The Great and Good of Frieze 24; What To See

So the infamous fair opened yesterday with the great and good of sellers buyers and press converging on the tented space in Regents Park. The air buzzed with excitement whilst the walls and floors were bedecked with every kind of art imaginable. With so much on view what good to see? Find out more in The Great and Good of Frieze 24; What To See

Image on left Gavin Turk At Your Disposal, 2023 TUR/O 13
wood, found materials 121 x 148 x 15 cm courtesy of Gavin Turk and Galerie Krinzinger Vienna

The annual gathering in London of the great and good in the world of art is one of the creative highlights of the year in the city that is London. Not a place known for being quiet, shy or retiring this hub of activity seemed to be even more global than years before.

On offer was every kind of expression and material within the art world. Ceremaic, materials, metals straws, grasses wools and literally any other non-paint option you could imagine.

Interestingly this season the fair feels more global with many different styles on show. From heritage-based work to the exploration of modern and diverse takes on multiple people and places.

On top of that emotions on show within the works were as varied as they were deep. Joy and sadness grief and distress pathos and humour.

The image on the left by Gavin Turk, highlights his long fascination with the themes of fire and evolution, and their connection to everyday objects like disposable lighters. Turk’s use of found objects in art, including discarded lighters found on the streets, highlights his interest in the concept of value and how we assign it to certain objects.

Historically the ability of humans to move fire around enabled nomadic existence. The use of disposable lighters, made from plastic produced with the use of fire, raises questions about our relationship with the environment and the sustainability of our actions.

The colour display of the disposable lighters connects to the spectral work of Joseph Albers, who explored the relationships between colours and their impact on perception. The bright hues of the broken lighters provide a visual contrast, highlighting the dichotomy between their cheap, disposable nature and their visually compelling appearance.

Here he challenges us to reconsider our values and actions, to think more deeply about the impact of our choices on the world around us and to consider the possibilities for new forms of value and meaning in our modern world.

Founded in New York’s East Village in 1982 and closed in 1988, Peter Nagy revived the gallery Nature Morte in New Delhi in 1997. Since then, the gallery has been synonymous in India with challenging and experimental forms of art, representing a generation of Indian artists

In Here After Here After Here, by Jitish Kallat is a continuous road sign that connects celestial, mythical, and earthly locations, marking distances measured from the artist’s studio. The text and symbols link the studio to destinations near and far, from London, Jaipur, and Singapore to the mythical Shangri-La, while extending beyond Earth to Mars, Neptune, and the Andromeda Galaxy.

Jitish Kallat Here after Here after Here 2024 Aluminum composite panels, steel connectors, blue paint coating and printed adhesive film 88 x 90 x 5 in 223 x 228 x 12 cm, Nature Morte

A recurring characteristic of Kallat’s work is how it fluidly moves between vast scales of time and space. By compressing distances and geographies into a single form, these interwoven loops bridge the immediate with the infinite, the known with the speculative.

Tanya Goel is known for her large-scale canvases that combine drawing, painting and collage into symphonies of colour, texture, and myriad surfaces. Entitled Mechanisms, these densely calibrated configurations combine the energy of Futurism with Constructivism for the digital age.

Tanya Goel Mechanisms (Fragments) 7 2024 Pigments, graphite, pen, acrylic, oil, lenticulars and paper silk on canvas 30 x 26 in
76.2 x 66 cm, Nature Morte

Occasionally she will turn her attention to smaller canvases, making what she calls Fragments, which are effectively details of the large Mechanisms.

Here a dense understructure of a computer-generated diagram is overlaid with pigments, paint skins, fabrics, bits of plastics, and reflective foils. The results are seductive episodes of quickly moving intensity, caught mid-stream.

