The 10 Best Booths at Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2022

This year, Frieze returns to Regent’s Park in London, gathering more than 280 galleries from 42 countries in a kaleidoscopic collection of classical and contemporary art. Amid economic turmoil on U.K. soil, geopolitical uncertainty across the continent, and mourning for a monarch who represented stability and British identity for many, the bustling booths at Frieze offer escapism and hope—sites for collectors and visitors to find inspiration during tumultuous times.

Presenting a mix of established and emerging artists, this year’s booths have taken striking liberties to distinguish themselves from the fair’s uniform layout: Take Lisson Gallery’s immersive solo presentation by Laure Prouvost at Frieze London, which envelops viewers within three freestanding paintings that feature challenging protest language around climate change and societal inequality. Prouvost’s enormous tapestry I wish you could see my face (2020) confronts viewers with jarring statements that reflect the need for empathy, such as: “I am sorry this room is not so nice I did ask for it to be changed.”

At Frieze Masters, Pace Gallery’s installation of Mary Corse’s The Cold Room (1968/2022), the second iteration of its kind, invites viewers into a multisensory enclosure in which a spectrum of white light is endlessly refracted, allowing each visitor to experience a different, kaleidoscopic pattern of light. At other booths, panel dividers create corners of intrigue; as visitors view works nestled at the heart of each booth, they enjoy a sense of intimacy within the teeming fair.

Eva Langret, artistic director of Frieze London, described the energy of the opening day as “palpable.” She emphasized the number of “carefully curated presentations with links to the wider institutional landscape in the U.K. and beyond.” She is especially excited about Thomas Dane Gallery’s booth, which is organized entirely by artist Anthea Hamilton and features some of her works, and for Timothy Taylor’s booth, which presents a solo exhibition of Sahara Longe’s oil-on-linen paintings. These monumental canvases depict life-size figures standing in varying proximity to one another—much like the visitors at Frieze—and ask the viewer to decipher the characters’ relationships and stories, based on their body language.

Read on to discover the must-see booths at Frieze London and Frieze Masters this week.

Gagosian

Frieze London, Booth E7

With works by Jadé Fadojutimi

Arguably the busiest booth during Frieze London’s preview day was Gagosian’s immersive solo exhibition of work by British artist Jadé Fadojutimi, which sold out before the end of the fair’s VIP opening. Seven large paintings featured electric celebrations of color and graphic abstraction. Complex textures of acrylic, oil paint, and oil pastel created layered allusions to the celestial and natural worlds.

Millicent Wilner, senior director of Gagosian in London, described prominent interest in Fadojutimi’s work—created specifically for Frieze London—from collectors and institutions around the world. “The cycle of paintings she is presenting at Frieze is exceptionally ambitious and beautiful,” she said. “Together with her current solo exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield, this provides a wonderful opportunity to experience how her practice continues to innovate and evolve.”

Addis Fine Art

Frieze London, Booth H33

With works by Selome Muleta

For its second year at Frieze, Addis Fine Art mounted new paintings by Ethiopian artist Selome Muleta, who makes her international fair debut this week. Vivid yet serene, Muleta’s works are striking in their fusion of portraiture and still life. Her meditative canvases focus on the interior lives of the women she paints. The fair booth follows the artist’s successful solo exhibition at the gallery’s Fitzrovia location last spring.

“Selome uses painting as a means of exploring the profound connection that she feels between her home environment and internal state of being,” said Mesai Haileleul, co-founder of Addis Fine Art. “She finds companionship with the winding plants and purring cats that reside with her, and uses painting as a means to express this quietly lived dialogue.”

All but one piece from the booth sold—with one of the paintings confirmed for acquisition by a prominent U.S. institution—and additional works from the back room placed as well.

Lehmann Maupin

Frieze London, Booth F2

With works by Cecilia Vicuña, Calida Rawles, and Teresita Fernández

Lehmann Maupin offers an elegant presentation of installations, films, sculptures, and more by three women artists. Central to the display are the works of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, which span four decades of her varied practice and embody her enduring fascination with natural materials. Caracol Azul (Blue Snail) (2017), for example, is a wool sculpture that extends over sixteen feet long and hearkens back to the cultural sanctity of unspun wool in the Andes. Vicuña’s work is simultaneously on view at the Venice Biennale, and Tate Modern revealed her commission for its Turbine Hall earlier this week.

L.A.-based African American artist Calida Rawles, meanwhile, debuts three pastel paintings featuring the increasingly rippled distortions of a woman’s body underwater. Rawles’s work responds to the Supreme Court’s recent upending of the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade case, which previously confirmed women’s right to abortion throughout the United States; the swimming figure is emblematic of women’s desire for freedom. Lionel Richie—who sits on the board of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—bought all three works, priced in the range of $60,000–$70,000 each, on the first day of the fair.

Jhaveri Contemporary

Frieze London, Booth C11

With works by Mahirwan Mamtani, Vasantha Yogananthan, Amina Ahmed, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Matthew Krishanu, and Sayan Chanda

This year at Frieze, Mumbai-based Jhaveri Contemporary brings together artists across generations from South Asia and its diaspora, many of whom are showing at Frieze for the first time. What unites these artists is a focus on religious and spiritual practice, expressed through painting, sculpture, photography, and textiles. “The stand brings together works that speak of transformation and the potential to explore alternative dimensions,” noted Jhaveri Contemporary co-founder Priya Jhaveri. “Portals, idols, ritual, and Tantra are among the tools and strategies at work here.”

