Shirazeh Houshiary’s Time Curve 2024 | Photo: Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton
A jaunt across autumnal Regent’s Park to the Fairs gave relief from current miseries. Fiona Banner’s warplane, an ink drawing Backfire (Weeps) 2024 at Frith Street Gallery and Mona Hatoum’s Untitled (pressure) 2023, of horribly compressed mattress coils and bed frames at White Cube were potent but isolated reminders of present realities.
- Read: Review of Frieze and Frieze Masters 2023
- Listen: Concert pianist Stephen Hough describes his passion for painting
This year Frieze was a focused commercial offer, a predominance of painting, anodyne sculpture and little to frighten the horses. Even Sarah Lucas’s bronze bottom Sex Bomb 2022 at Sadie Coles and Nancy Spero’s bras and knickers clothes hanger Sheela-Na-gig at Home 2000 at Galerie Lelong & Co seemed out of kilter. There was little sound or video, an exception being Jenkin van Zyl’s Sweat Exchange 2024, a kinky video performance in grotesque pink silicone in a sauna staged in a drained swimming pool, at Edel Assanti.
- Read: Review of Frieze and Frieze Masters 2022
- Read: 5 pieces of classical music inspired by paintings
The Artist to Artist section had artist Glenn Ligon’s choice of Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom’s installation Before, During & After – Here, Now, Before , During & After: Here Soon, Ongoin, at Champ Lacombe, a work of trial and error of learning to play the drums, as Ligon says ‘troubling the boundaries between genres of art and between artist and audience.’ The Frieze Artist Award went to Lawrence Lek, whose multimedia work Guanyin (confessions of a Former Carebot), an interactive animation operated from a low tech clunky game console by, mostly, underage visitors, with a sardonic take on AI/human interaction felt oddly alien. Not much disturbed the sheer pleasure of looking at painting, from the moving tiny images of Rosa Elena Curruchich d. 2005 , Guatemala’s first female indigenous artist at Proyectos Ultravioleta to young artist Shaqúelle Whyte whose enigmatic form1: Under the lonely sky at Pippy Holdsworth was bought for the Arts Council Collection.
- Read: Review of Frieze and Frieze Masters 2021
- Read: A new festival features paintings by classical musicians created during lockdown
While Frieze had been revamped, more spacious with new galleries upfront, Frieze Masters Studio was expanded with a well-curated street of solo presentations in dialogue with the past and with place. The late Pakistan British artist Balraj Khana was celebrated with early paintings at Jhaveri Contemporary, (see his long overdue show at Tate Britain) and other revelations were glorious works by Czech surrealist Eva Švankmajerová d. 2005 , wife of the better-known filmmaker Jan Švankmajer, which lampooned famous nudes by male artists, at The Gallery of Everything. Lisson presented Iranian born British artist Shirazeh Houshiary with sculpture and paintings inspired by her desert travels to China’s Mogao Caves. British artists shone this year: Alan Charlton’s uncompromising minimalist grey paintings at Annely Juda and Tess Jaray serene at Ben Hunter & Offer Waterman. Alongside the antiquities, old master paintings, pots, baskets and silver, the rare booksellers came up trumps with David Crouch’s wonderful Aladdin’s cave of books with imaginary maps: a treat. 