Richard Salton Gallery has a group exhibition Protected Earth that is centred around ecofeminism, presenting a cross-generational survey of 9 artists from 7 countries, all of whom have received significant institutional recognition in recent years. It includes  Jennifer Binnie, Gaia Fugazza, Simryn Gill, Reena Saini Kallat, Marisa Merz, Gina Pane, Greta Schodl, Ria Verhaeghe and Barbara Levittoux Świderska

Barbara Levittoux-Świderska was one of the most important yet often overlooked textile artists who transformed tapestry from flat decorations to avant-garde installations.

Born in Warsaw, Poland, Levittoux-Świderska came to prominence in the 1960s when textiles entered into mainstream contemporary art. Like fellow Polish textile artists Magdalena Abakanowicz and Jolanta Owidzka, Levittoux-Świderska followed the Eastern European tradition, incorporating locally sourced materials and rural practices to improvise new textile art-making methods and forms. 

Barbara Levittoux-Świderka, Cloud [Chmura], 1986 Richard Saltoun Gallery

Reena SAINI KALLAT’s based in Mumbai practice spans drawing, photography, sculpture and video. Her interest in political and social borders, and their violent cleaving through land, people and nature, resonates with the continuing aftershocks of the Partition in India, which her paternal family experienced. Kallat has researched various histories of migration, the plunder of shared natural resources for national gain, and archives of disappeared people. The idea that barriers give way, and can be subverted is pronounced strongly in Kallat’s work: where there is contact there is exchange and fusion. In the artist’s own words: 

Reena Saini Kallat, Hyphenated Lives (Chu-gle), 2018 Richard Saltoun Gallery

Frieze also has on show London-based artist and filmmaker Lawrence Lek who received the 2024 Artist Award at Frieze London, realised in partnership with Forma for the sixth consecutive year. An anchor component of the fair’s artist-led programming, the award provides an early mid-career artist at a pivotal moment in their practice with the opportunity to debut an ambitious new commission at Frieze London.

Lek’s multimedia installation, Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot, will focus on the eponymous character from his ongoing Sinofuturist cinematic universe. The project will combine narrative worldbuilding and mechanical sculpture into an immersive environment where players gradually uncover the story of Guanyin’s existence.

In Lek’s world, Guanyin is a Carebot, a cyborg therapist created to save other AI from the brink of self-destruction. Named after the Buddhist goddess of mercy, Guanyin(literally, ‘the one who listens’) embodies the artist’s interest in the spiritual and emotional dimensions of technology

Lawrence Lek, Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot Sadie Coles Hq. Courtesy of the artist.

The audience follows Guanyin as she examines Vanguard, a self-driving car that has been identified for problematic behaviour. Haunting in tone and meditative in intent, the project draws from the idea of ‘ walking simulators’–a genre of video games in which players discover clues by exploring an environment. Through Lek’s soundtrack for the installation, Guanyin’s voice will accompany the journey, recounting journal entries, company reports and messages to the nonhuman patient in her care. These dialogues reflect how conversational AI–from the Turing Test to Alexa and modern chatbots–affects our interactions with the world.

Born in Nigeria in 1990, Samuel Nnorom is a multi-award-winning artist whose work poetically crosses tapestry-like sculpture and pre-loved Ankara wax fabric. Since early childhood, elements that now shape his contemporary practice have surrounded him: sketching portraits of customers who visited his father’s shoe shop and playing with colourful scraps from his mother’s tailoring workshop crystallized his artistic vocation.

Samuel Nnorom Efficacy, 2021 Ankara fabric 172.7 x 101.6 x 12.7 cm
68 x 40 x 5 in SNO 004 Tiwani Contemporary

From Bahia Salvador, Antonio Tarsis adopts the reprocessing of quotidian objects as a compositional and critical tactic. Matchboxes, fruit crates and fragments of charcoal are examples of elements whose fragility and disposable character Tarsis exploits as visible registers of time’s effects.

After safeguarding and accumulating these transitional objects, their variably faded tones, the tissue paper glued over partially covered surfaces and broken pieces of coal compose the texture of his assemblages, that receive graphic interventions in the form of drawings or collages.

