In the Shadows: Frieze Sculpture Brings Poetic Presence to Regent’s Park

Each autumn, as London prepares for Frieze Week, The Regent’s Park becomes the stage for an open-air exhibition that blurs art and environment. Opening September 17 and running through November 2, Frieze Sculpture marks the thirteenth edition of the acclaimed public art initiative—once again curated by Fatoş Üstek, who invites visitors to wander through the park’s English Gardens beneath the resonant theme, “In the Shadows.”

Üstek’s curatorial vision frames the shadow not as an absence, but as a site of potential—“zones where stories unfold quietly yet powerfully, often out of sight,” she notes. Across fourteen sculptures by international artists—from Jaune Quick-to-See Smith to Elmgreen & Dragset, Reena Saini Kallat, Erwin Wurm, and the collective Assemble—the exhibition explores how darkness can be both refuge and revelation.

Poetics of the Hidden at Frieze Sculpture

The works on view conjure a dialogue between the tangible and the unseen. Andy Holden’s Auguries (Lament) (2025) turns the calls of extinct and endangered birds into bronze sound-forms, echoing ecological fragility. Reena Saini Kallat’s Requiem (The Last Call) (2024) amplifies the idea of disappearance—a monumental sound sculpture in which silence becomes an elegy for lost species. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, whose King of the Mountain (2024–25) honors Indigenous cosmologies, transforms myth into monument, merging cultural memory with environmental consciousness.

Nearby, Erwin Wurm’s Ghost (Substitutes) (2022) haunts the lawns like sartorial phantoms—empty garments recalling absent bodies—while Burçak Bingöl’s Unit Terrenum Rosa (2025), crafted from clay soil drawn directly from Regent’s Park, re-grounds the exhibition in the earth itself. Nature and transformation remain central to Henrique Oliveira’s Desnatureza 8 (2025), whose visceral wooden tendrils twist like roots breaking through the civilized surface of the city.

Elsewhere, Grace Schwindt’s When I Remember Through You (2025) becomes a meditation on memory and care, while Lucía Pizzani’s The Tale of the Eye, the Snake and the Seed (2025) weaves together metamorphosis, ritual, and feminine myth in a performance-driven installation. Assemble’s Fibredog (2025) injects a sense of collective play, the work extending into a costumed procession that traverses the park—linking art, craft, and community through tactile storytelling.

A City in Sculpture in London

This year, Frieze Sculpture joined forces with London Sculpture Week (September 20–28), connecting with major public art initiatives including Sculpture in the City, The Line, East Bank, and the Fourth Plinth. As part of The Sculpture Switch, Pizzani will guide visitors through Sculpture in the City, while artist Vanessa da Silva—a previous participant—returns to lead tours through Regent’s Park. A conference at the Warburg Institute on September 26 will further expand the conversation around art in public space, exploring how contemporary sculpture redefines urban experience.

Through these partnerships, Üstek underscores London’s unique capacity to function as an open-air museum—its public gardens, streets, and riverbanks transformed into a constellation of creative encounters. Bloomberg Connects once again serves as the Official Digital Guide, offering a free audio tour narrated by Üstek, accessible globally via app.

Shadows as Thresholds during Frieze Week

If Frieze Sculpture serves as the prelude to Frieze Week London and Frieze Masters (October 15–19), this edition feels particularly attuned to the cultural moment—where the interplay of visibility and erasure, nature and artifice, carries fresh urgency. “Darkness,” Üstek reminds us, “is no conclusion—it is a threshold.”

That threshold stretches across the park’s winding paths, where works by Timur Si-Qin, Abdollah Nafisi, David Altmejd, and Elmgreen & Dragset invite contemplation of the unseen systems—ecological, emotional, ancestral—that shape our collective present. In the fading light of autumn, Frieze Sculpture 2025 reminds us that what lies in shadow may in fact illuminate the future.