10 Must-See Exhibitions during Frieze London 2024
Yayoi Kusama, installation view of “EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE” at Victoria Miro, 2024. Courtesy of Victoria Miro.
Frieze London is once again set to take place in Regent’s Park from October 9th through 13th, and it appears 2024 is a year of change. There is a new floor plan, resetting the balance between blue-chip and smaller galleries within the fair, while this year’s program promises a reorientated focus on curated sections including the artist-selected solo booths. For the upcoming edition, the likes of Hurvin Anderson, Lubaina Himid, Rashid Johnson, and Yinka Shonibare have selected younger artists to platform, including Peter Uka, Magda Stawarska, Rob Davis, and Nengi Omuku. There will also be a new themed presentation, “Smoke,” organized by Hammer Museum curator Pablo José Ramírez, alongside the usual booths from more than 160 galleries.
As collectors, curators, and artists descend on the city from around the world, galleries from the polished streets of Mayfair to the depths of Deptford aim to entice crowds to venture beyond the tent. Some try to tempt attendees by debuting hot rising talents: George Rouy at Hauser & Wirth; Yu Hong at Lisson Gallery; and Pei Wang at WORKPLACE, for example. Others pique public interest with institutional-level shows by world-renowned artists such as Tracey Emin at White Cube, Yayoi Kusama at Victoria Miro, and Olivier Mosset at MASSIMODECARLO.
For those who are done with the fair by 2 p.m. on VIP day, we have curated a selection of 10 must-see exhibitions to catch before heading off to Paris.
“The Bleed, Part I” will mark George Rouy’s debut exhibition with Hauser & Wirth since the announcement of his co-representation in May 2024, cementing his status as a leading figure of a new generation of British painters. As the youngest artist on the globally renowned blue-chip gallery’s roster, the 30-year-old Kent-born painter has rapidly gained recognition since graduating from London’s Camberwell College of Arts in 2015.
In 2023, Rouy presented solo exhibitions with Nicola Vassell Gallery in New York and Hannah Barry Gallery in London, following a steady stream of impressive presentations with Almine Rech in Paris in 2022, Peres Projects in Berlin in 2021, and Steve Turner Gallery in Los Angeles in 2018. He has also attracted the attention of global institutions: His works are held in the collections of X Museum in Beijing and ICA Miami, and he has featured in group exhibitions with the Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas and the K11 Art Museum in Shanghai.
For “The Bleed, Part I” (the second part will take place at Hauser & Wirth’s downtown Los Angeles location in 2025), Rouy will present a suite of monochrome paintings. This marks a new direction for the artist, alongside his recognizable earth-toned and enveloping canvases. His dynamic figurative paintings blur bodies into congealed and inextricable forms as a route to examine the emotional extremities of our time—namely, notions of identity and embodiment in an increasingly globalized and technology-driven age.
Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room - Beauty Described by a Spherical Heart, 2024. Courtesy of Victoria Miro.
Taking place 26 years after her first solo presentation with Victoria Miro, “EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE” is Yayoi Kusama’s 14th solo exhibition with the gallery. Brimming with previously unseen work, the show premieres a new “Infinity Mirrored Room,” titled Beauty Described as a Spherical Heart, alongside a recent series of paintings and sculptures from the world-famous Japanese artist.
For example, on view is Death of Nerves (2022), a large-scale sculptural installation made from multicolored sewn and stuffed fabric elements, originally commissioned by M+ Museum in Hong Kong. Alongside that installation, a new series of paintings fills the gallery’s first floor, hung in salon style and bursting with bold colors and imagery exemplary of the artist’s oeuvre, such as her dot-covered “Infinity Nets.”
This exhibition coincides with major institutional exhibitions of Kusama’s work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves in Porto, Portugal, following her recent three-year long “Infinity Rooms” exhibition at Tate Modern in London. Her tallest bronze pumpkin sculpture to date is also currently on view in London’s Hyde Park, presented by the Serpentine Galleries and the Royal Parks.
A suite of captivating new figurative paintings, an intensely visceral short film, and one of her largest bronze sculptures to date: Tracey Emin’s solo exhibition at White Cube in Bermondsey continues her lifelong investigation into themes of love, life, and mortality. Drawing on a recent and transformative chapter of Emin’s life, including her experience with a life-threatening illness, the exhibition foregrounds the raw vulnerability the artist has been known for since her 1999 Turner Prize nomination for My Bed (1998).
Born and raised in Margate—a small, coastal town in England—Tracey Emin was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2024 for her services to art. She has exhibited extensively, including in recent solo exhibitions at the Munch Museum in Oslo in 2021, the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2020, and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris in 2019.
WORKPLACE, an incubator for diverse young talents with spaces in London and Newcastle, is known for picking the defining names of the next generation. In this trend, the gallery is set to present up-and-coming Chinese painter Pei Wang’s debut London solo exhibition during Frieze London 2024.
Featuring a selection of haunting, closely cropped, hyperrealistic new paintings, the exhibition sees Wang continue his investigations into the relationship between imagery and digital consumption. Rejecting the digestible clarity of clickbait, the works on show are deliberately cryptic and often provoke more questions than they answer. One, a moody rendering of a merry-go-round surrounded by darkness, The Vanity Fair (2024), is akin to a still from a horror film—the viewer is left on edge, wondering what might happen next.
Based in Barcelona, Wang received his MA in oil painting from the China Academy of Art in 2015 and has since presented a solo exhibition at Tara Downs in New York in 2024, following his inclusion in multiple group shows in China.
Ella Walker is a name on the rise: She had a recent solo exhibition with Casey Kaplan in New York, and was included in Hauser & Wirth Somerset’s survey of the most exciting emerging artists. In “The Romance of the Rose,” Pilar Corrias Gallery presents its first show with the artist, following its representation announcement in April.