Antonio Tarsis Untitled 2024 Matchbox Balsa Wood & Matches carlosishikawa.com

His materials carry a combustible or flammable potential, and Tarsis frequently uses burnt gunpowder as part of his visual lexicon. In superimposing abstract compositions to the intrinsic meaning of the matter he employs, the artist insists upon the volatility of plastic processes, giving way to a metaphor for the instability of individual or collective memory before social degradation and physical transformation.

Anne Hardy’s piece at Frieze is from the exhibition, Survival Spell. The works in the exhibition, begun during Anne Hardy’s residency at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas, display the earthy, weather-worn tones of a desert or an archaeological site.

The materials found there, in the street outside her London studio and while foraging within the in-between spaces of cities, are incorporated throughout the sculptures. Rocks, metal, fly screens, shoes, ring pulls, atmospheres, beans cast in pewter, ‘things that were once useful’, suggest a layered sense of time and process.

Survival Spell marks a shift towards figuration in Anne Hardy’s work and expands the sentient qualities of her large–scale FIELD work installations into individual works. Life casts of hands and shoes, articles of the artists’ clothing, or stones arranged in the shape of hands cumulatively suggest living presence.

Anne Hardy, Being (Immaterial), 2023-24, artist’s clothes, rusted wire, shells, welded steel, Jesmonite, jewellery, cast concrete, bronze, pewter, white metal, dried plant, earth 82 × 116 × 130 cm – 32 1/4 × 45 5/8 × 51 1/8 in. maureenpaley.com

In Being (Immaterial) and Being(Interloper), these elements resolve into fragmented but recognisable bodies that are seated or kneeling directly on the floor, rooted in earth.

Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom is an artist for whom learning is positioned as an artistic practice: he learns as he makes and makes as he learns. The resulting artworks, which span photography, moving image, live performance, sculpture and sound, document that process while troubling the boundaries between genres of art and between artist and audience. His work is a call-and-response with the viewer and with his own practice, as a video installation, performance or set of photographic images might serve as the basis for new works. Boakye-Yiadom believes artworks are unfinished conversations: collaborations and dialogues we have with others over time through the medium of art. His multifaceted, multilayered practice is one in which gathering, listening and looking is foregrounded and celebrated.’

Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom, Before, During & After: Here Now, Before, During & After: Here Soon, 2024. Courtesy the artist & Champ Lacombe

At the core of the work of British/Japanese artist Simon Fujiwara is a question, what does it mean to be a ‘Self’ in the 21st century? With humour, inventiveness, delight and rigour, his works reflect on existential quandaries such as: how should one construct a self today? How has technology altered our identities? Is there such a thing as an authentic ‘me’?  His works range from paintings and photographs to installations, films and sculptures.

Big Bootycelli Who?, 2023 Acrylic, pastel, charcoal, crayon and inkjet print on canvas at estherschipper.com

Ryan Gander’s œuvre evokes fictional spaces, institutions and figures. His work is extremely varied, unified more by a conceptual vision than by formal appearance. It often combines fictional presence and absence, creating objects that refer to events, other absent objects, artworks or persons, both real and imaginary.

A Moving Object or Short termism, Bronze Enamel Paintat estherschipper.com

The voids or absences, evoked by the suggestion of missing items either named, delineated or circumscribed by traces, act as witty, sometimes lyrical invocations of the power of imagination. His attention is often focused on the playfulness and imagination of children, which is often more expansive and less restrictive than adult behaviour, less encumbered by “reality”, facts and appearances.

Ann Veronica Janssens’ work foregrounds the body’s perception of the world and itself in it. Beautifully made, her works exude the impression of great simplicity yet create vivid experiences of the act of seeing, evoking a heightened awareness of the changeability and fleetingness of individual perception. Born in 1956 in Folkestone, England, she studied at L’École de la Cambre in Brussels. And now the artist lives and works in Brussels.

