Who will make a splash at Frieze this year?
It’s two years since London’s Frieze Art fairs last took place, welcoming 60,000 visitors to Regent’s Park and to the network of other fairs, auctions and exhibitions that spring up at this time of year. The Frieze phenomenon is not only a key ingredient in maintaining the UK’S status as a leader in the international art market, but a vital stimulus to restaurants and hotels.
Eight days from now, those crowds, some taking advantage of the UK’S newly relaxed travel restrictions, will descend on Frieze’s two tented structures – one for the latest contemporary art, the other, Frieze Masters, for a historical experience covering six millennia. On the same day, the 1-54 fair for art from Africa and its diaspora opens at Somerset House.
Neither Brexit nor the pandemic, it seems, has diminished enthusiasm. The Regent’s Park tents will house some 290 galleries, much as before, while Somerset House has seen a surge in requests by galleries from Africa to take part.
At Frieze, the resumed revenue flow will be more than welcome for Endeavour, the Hollywood talent agency that has taken a reported 70 per cent interest in Frieze’s business, contributing to a new Frieze fair in Seoul next year and the extension of the London fair with a gallery space in Cork Street, Mayfair, that will open on Thursday with quilt works by African American Christopher Myers.
Who are the hot artists at Frieze to look out for? One is Sabine Moritz (wife of the German painter Gerhard Richter) at Pilar Corrias, whose abstractions sold out at Art Basel last month priced from €50,000 – €100,000. Another is 28-year-old figurative painter and musician Issy Wood, at Carlos/ishikawa. The auction database Artnet reports that internet searches for Wood are increasing – from 0 to 178 in the first half of 2021 – so, something is cooking there.
Dig deeper and you’ll see video work by Sonia Boyce, the artist chosen to represent Britain at the next Venice Biennale. Boyce has long been a museum curator’s choice, and now Simon Lee Gallery is upping her status in the market, having sold photographic work in her first appearance at Basel for up to £60,000.
Also at Frieze will be White Cube. The gallery is not somewhere I’d normally recommend going to for a breather, having for so long been the focus of frenetic interest in Damien Hirst and the YBAS. But this year it has hooked into another kind of zeitgeist: eastern-style meditation, as expressed in the work of artists Antony Gormley, Mona Hatoum and Park Seo-bo.
Across the park, past a giant pineapple by Rose Wylie in an open-air sculpture display, Frieze Masters will have stands devoted to recherché subjects like renaissance vases, medieval mosaics and antique books on climate change.
A discovery for most here will be the first UK display of paintings by the self-taught “outsider artist” Janet Sobel at the Gallery of Everything. Sobel is said to have dripped before Jackson Pollock and was included in the Royal Academy’s Abstract Expressionism exhibition in 2016. At Frieze Masters, the gallery will be showing some remarkable early work, described by director James Brett as “dreamscapes” and priced around £40,000.
The concept of “discovery” is endemic to the 1-54 fair which, among its special projects, embarks on the novel concept of acquiring complementary works by two Afrobrazilian artists – in this case, decorated ritual palm veins by Mestre Didi ($30,000 each) with vibrant symbolic abstractions by activist Abdias Nascimento, painted while he was exiled in Nigeria during the 1960s (up to $190,000).
At Christie’s, the 1-54 fair is also auctioning NFTS (non-fungible tokens) based on David Hockney’s swimming pool paintings by the Nigerian digital artist Osinachi. Estimated from £40,000 to £60,000 – they are the first NFTS to be sold through 1-54.
The tidal wave of interest in African art spills over into several powerful galleries in town, with Noah Davis at David Zwirner and Jordan Casteel at Massimo de Carlo, not to mention Gagosian London’s first exhibition devoted to African diaspora artists, which has been assembled by Antwaum Sargent, an American writer who was appointed director of the gallery this year specifically to promote artists of colour.
One discovery is the painter Janet Sobel, who is said to have dripped before Pollock