Taking the 13th-century French poem The Romance of a Rose as its starting point, the exhibition unpicks problematic and patriarchal feminine archetypes. It recasts a diverse range of women as characters that have been historically deployed to denigrate women, from the jealous crone to the madwoman. In these large-scale and highly detailed paintings, women are rendered in joyful and humorous revelry as self-defining forces.
Known for her research-driven approach, Walker allows history to direct both the exhibition’s theme and the materials she uses to create the works. Painted with light washes of acrylic dispersion, pigment, chalk, and marble dust upon a textured ground, the whimsical scenes that make up “The Romance of a Rose” see Walker inject a spirit of punk feminism back into the past.
For her first solo exhibition in London, 58-year-old Chinese artist Yu Hong presents a new series of large-scale acrylic-on-canvas paintings at Lisson Gallery’s Bell Street location. Expanding on a body of work first unveiled at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, in 2023, the paintings on show are inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s painting Island of the Dead (1880). As such, they can be understood as psychological landscapes that each embody a universal experience of emotion, including love, expectation, and oblivion.
In Island of Expectation (2023), for example, a single female figure is balanced precariously upon a ladder above a wide and wild sea, the turbulent, churning waters acting as a metaphor for her innermost feelings. Meanwhile, in Island of Survival (2023), the swirling clouds that envelop the sky mirror the tension between the central figures beneath.
Following on from her first major exhibition in Europe at the Chiesetta della Misericordia in Venice, presented by the Guggenheim’s Asian Art Initiative during the Venice Biennale 2024, “Islands of the Mind” affords Hong long-awaited international acclaim. Often heralded as a leader of Chinese contemporary art, the artist has presented work at the Long Museum in Shanghai and the CAFA Art Museum in Beijing, but has only recently drawn equivalent attention overseas.
Taking place at Gagosian’s Davies Street space, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves?” will feature six new paintings from much-discussed New York–based figurative painter Anna Weyant. The series continues the artist’s exploration of femininity through a tragicomic lens.
Delicate and sensitive, her renderings of female figures are known for combining autobiographical details from the artist’s life with a symbolic wit akin to Surrealist masterpieces by the likes of René Magritte. In Girl in Window (2024), for example, a single fig leaf conceals the flattened figure’s left nipple as a playful gesture that speaks to the societal expectation of women as objects of observation.
Her third solo show with Gagosian, this exhibition follows Weyant’s recent inclusion in institutional group exhibitions at the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, North Dakota, in 2024; the Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins in Mougins, France, in 2024; the FLAG Art Foundation in New York in 2023; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2022; and the Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas in 2022.
Founded in 2010 and spanning two spaces in Central London, Huxley-Parlour is known for creating dialogues between noteworthy established artists and emerging talents worthy of further recognition. An example of the latter, 33-year-old artist Lorena Torres, opened her debut solo exhibition with the gallery, “El Milagro es la Pereza de Díos,” in mid-September.
Raised in Colombia and of Caribbean descent, Torres roots her practice in her upbringing and the culture of Colombia’s Caribbean coast. Featuring 11 new paintings created in 2024, the exhibition, which draws its title from a quotation found in Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, speaks to the spiritual significance of quotidian experiences. Each painting sees a jubilant cast of humans and animals, drawn from Torres’s observations of the community that surrounds her, enacting fantastical scenes.
Sarah Slappey, Green and White Body Matrix, 2024. Courtesy of Bernheim.
American artist Sarah Slappey is known for her unsettling, disjointed, and hyperreal depictions of naked female figures, which have made their way into some of the most significant collections in the world, including the Hirshhorn Museum and ICA Miami.
For her debut London solo exhibition at Swiss gallery Bernheim’s recently opened Mayfair outpost, the 40-year-old painter explores the specific and often unnatural presentations of the female body that have permeated art history. Echoing the contorted marble torsos of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s sculptures or the bulbous flesh in Hans Bellmer’s photographs of dolls, the artist combines a photorealistic figurative mastery with impossible bodily arrangements. In this way, she draws attention to the imagery that has impacted visual conceptions of femininity and womanhood in our collective imaginations across time.
This presentation in London follows on from Slappey’s recent solo exhibitions at Bernheim’s Zürich space and Sargent’s Daughters in New York (the two galleries co-represent her). Over the past year, her work has also featured in group exhibitions at institutions across Europe and the U.S., including the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen in Germany; the Albertina Modern in Vienna, Austria; the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, North Dakota; and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Olivier Mosset On the Lost Highway 18, 2024. Photo by Todd-White Art Photography. Courtesy of the artist and MASSIMODECARLO.
MASSIMODECARLO’s first Milan exhibition, in 1987, was a show of minimalist painter Olivier Mosset. Now, for Frieze Week 2024 in London, the gallery returns to its roots with a solo exhibition of the 80-year-old Swiss artist’s work.
A pivotal figure in post-war abstraction, Mosset began his career in 1960s Paris. As a response to the spectacular and self-conscious nature of the new avant-garde of the period, the artist orchestrated groundbreaking artistic interventions alongside BMPT Collective members Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni. Often thought of as the acme of BMPT’s experimental approaches to painting, the 200 or more identical oil paintings of a small black circle at the center of a square white canvas that Mosset produced between 1966 and 1974 are exemplary of his ongoing approach to painting. He seeks to challenge established modes of artmaking, forgoing figuration, subjectivity, and symbolism in place of a focus on pure color and shape.
Curated by New York–based critic, curator, and friend of the artist Bob Nickas, Mosset’s exhibition “On the Lost Highway” promises to be intense, meditative, and characteristically bold, celebrating the legacy of one of the great U.S.-based painters of the 20th century.