Ann Veronica Janssen Umbrella 2020 Straw parasol gilded with Gold leaf edition of 3 estherschipper.com

Before Mark Manders embarked on his artistic career, he worked, as a teenager, in a graphic design studio. This is where his fascination for design and language, and particularly poetry, originated. Attempting to write a self-portrait in an unconventional manner, he soon hit the boundaries of language and translation. Words were substituted by visual elements. According to Manders, drawings, sculptures and installations are freer and can, just like poetry, incorporate different sounds, colours, rhythms, rhymes and interpretations. 

Mark Manders Composition with Long Vertical 2024 painted bronze, painted canvas, painted wood, painted apoxy, taxidermied bird, hair. xavierhufkens.com

Although time and place-related references appear to be irrelevant in Manders’ work, there is one year that is often being referred to: 1986. This is the year in which Manders (Vonkel, 1968) outlined the concept of his work, Self-Portrait as a Building. His work resembles a fictional building, divided into separate rooms and levels, of which the size and shape can never exactly be determined. Potential shifts and extensions constantly threaten the cohesion of the ever-expanding self-portrait. Manders works toward one big overarching moment that will bring together all his works, continuously interconnected and in dialogue with each other

Jacobo Catelllano, Ventana 1 2024 Ebony, Linen, Oil and Iron Maistrra Buena

Jacobo Castellano’s most important source of inspiration for art is his own story. He uses this as an example by means of materials and memories and produces sculptures and installations full of autobiographical and art historical references. The way the sculptures are reconstructed from the remains of old objects gives it a special atmosphere.

Time, ephemerality, memories, for Jacobo Castellano each object tells a story: his works demonstrate something melancholic and at the same time a kind of lightness of being, as an air of nostalgia from bygone days seems to surround his pieces that reach from sculptures and collages, to installations photographs. Memories from the past, woven into everyday objects, furniture and toys, have always played a key role in his creations, emphasizing his Andalusian roots, where tradition and religion still cast a shadow over everyday life.

Gregor Hildebrandt’s signature media are cassette tape and vinyl, which he collages and assembles into apparently minimalist yet latently romantic paintings, sculptures, and installations. Resting in silence behind the glossy surface of his analogue aesthetics, which verges on black and white monochrome, music and cinema haunt his practice.

Gregor Hildebrandt, Marlene also Matadora 2024 Perrotin

Whether pictorial or sculptural, his works contain prerecorded materials, which he references in the titles. These pop-cultural sources, usually a single song, are meant to trigger both collective and personal memories. Like analogue storage media, his distinctive rip-off technique is a metaphor for the mnestic process itself: it consists in rubbing magnetic coating against double-sided adhesive tape stuck on canvas to trace intricate and elusive powdery patterns. Further relating to architectural Gesamtkunstwerk, Hildebrandt’s monumental sonic barriers made of stacked, bowl-shaped records and his sensual wall curtains made of unreeled tapes create paths for the visitors of his shows.

The English painter, Billy Childish is known for his introspective, autobiographical, and deeply emotional paintings, photography, films, and music. Since the late 1970s, Childish has been prolific in creating and has led and played in bands including the Thee Milkshakes, Thee Headcoats, and the Musicians of the British Empire.

Billy Childish Carlfreedman.com Creating Artwork live at Frieze

Through all of these disciplines, Childish addresses social, political, and personal issues such as war, protest, his turbulent childhood, and his struggles with addiction. While his confessional poetry and music explore these issues with startling honesty, Childish’s paintings are more subtle. His subjects are often drawn from his environment or are people he knows or admires: birch forests, self-portraits, a lone figure in a pastoral English landscape, and his wife as a reclining female nude.

Writer Neal Brown, book describes Childish as “one of the most outstanding, and often misunderstood, figures on the British art scene”.

