.
Pace Gallery dedicates its booth to William Monk, unveiling a new suite of paintings that expand his meditation on perception, time, and the porous boundary between abstraction and representation. Works such as Sentinel’s End (2024–25), Headland II (2024–25), and Cactus Garden (2024–25) extend Monk’s chromatic vocabulary and rhythmic brushwork, translating fleeting sensations of landscape and memory into immersive fields of colour. Smaller canvases—House of Nowhere II and III (2024–25)—distil this sensibility into intimate scale, evoking portals that hover between stillness and flux. Quietly monumental, Monk’s new series crystallises the contemplative poise and painterly transcendence that define Pace’s presentation this year.
Lisson
Leiko Ikemura, “Hope,” 2025, tempera and oil on canvas, 160 × 200 × 5.1 cm; 63 × 78 3/4 × 2 in. © Leiko Ikemura. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery.
Lisson Gallery offers an intergenerational meditation on humanity’s entanglement with the natural world, gathering artists who probe the intersections of ecology, perception, and transformation. Spanning sculpture, painting, installation, and film, the booth meditates on the fragility and endurance of life on Earth. Highlights include Leiko Ikemura’s Hope (2025), a tempera-and-oil vision of renewal that fuses landscape and spirit, and Sarah Cunningham’s Untitled (2024), whose layered surfaces evoke the shifting atmospheres of memory and emergence. Works by Hugh Hayden, Otobong Nkanga, Ryan Gander, Laure Prouvost, and Tishan Hsu deepen this ecological reflection, positioning Lisson’s presentation as a living organism—an art-driven ecosystem that reconnects human awareness with the world it inhabits. For insider tips on London during Frieze, check out the recommendations from Paddle8 co-founder Alexander Gilkes
