The 14th edition of the London Frieze Art Fair gathered over 160 of the world’s leading galleries showcasing works by newly discovered artists alongside some of the most respected names in contemporary art. We were lucky to visit the Fair ahead of the busy crowds and collectors so here are some of the stand-out pieces and booths.
Haus + Wirth created ‘L’ atelier d’artistes’, with a multitude of objects and materials in a fictitious artist’s studio. This booth is highly entertaining and provides in reality a jumble of small and large works by a multitude of artists from Louise Bourgeois to Martin Creed, Francis Picabia to Henry Moore, mixed with an abundance of artfully arranged material including bottles, palettes and fruits.
Gagosian has devoted its entire stand to a spare installation of the ceramics of author-artist Edmund De Waal while on Marianne Boeski’s booth, fans of Hans op de Beeck, who missed his Collector’s House project in Basel earlier (covered) this year, could be transported to the Silent Library, a serene monochromatic white space .
Visitors could play with the reflection of glossy artworks by Anish Kapoor or the snowman by Gary Hume, and discover the exclusive release of the limited edition of the ballerina by Jeff Koons at Almine Rech Gallery.
This year’s Frieze devoted an entire section to the Nineties with 14 galleries collaborating to recreate seminal exhibitions from Daniel Buchholz’s recreation of Wolfgang Tillmans’ very first show at his gallery in 1993 to the recreation of Karen Kilimnik’s romantic Fountain of Youth with bucolic garden and maze at 303 Gallery.
In parallel to the Turbine Hall installation at the Tate Modern, the Pilar Corrias Gallery
is showing Philippe Parreno’s balloons—Speech Bubbles together with Shahzia Sikander’s mesmerizing Singing Suns (2016) video animation.
Galerie Martin Janda is featuring a written banner with ‘ An Artist who Can Not Speak English is No Artist’ , an artwork by Croatian artist Mladen Stilinović, who recently passed away. He was one of the leading lights of conceptual art in Croatia, detourning banners and signs repeating stock ideological phrases from communist political speeches in the 1960s and ‘70s. In this piece from the time of the Soviet Union’s disintegration, Stilinović seized upon a phrase that evoked the difficulty Croatian artists had in breaking into the Western art market, but which could also conceivably come from a nativist speech in Britain or the United States today.
Victoria Miro presented sculptures and tapestry by Grayson Perry, Yahoi Kusama and Chantal Joffe. One of Grayson Perry’s tapestry illustrates the British sensor of humour post-brexit with “Britain is Best” embroidery, below a nationalistic tribe riding a crowned, careening horse.
Giant bronze bells by French-Moroccan artist Latifa Echakhch lie shattered across the floor at Kamel Mennour booth in symbol of how time inflects its content and how easily important things can be forgotten.
The highlight of P.P.O.W.’s booth is certainly Portia Munson‘s 1994/2016 Pink Project: Table, in which the artist collected hundreds of pink, plastic items—dolls, My Little Ponies, makeup receptacles, hair accessories, sex toys and mirrors among them—marketed at young girls and women and explores how pink has been embedded in the female subjectivity by consumerism.
At Seventeen Gallery visitors could experience vitual reality by wearing Oculus Rift headsets and dvelve into Jon Rafman’s parallel apocalyptic universe, while seating on a giant sculptural snake eating its tail.
Canada Gallery invited the viewers with Samara Golden’s new dimension, destroying the concept of gravity and what is physically possible as furniture, everyday objects and breakfast table food hang suspended from the wall.
View the full set of pics here
FRIEZE ART FAIR 2016
Regents Park
London
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