Mire Lee’s work challenges notions of selfhood, social acceptability, and cleanliness; obliterating societal conventions of aesthetics and desire in the face of her orgasmic, transgressive and kinetic technologies. Towels, chains, clay, silicon hoses, and steel structures coalesce to form an organism that is haptic, primordial, and yet highly mechanized. Lee’s works engage the senses in a visceral way, outside the realm of intellect and language.

Mire Lee Surfaces with Many Holes: Nets III 2022. Latex , Netting, pigmented Silicone oil, plywood Tina Kim Gallery

Mire Lee  is known to create kinetic sculptural installations that appear shabby, ridiculous, and precarious. Lee questions human fantasies of technologies that contradict the realities of subjects that decay and deform through time.

Christiane Blattmann’s approach is shaped by her experience in theatre, painting, architecture and sculpture and is reflected in plastic and spatial questions. She thinks of space as both an abstract and a concrete dimension, the division of which produces not only forms but also boundaries and thus concepts of inside and outside.

Christiane Blattmann Watersheds, 2024, exhibition Gallery Karin Guenther

The positions of bodies in space can be decisive for architectural, but also psychosocial and political perspectives. In addition to space as a conceptual ‘material’, it is haptic materials that enable Blattmann to link architecture, sculpture and painting.

Hreinn Friðfinnsson uses everyday materials as a basis, and continually explores elements of time, environment, narration, memory, and perception. Friðfinnsson’s practice is characterized by a poignant and recursive nature that creates a framework throughout his oeuvre.

Hreinn Friðfinnsson Suspended 1999-2022 i8 gallery

Referred to by curator and art historian Hans Ulrich Obrist as “emotional conceptualism,” Friðfinnsson’s approach to artmaking is often reductive, and rooted in gestures and materials that reflect the artist’s experience within the world. Friðfinnsson incorporates elements that have an inherent fragility, such as glass, leaves, feathers, and mirrors, which underscores the poetic, ephemeral nature of his practice. 

Lindsey Mendick has never shied away from grappling with uncomfortable subjects that rarely get much of an airing in life, let alone art. Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, mental health, female sexuality and vampiric relationships have all been featured in memorable bodies of work, in which searing honesty blends with humour.

Lindsey Mendick Selected Works Carl Freeman Gallery

Mendick first attracted attention with her ceramic works exuberantly laden with all manner of meticulously rendered, modelled and lushly glazed.

But in recent years her ceramics have increasingly been seen in an alliance of works in mixed media, paintings, film, furniture and found objects. These become mises en scène, a mash of the personal and the fantastical to dramatic effect.

Dávila’s sculptural work is based on the specificity of the employed materials, their origin, symbolic value and their formal characteristics are elements that take great significance; industrial materials interact with organic raw materials. Influenced by his education in architecture, Dávila arranges objects as if they were basic elements of drawing for creating systems that exemplify notions of equilibrium, stability and permanence. With these sculptures, Dávila intends to provide visibility to the physical processes that are required in order for things to maintain their shape and occupy space in a specific manner. Human intervention and the material disposition of things produce hybrid systems that respond to structural intuitions; technique unfolds itself as a poetic dimension.

Jose Davila The Act of Perseverance VI 2019 Concrte, volcanic Rock and Ratchet straps omr. art

For Jose Dávila, the world that surrounds us contains an infinity of geometric structures and sculpture must behave as an adhesive territory where not only weights are negotiated, but also the expressiveness of matter, fragility and hardness, resistance and adaptability, or the symbolic character of the present and the past, through the objects and the stories they represent.

Nicola L.’s ‘Penetrable’ sculptures, initially conceived to be entered or worn by viewers or performers, are creepy, almost kinky, their taut canvas forms like skins, punctuated with spaces for heads, arms, eyes and legs. Adorned with phrases like ‘We want to breathe’ and ‘We don’t want war,’ these wearable artworks embody politically charged messages. 

