In London, a light rain fell through the golden days of October, and passersby, long accustomed to it, simply pulled up the hoods of their trench coats and kept moving at an unhurried pace toward Regent’s Park. There, Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2024 were in full swing. From October 9 to 13, the 21st edition of Frieze opened as scheduled. More than 160 galleries from 43 countries took part in Frieze London, while Frieze Masters brought together 130 galleries from 26 countries.
In the English Garden between the two tents, daylight and greenery framed the 25 works or groupings by 22 artists in Frieze Sculpture, prompting visitors emerging from the indoor halls to exclaim, “So beautiful.” “This year we completely reworked the layout of both tents,” Eva Langret, the director of Frieze London, told us. “The structure, the entrances, and the curatorial approach are all entirely different. People should find the experience very refreshing.”
At the same time, London’s major museums and art institutions mounted a wave of exhibitions to coincide with Frieze, more impressive even than last year’s. There were major shows devoted to Francis Bacon, Van Gogh, and Monet, along with a retrospective spanning Michael Craig-Martin’s sixty-year career, a Mike Kelley retrospective, and Hyung-koo? No: the source names Haegue Yang, whose exhibition is her largest in Europe to date. Returning to London once again as the only Chinese media partner, we spoke with Langret and with Fatoş Üstek, who is curating Frieze Sculpture for the second time, about the fair’s highlights this year and its plans for the next decade.
Entering Frieze in Regent’s Park, we were immediately surprised by the new layout. Instead of encountering the established blue-chip galleries first, as one usually does, we found the “Focus” section, marked with lake-blue signage and devoted to emerging galleries and artists, placed at the most central point right by the entrance.
“We put emerging artists and solo presentations in the most visible place, so the artist’s individual presence is brought forward and younger artists are more easily seen,” Langret told us. “The traditional established galleries are deeper inside the fair. We also created a great deal of new open space, so people can talk and exchange ideas more freely on-site.” Supported principally by Stone Island, the “Focus” section represented not just a change in layout but a change in the way viewers encounter artworks and come to know artists.
In “Focus,” each gallery turned its booth into a solo presentation for a single artist. One of the most talked-about was Benedikte Bjerre’s “a group of penguins,” which inspired more than a few collectors to say, on the spot, that they wanted to “take a penguin home.” Running parallel to “Focus” were six “Artist-to-Artist” booths, a section introduced last year in which established artists nominate younger ones.
According to Langret, the response to the section’s debut last year was so strong that this year’s floor plan was adjusted accordingly. The gallery-centered arrangement was broken up, and greater emphasis was placed on artists’ identities and individual styles, in keeping with the logic of “Artist-to-Artist.”
They respectively recommended six younger artists for solo presentations: Peter Uka, Magda Stawarska, Rob Davis, Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom, Massinissa Selmani, and Nengi Omuku.
Several of these rising artists were on-site, speaking with visitors. They included minority artists from South America and an artist from Poland, one of Europe’s smaller countries; the principal mediums on view included oil painting, works on paper, photography, installation, and video. Another striking shift we noticed was that major international galleries were also becoming more inclined to “tell one artist’s story,” presenting an entire booth as a kind of solo exhibition.
The figure drawing the most attention was Billy Childish, the “rock poet” artist who had only recently concluded a solo exhibition at the He Art Museum in Guangzhou. At the booth, he chewed gum while painting, with a young person and a child nearby, as if it were a painting lesson. The scene was distinctive enough that Lisson’s booth became nearly impassable at one point. On the first evening, the gallery disclosed that 11 works by Childish had already sold from the booth, nearly a sellout, and that different works might be installed the next day.
At Gagosian’s booth, Carol Bove, long known for steel sculpture and for using discarded building materials, created a kind of colored forest out of nine monumental steel sculptures. All were new works from 2024. Using square stainless-steel tubes in pale lavender, bright yellow, and fluorescent green, adding folds and embedding them among clustered steel fragments, she mixed the readymade and the non-readymade to produce a richer visual effect.
At Hauser & Wirth, Charles Gaines offered another kind of forest, with plants spread across the booth and gradually “parsed” into numbers. At Lisson, the Japanese woman artist Leiko Ikemura showed new glass and bronze sculptures along with tempera paintings. Though born in Japan, she has long lived in Berlin, and her work bears that double particularity: delicate and ethereal, yet willing to challenge artistic convention and break social norms.
