Standouts at Frieze London 2024

Frieze London’s 22nd edition is this weekend in Regent’s Park. Open until October 13th, the fair introduces a new floor plan, placing smaller galleries next to blue-chips, allowing for more discovery. Some 130 galleries from 43 countries, including Sean Kelly, Pace, and Carl Freedman are exhibiting, showing collectors a curated selection of works from artists on their rosters. Raf Simons, FKA Twigs, Dries Van Noten, Wolfgang Tillmans, Bianca Jagger, and Honey Dijon were among the notables spotted on the opening day, but these highlights had all of my attention.

‍Carl Freedman Gallery

I met a few wonderful and extremely talented female artists from Margate last summer, and their vibe and work piqued my interest due to their ability to turn memory and history into beautiful, moving visual work. At Frieze, Margate gallery Carl Freedman is showing an entire case of sculptor Lindsey Mendick’s glorious yet irreverent ceramic vessels, adorned with spiders, licorice allsorts, hearts, and cigarettes. Laura Footes’s beautiful, yet haunting painting shows a ghostly figure sitting on a bed as they look out at a skyline. Vanessa Raw’s scintillating composition displays a group of naked women frolicking in a bucolic landscape. 

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Timothy Taylor

Jamaican artist Paul Anthony Smith references the line “What happens to a dream deferred?” from Langston Hughes’s iconic 1951 “Harlem” for “Dreams Deferred,” the title of the series in which he photographed the flora of several famous gardens from places like Central Park and Queen Mary’s Gardens, covering them with oil paint and obscuring some with a chain link fence, using them as a metaphor for the professional trajectory of Black men. At the fair, Timothy Taylor’s booth is also exhibiting some of the artist’s signature picotage works, where he punctured dreamy sunset photos with patterns drawn from Caribbean architecture. 

Sean Kelly‍

I slipped my feet into what has to be one of the world’s most expensive pairs of shoes—Marina Abramović’s Shoes for Departure, 1991/2017 made from quartz crystal, which has grounding properties. The bicoastal American gallery is also exhibiting a basketball sculpture and diptych of a nude Black body adorned with a tribal mask in one image and a green parakeet in the other by Awol Erizku, marble abstractions by Sam Moyer, and a blue abstract painting by Donna Huanca. 

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Lehmann Maupin

‍British painter Billy Childish has brought his studio inside Lehmann Maupin’s stand at the Frieze London tent, complete with two assistants, an easel, and countless tubes of oil paint to demonstrate his process. Tranquil landscapes and a glaring self-portrait fill the temporary space.

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The Approach‍

Paloma Proudfoot’s wall sculpture of two women peeling away the torso of third woman’s body to reveal her muscles, Skin poem, 2024, immediately caught my attention as I passed The Approach’s booth, as did Eclipse, 2024, Kira Freije’s hands cast in aluminum and decorated with jacquard sleeves.  

David Zwirner‍

The global gallery is celebrating British painter Rose Wylie’s 90th birthday by dedicating a section of its space to her large-scale canvases filled with cultural commentary. There’s one that hails Lilith, the first woman created in Jewish mythology who refused to be subservient, as a “The First Feminist.” Zwirner is also showing Cyclops, 2024, a painting of a nude Asian woman squatting, with one eye obscured by her hair, by its youngest artist yet—Sasha Gordon. 

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Pace‍

Pace is exhibiting a sampler platter of its roster, including a Hank Willis Thomas work composed of football jerseys, a painting of an older and younger woman sitting on the tube by Paulina Olowska, a sculpture of a boy holding a plane by Elmgreen & Dragset sculpture, a seaside bonfire nightscape by Gideon Appah, and a stack of chairs and marble balls by Alicja Kwade.‍

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Smoke

This year Frieze London is introducing Smoke, a new section dedicated to ceramics and artists who work with the clay. Indigenous Mexican artist Noé Martinez wanted to keep the memory of his ancestors’ culture alive with a collection of Huastecan-inspired vessels at Patron. At Make Room, Canadian artist Yeni Mau is responding to the abundance of identity art by using car mats to form stacked sculptures accented with metallic rings and leather straps to form artworks by fracturing, reassembling, and reinventing them into pieces that could be artifacts from the past or the future. 

Proyectos Ultravioleta‍

The Guatemala-based gallery won Frieze London’s 2024 Stand Prize, featuring clay-on-canvas paintings by Edgar Calel that read “Me Venden” juxtaposed with small paintings by the late Rosa Elena Curruchich. 

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Frieze London takes place October 9 - 13, 2024 at The Regent's Park.