Marseille-based Vasantha Yogananthan is a standout. His trance-like photography—characterized by vivid hues and high contrast—is the product of an eight-year project reconceiving the legend of the Ramayana in present-day India. With color-saturated portraits shot at night and still lifes captured at intimate proximity, Yogananthan portrays moments from the Ramayana amid a colorful festival of Dussehra—the Indian festival celebrating the victory of good over evil.

David Zwirner

Frieze London, Booth B2

With works by Lucas Arruda, Wolfgang Tillmans, Lisa Yuskavage, Kerry James Marshall, Bridget Riley, Oscar Murillo, and others

David Zwirner’s booth features new work by artists Lucas Arruda, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Lisa Yuskavage. Attendees clustered around Yuskavage’s Tit Tondo (2021) and Butt Tondo (2022), which toe the line between popular imagery and art historical precedents, embracing the high-low dichotomy that pervades all her work. The round paintings, or tondos, are provocative, commercial, and faithful to the artist’s long standing focus on female characters that assume the roles of both subject and object. Both sold on the first day of the fair for $250,000 each. Nearby, Arruda’s seascapes capture the wildness of the natural world, embracing sensuality and eliminating focal points to immerse viewers in the overwhelming, directionless forces of the sea and sky.

Meanwhile, Kerry James Marshall’s painting Black and Part Black Birds in America: (Yellow headed Black bird; Black Chinned Hummingbird; Ruby Throated Hummingbird, male and female) (2022)—the largest in his “Black and Part Black Birds in America”series, and created specifically for the fair—applies ideas about American racial stratification and sorting to the world of birds. The work sold for $6 million to a major U.S. museum.

Perrotin

Frieze London, Booth A11

With works by GaHee Park, Bernard Frize, Iván Argote, Daniel Arsham, and others

Perrotin’s sprawling, centrally located booth was abuzz with captivated visitors. They swarmed around Korean artist GaHee Park’s highly cerebral, somewhat unnerving drawings and paintings. These pieces are alluring in their muted pastel hues, conveying serenity charged with mysterious, sexual undertones. The quaint, almost naïve settings of Park’s work give way to darker emotional conditions: A bowl of oranges sits next to a woman with two mouths, in a scene unnervingly dotted with harmless ladybugs.

Other standout pieces include Thilo Heinzmann’s O.T. (2021), a vast, hypnotic painting of oil pigment and glass on canvas that demonstrates the artist’s unique visual language of gestural yet controlled explosions of color and texture. Drawn to tactile qualities in painting, Heinzmann makes inventive use of pigments to project an aura beyond the edges of the canvas—one that feels particularly serene in the context of a bustling art fair.

P420

Frieze London, Booth G17

With works by Riccardo Baruzzi, Irma Blank, Adelaide Cioni, Rodrigo Hernández, Pieter Vermeersch, and Shafei Xia

Bologna-based gallery P420 presents a melting pot of contemporary artists from different backgrounds, who work across media including sculpture, painting, hammered brass, ceramics, and watercolor. Each artist articulates a fresh perspective on issues present and eternal: intellectualism, sustainability, existentialism, and freedom. P420’s founders Alessandro Pasotti and Fabrizio Padovani described initial feedback from collectors and curators as “very positive and enthusiastic,” highlighting that none of the works exhibited have been seen before the fair.

Standouts include Riccardo Baruzzi’s captivating scarecrows, which he described as “representing a roughness that is part of me.” The stylized iron structures are mere imitations of human presence, but they take on their own character and identity with hands made of bronze and terracotta heads.

Meanwhile, Adelaide Cioni’s humorous works on canvas subvert traditional male thinkers with simplicity and glibness, reducing the likes of Kant and Heidegger to inanimate beans. Shafei Xia’s exquisite Miss pig (2022) evokes Chinese symbology via painted sculpture, unveiling layers of meaning while expressing a desire for freedom.

Stephen Friedman

Frieze Masters, Booth E7

With works by Ilona Keserü

Ilona Keserü, one of Hungary’s foremost post-war artists, has developed a prolific, varied body of work over her 70-year-long career. Evocative and joyful, Keserü’s abstract style was born from defiance of Soviet rule following the Hungarian revolution, and further developed during a time of artistic self-censorship and widespread restrictions. Fusing references to Hungarian folk culture with nods to European art and architecture, her work radiates optimism and buoyancy despite its charged context.

Galerie Mitterrand

Frieze Masters, Booth A7

With works by Niki de Saint Phalle

It’s impossible to ignore Niki de Saint Phalle’s jubilant, large-scale sculptures of what she calls “Nanas” (an affectionate term for “girls” in French), which embody the freedom of movement and the vitality of unrestrained emotion. More joyful than sensual, their curvaceous forms, realized in vibrant primary hues, invite viewers to celebrate.

Galerie Mitterrand director Sébastien Carvalho describes Saint Phalle’s work as a “permanent joyous revolution,” evidenced by the increasing number of exhibitions of her work in recent years—from MoMA PS1 in New York in 2021, to this year’s Venice Biennale.

Saint Phalle and Galerie Mitterrand have enjoyed a long relationship; the gallery’s inauguration in 1988 featured her sculptures, and it has partnered with the artist’s estate since her death in 2002. “On the 20th anniversary of her death, we want to pay her a vibrant tribute at Frieze Masters by bringing together a selection of her most iconic works,” Carvalho said.

Ab-Anbar

Frieze Spotlight, Booth S11

With works by Sonia Balassanian

Ab-Anbar, a contemporary Iranian gallery that supports thought-provoking artists from the Middle East, presents a solo exhibition of poet and artist Sonia Balassanian’s work. Entitled Hostages: A Diary (1980), the installation is composed of pieces that marked the beginning of her political art. Centered on her experience of otherness and internal revolution, Balassanian’s art is at once personal and political, reflecting her role as a social activist for women’s rights.