Her work reflects on the cross-cultural condition and female experience shaped by her identity, and moves seamlessly among painting, drawing, watercolor, tempera, glazed terracotta sculpture, glass, and ceramics. This year also introduced a special themed section, “Smoke,” a new area focused on ceramics, a medium that has gradually gained recognition in Western contemporary art and become one of its more influential aesthetic forms.
“At each edition of the fair, we invite Pablo José Ramírez, a curator from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, to organize a special section bringing together artists who push beyond the boundaries of medium and explore clay in innovative and expanded ways. I’m especially looking forward to works by artists such as Ayla Tavares from Rio de Janeiro and the Mexican Indigenous artist Noé Martínez.”
Langret said. Frieze Masters, too, had a new layout this year. Redesigned by the architect Annabelle Selldorf, the fair took the masters of art history as its organizing thread. Compared with Frieze London, the booths felt more restrained, and the palette darker. Alongside familiar paintings by Picasso, Degas, and Matisse, there were Rodin sculptures, ancient Roman sculpture, medieval chant books, and Egyptian mummies on view. The range was so wide that one almost had the feeling of walking through a history museum.
In the English Garden connecting Frieze London and Frieze Masters was Frieze Sculpture, the annual fixture. Unlike the fair itself, which had just opened, Frieze Sculpture, as part of a public-art program, had opened as early as September 18. Every morning and evening, people could be seen doing morning exercises or running in the park, and the sculptures naturally became part of many viewers’ daily lives.
To help more people experience the difference between the sculpture exhibition by day and by night, Frieze also introduced park “Art Walks” offered separately during daytime and evening hours. “A daytime and nighttime walk through Frieze Sculpture brings two entirely different experiences. During the day, viewers can fully appreciate the material, texture, and form of the works in natural light.”
Üstek, who is curating the sculpture exhibition for the second year, told us. In daylight, the sculptures converse with the grass, sky, trees, and air; at different times of day, the sun casts intricate silhouettes onto the ground, heightening their sense of exchange with the surroundings. By night, the atmosphere of the park is utterly transformed by darkness.
The daylight is gone from the garden, replaced by the park’s artificial lights.
“At night, the sculptures become more mysterious. The side touched by light is very bright, while the parts that aren’t lit are completely hidden in shadow, eerie and captivating in a way that simply isn’t possible in daytime. The subdued, quiet atmosphere also heightens feelings of solitude and introspection,” Üstek told us. Of the 25 works or groupings on view this year, half were newly commissioned, and each of these new works responded in some way to the site of the English Garden and its surrounding environment.
Frances Goodman’s contribution, for instance, consisted of two columns built from ceramic pills and tablets, one on each side of a path, like a gate. They suggest that by passing through, one enters a new world, while also hinting that various kinds of pills can carry a person into an entirely different state. Several works this year also engaged newer media such as AR and video, among them Libby Heaney’s sculpture inspired by Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.
At first glance, one might see only a giant blue half-nude female body. But if you scan the QR code on one side, you enter a watercolor-animation web interface generated by quantum-computing code written entirely by the artist. There, Bosch’s medieval monsters, processed through A.I., become more hybrid contemporary creatures. Among the 22 artists in the sculpture exhibition, Juliana Cerqueira Leite was the only one to present three works, including Shovel, 2024, Sand, 2024, and, elsewhere in the garden, works shown alongside Yoshitomo Nara’s Ennui Head, 2020.
The source of this series is everyday life: ordinary actions such as tying shoelaces or turning the pages of a book are captured through high-tech motion tracking. What we saw in the park were three sculptures that were, in effect, three gestures: digging with a shovel, buttoning a pair of jeans, and sanding a wall. Üstek told us that among the works on view during the nearly month-long sculpture exhibition in the English Garden, the most striking were Theaster Gates’s two bronze sculptures Duet, both more than three meters high.
Though made of bronze, the works carried the tradition of ceramics from the outset, a great deal of which has to do with the artist’s own command of ceramic practice. Why this shape? Because Gates is fascinated by the mooring bollards used in everyday seafaring, and in this new bronze sculpture the double mooring signifies both a crossing and a kind of restraint. Zanele Muholi’s Bambatha I, 2023, invoked a spirit of resistance and resilience; the artist drew inspiration from the 1906 Bambatha Rebellion in South Africa.
