Charm of 5,000 years of art
Frieze Masters
A TREND in recent Frieze Masters fairs has been the show-stealing theatrical setting. The star of this year’s fair is a detailed recreation, complete with mock-concrete floor and steel and wood beams, of Peter Blake’s studio.
Conceived by the gallery
Waddington Custot, together with designer Robin Brown and producer Anna Pank, it serves a real purpose in illustrating Blake’s techniques and tools — the pots of pencils and fine brushes, the scissors with which he cuts out his trademark collages — and his raw materials, including the photographic images on the central desk. But it also indicates the artist’s imagination through his collections; a peculiar Englishness that always underlines his work spills over from his gatherings of puppets, dinky toys, boxing and wrestling memorabilia, ships and pearly king jackets. Interspersed among the bric-a-brac are Blake’s works, several of which sold at yesterday’s fair, including Roxy Roxy (1965-83) for £290,000. In the long time I spent in this booth, I began to wish that they could always be displayed like this.
Masters is my favourite art fair partly because its sweep, from the ancient world to the year 2000, disrupts the usual predictability of fairs. So, at David Zwirner is a sublime triumvirate of yellow — a John McCracken plank, a Josef Albers Homage to the Square and Dan Flavin’s first fluorescent light work — and on the next stand, Prahlad Bubbar, are Indian miniatures, including a 17th-century painting of Krishna Dancing in the Rain. I was charmed by a 5,000-year-old Mesopotamian recumbent leopard shown with the Ariadne gallery, and then, next door, pleasantly surprised by Gagosian’s display of Roy Lichtenstein and Georg Baselitz, artists whose language, cultural background and intentions opposed — yet it’s a stimulating clash. Meanwhile, fine solo booths are dedicated to Anthony Caro (at Annely Juda), Lynda Benglis (with Thomas Dane and Cheim and Read) and Alfredo Jaar (with Goodman and Lelong galleries).
Until Sunday ( friezemasters.com)