Nicola L The World Goes Pop 2015 Ink Cotton Wood Alison Jacques

These themes run throughout the show at Alison Jacques, Nicola L.’s first in the UK, which represents the diversity of her practice through a range of works created between 1969 and 2018. Meanwhile, her furniture artworks, functional household objects like tables, shelves and drawers crafted into distinctly female forms, offer a bold commentary on domestic labour and the commodification of women’s bodies, and a plea for us to focus on the revolutionary potential of the whole person.

Born in 1959 in Mumbai, Atul Dodiya trained at the Sir J.J. School of Art, 1982, and École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1991–92, and is widely considered one of India’s most significant artists. Dodiya’s proclivity for the avant-garde nurtures his practice with myth-like, often poetic interpretations of encyclopaedic ideas and interconnected cultural contexts, which he cultivates through complex social, political and art historical arrangements, juggling various image economies as a kind of cultural inheritance.

Atul Dodiya Cabinet VI I Cabinet VIII wooden cabinet installation (treated with polyester putty and zinc) with Phtogprahs sculptures paintings and found objects Vadehra Art Gallery

Dodiya’s paintings, assemblages and sculpture-installations embody a passionate, sophisticated response to the sense of crisis he feels, as an artist and as a citizen, in a transitional society damaged by the continuing asymmetries of capital yet enthused by the transformative energies of globalization. When Dodiya was ten, he suffered an injury to the eye while playing with friends in a century-old village-like neighbourhood of DK Wadi in Bombay.

Shown in the Focus section of Frieze artist Keti Kapanadze while still a student at the Art Academy in Tbilisi, produced her first conceptual graphical and photo works in 1983, she was the first conceptual artist in Georgia in Soviet times.

Since that time her works have been part of the permanent exhibition of the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the USSR at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, USA.

Keti Kapanadze wall-mounted sculpture, Betwixt 2, 2019, Table Tops, Wood, Formica, 240x420x3.5 cm Artbeat Gallery

The installation features a kidney-shaped design, evocative of a fetal gesture, which transforms from a three-dimensional object into a two-dimensional, rhizomatous network. This transformation symbolizes the emergence of new narratives and meanings, disrupting linear and hierarchical structures. The autonomous monumental symbols that emerge on the wall suggest a deconstruction of traditional knowledge systems, critiquing patriarchal structures by recontextualizing familiar forms into symbols of resilience and strength inherent in the feminine experience. The visual composition resembles chemical reaction blueprints, creating landscapes that evoke both humour and emotion and metaphorically address the micro- and macrocosms of human existence.

Also shown in the Focus section, Fuentesal & Arenillas a Spanish artist duo consisting of Julia Fuentesal and Pablo M. Arenillas. Their work explores the playful side of artistic practice and often incorporates autobiographical elements. They describe their practice as a constant state of imagining, minimizing, and increasing at speed.

Fuentesal & Arenillas El Apartamento Havana Madrid

Julia Fuentesal and Pablo M.Arenillas studied Fine Arts in Seville and have lived since then in London and Berlin. 

And Finally, in the Focus arena, Divine Southgate Smith Nicoletti Gallery This artist has developed a transdisciplinary practice that comprises photographic collage, sculpture, moving image, performance, writing, spoken word, and 3D animation.

Divine Southgate Smith at the Nicoletti Gallery

Her/their approach to art-making is non-specific and collaborative, allowing her/them to explore complex narratives through various mediums and disciplines while navigating speculative spaces where things are abstracted, contextualised, de-contextualised, voiced, or silenced. 

Questions abound as they do whenever there is any kind of creative exhibition. One that always crops up with art is the question of why it is. This season the answer seemed using cloth instead of canvas, and wood rather than marble In fact, painting, sculpting, drawing, sewing and even slogans never need to be in any traditional form and neither does the best work need to be West-centric, it can be as free-flowing and as non-boundaries as anyone wants to make it.

Frieze London Find out all you need to know here frieze.com

If you enjoyed reading The Great and Good of Frieze 24; What To See then why not read The Magic of the Golden Ratio Here

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