Another work attracting considerable attention was Kirstine Roepstorff’s gleaming Lightning Rod. It drew viewers toward the primal energy of the surrounding environment.
“This year’s works in the sculpture park strike a balance between rigor and sensitivity. They invite reflection on everyday life while also deepening play and interaction with viewers,” Üstek said. During this year’s Frieze week, the major exhibitions opening across London’s institutions were, if anything, equally formidable.
Van Gogh, in particular, remains a cultural colossus. The exhibition presented 61 works he made in the Arles region of southern France between 1888 and 1890. He spent much of that period in a psychiatric hospital, and these 61 paintings trace the full range of feeling and struggle that marked the final two years of his life. On view were the signature Yellow House, Van Gogh’s Chair, The Bedroom, Sunflowers, which Gauguin praised as “very Vincent,” as well as the celebrated Irises and a variety of landscapes.
Alongside these familiar works were still lifes by Van Gogh that are much less often seen, as well as paintings combining Japanese flowers with the figure of the sower. For the exhibition, the National Gallery in London assembled loans from dozens of museums and foundations around the world, including the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée d’Orsay, and institutions in the Netherlands and Germany, in an effort to help viewers understand how Van Gogh lived through his final two years and how, in that last phase, he gradually released himself completely.
The public response could hardly have been more enthusiastic: tickets for November had already sold out well in advance, and even staff members at the ticket desk said with pride, “This exhibition is really something!” About a two-minute walk from the National Gallery, we arrived at the National Portrait Gallery, where Francis Bacon: Human Presence, a major exhibition devoted to portraiture, had just opened to the public on its first day.
Taking Bacon’s treatment of portraiture as its point of entry, the exhibition links the course of his life: friends, lovers, and selfhood, each shift in style closely bound to the pain and love affairs of his real life. In the paintings, one sees not only Bacon’s unfettered brilliance as an artist but also his flaws as a person: violence, paranoia, arrogance, and estrangement. At Tate Modern, which has long worked closely with Frieze, the annual Turbine Hall commission this year belongs to the Korean woman artist Mire Lee.
Her installation Open Wound reimagines Tate Modern as an industrial womb, turning the Turbine Hall into a living factory from whose ceiling hang countless pieces of pink “skin” on metal chains. At the center of the hall, an electric turbine suspended from the ceiling rotates slowly. We watched a blood-pink viscous liquid emerge from silicone tentacles resembling flesh and drip from above into a large iron tray below.
In the end, the pink liquid below congeals into the “skin” one sees upon entering. Over time, more and more “skin” accumulates, “born” from the mechanical body and then “sloughing off” from the ceiling above. On Tate’s second floor was another major exhibition: a large retrospective of the American artist Mike Kelley, who created Kandor, the fictional hometown of Superman, titled Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit.
The exhibition begins with the turbulence of the artist’s childhood and youth and continues through his death by suicide at home, presenting works from every stage of his career, including the classic stuffed-animal pieces, the “memory ware flats,” and the late stage and musical works. Another Korean woman artist drawing intense attention during Frieze week was Haegue Yang, whose solo exhibition Leap Year at the Hayward Gallery is the largest ever devoted to her in Europe.
On opening day, the crowd was so dense that “packed to the rafters” would hardly have been an exaggeration. The Hayward’s four floors were filled with work from across Yang’s career: paper cutout collages, large venetian-blind installations, woven plants and fruit, and assorted old Korean objects. They suggest a kind of identification with the artist’s origins, as well as a homesickness shaped by life in the West. “I’m always pleased to see the London art world schedule major exhibition openings and special events around Frieze week,” Langret said.
“Over the past twenty years, the art world has undergone enormous development and change. Frieze has consistently been a pioneering force, from founding the magazine to launching the fairs and then to the debut of Frieze Seoul in 2022. Last year, we welcomed visitors from 92 countries, and in the next phase we hope to keep expanding our international reach.”
“This year, we made sweeping changes to the layout of Frieze London, making Frieze younger. And in the next decade, we hope to welcome collectors and audiences in a renewed form.”