From the best booths to the exhibitions to see outside of the fair, here is our guide to this year’s edition of Frieze London
That time of year has rolled around again and Frieze London 2024 has returned to mark its territory in Regent’s Park. Thankfully, Rita’s is back on food duty, ensuring that the city’s influx of collectors, curators, and artists won’t have to endure sad Pret sandwiches on the go. While the fair might dominate the Google calendars and gallery group chats, don’t overlook the equally thrilling exhibitions happening across the city.
George Rouy’s explosive works are lighting up Hauser & Wirth, Nicola L’s playful body-inspired interiors are pulling crowds at Camden Art Centre, and fashion designer Marco Capaldo’s bold aesthetic – honed at his own label, 16Arlington – is making waves at Almine Rech. Also on our radar is forum, a group show at Xxijra Hii exploring that endlessly intriguing space where public and private lives collide. Curated by Laila Majid and Louis Blue Newby, the show provides fresh perspectives on intimacy, citizenship, and identity. It will be accompanied by their award-winning film, South Florida Sky, screened at Frieze next week as part of the ICA’s programme.
Tau Lewis at Sadie Coles HQ
Sadie Coles HQ presents Tau Lewis’s monumental work, transforming discarded textiles into intricately crafted sculptures that honour African diasporic legacies. By upcycling materials, Lewis draws on traditions of survival, creating figurative works rich with historical and cultural resonances. These sculptures weave together past, present, and future in Black cultural production, standing as acts of healing and resistance. Acknowledging the materials’ histories, she imbues them with new energy and narrative. Her recent exhibition at the ICA Boston, Spirit Level, deepens her ongoing exploration of identity and shared histories.
Dean Sameshima at Soft Opening
Dean Sameshima’s Numbers series, presented by Soft Opening, revisits 1970s queer erotica by referencing Drummer Magazine’s infamous connect-the-dots puzzles. These paintings transform playful, sexually-charged illustrations into abstract forms that capture the accumulation of queer experiences – friendships, lovers, and memories – while addressing the absence of Asian representation in both the gay community and mainstream media. Sameshima’s minimalist approach challenges erasure, offering nuanced commentary on desire, representation, and community.
Read our guide to Dean Sameshima here.
Nat Faulkner at Brunette Coleman
Nat Faulkner’s works, presented by Brunette Coleman, blur the boundaries between photography and sculpture. He fuses photographic strips with plywood and glass ampoules, creating layered narratives around time, memory, and inebriation. Faulkner’s fascination with the “wet processes” of photography mirrors the way sunlight, despite efforts to exclude it, inevitably leaves its mark. His exploration of mechanical processes and natural forces creates a delicate interplay between control and spontaneity, capturing moments of transformation and imperfection.
Charlotte Edey at Ginny on Frederick
In Thin Places, Charlotte Edey draws us into spaces where the bodily, psychological, and architectural intersect. Her tapestries and pastel drawings, rich in symbolism – pearls, webs, moons – serve as allegories for memory, time, and identity. Edey’s blend of hand embroidery and beading turns mark-making into acts of introspection, where materials become windows into deeper psychological states.
Eva Gold at Rose Easton
Eva Gold transforms Rose Easton’s booth into a claustrophobic domestic setting, filled with worn furniture and framed drawings of cinematic moments. Her installation explores voyeurism and privacy, implicating the viewer in an intimate yet unsettling scene. Through narrative-driven art, Gold examines boundaries of trust and surveillance, highlighting the silent forces that shape our interactions in both private and public spaces.
Hannah Morgan at Xxijra Hii
Hannah Morgan’s Animula series, debuting with Xxijra Hii, explores the convergence of medieval and speculative creatures within industrial settings. Using alabaster, clay, and steel, Morgan creates an immersive environment inspired by British Gypsum excavation sites. Her works explore themes of identity, transformation, and the primal forces of life and death. Carved alabaster creatures and hanging stone “oculars” connect the unseen subterranean world with the surface, evoking both loss and renewal.
Alison Jacques
Alison Jacques presents a dynamic selection of works by Sophie Barber, Sheila Hicks, Ian Kiaer, and Robert Mapplethorpe. From Hicks’s bold textile art to Mapplethorpe’s iconic photographs, the booth celebrates form, identity, and materiality. Notable are Sophie Barber’s playful miniatures, Lorna Robertson’s explorations of femininity and domesticity, as well as Veronica Ryan’s quiet yet powerful investigations of memory and heritage through sculpture.
Divine Southgate-Smith at Nicoletti
Nicoletti features Divine Southgate-Smith, whose work explores Black, queer and female experiences. Aspects of Things Existing, inspired by 11th-century Persian cosmographer Zakariya al-Qazwini, examines sculpture’s role in African domestic spaces. Southgate-Smith’s installations bridge past and present, exploring how archives shape our understanding of space, time, and empowerment. Her practice delves into the spiritual and cultural dimensions of objects, suggesting new narratives of history and survival.
Georgina Hill at South Parade
Georgina Hill’s City Lights exhibition takes viewers through an urban landscape where architecture, commerce, and social interactions converge. Using stained glass, metal and paper, Hill captures the city’s energy, from intimate domestic moments to bustling public scenes. Her illuminated, grid-like boxes act as portals, blending interior and exterior views, offering glimpses of the city’s past, present and future in a captivating fusion of craft and concept.
Desert Nudes by Lorena Lohr
Lorena Lohr captivates with her vibrant oil-on-panel paintings, inspired by the sweeping, untamed beauty of the American Southwest. In Desert Nudes, she seamlessly blends the iconic landscapes of Americana with intricate depictions of the female form, drawing influence from both Northern Renaissance art and frontier mythology. Lohr reimagines the desert as a realm of life and mysticism, where the stark, arid landscape meets delicate human presence. This collection, published by Soho Revue, launches this week at both Soho Revue and Dover Street Market, accompanied by essays from Cassie Beadle and Lohr herself.
Frieze London runs from 9 – 13 October 2024.
