10 Must-See London Shows during Frieze Week 2023
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Frieze’s first fair in London’s Regent’s Park. Over 160 galleries will return to participate in one of the most anticipated events in the global calendar. Alongside Frieze’s familiar public program for Frieze Sculpture and its Artist Award, this anniversary edition will feature a number of new collaborations with major U.K. arts organizations.
Beyond the fair’s walls, museums and galleries will also present ambitious programs. Among these are the museum exhibitions of Sarah Lucas at Tate Britain, Gray Wielebinski at the ICA, Nicole Eisenman at Whitechapel Gallery, and Tamara Henderson at Camden Arts Centre.
Below are 10 exhibitions in London during Frieze 2023 by blue-chip galleries and smaller art spaces that showcase a wide range of mediums, subjects, and styles.
Sylvie Fleury, installation view of “S.F.” at Sprüth Magers London, 2023. Courtesy of Sprüth Magers.
“S.F.” brings together three decades of the Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury playfully deconstructing machismo—in the art world, in motor clubs, and in sci-fi—with strategies from the industries of fashion, beauty, and advertising, as well as a good dose of humor. In one room, a minimalist floor piece not unlike those by Carl Andre is speckled with the broken-up, pressed powder of two Chanel blushes.
In another room, large-scale sculptures of space rockets are covered in synthetic white fur. An installation recreates the headquarters of the She-Devils on Wheels—a motorcycle gang Fleury created after she was rejected from a car club. Throughout the exhibition, designer high heels appear as sculptures displayed on plinths as objects of consumption. Desire is a throughline is this deliriously feminine show.
Marina Rheingantz, Schmetterlinge im bauch, 2023. © Marina Rheingantz. Photo by Theo Christelis. Courtesy of the artist and White Cube.
For her first exhibition since joining White Cube, the Brazilian artist Marina Rheingantz will present a series of her dense and expansive landscape paintings. When Rheingantz started painting, her practice was anchored in the rural Brazilian landscape she grew up in. Her landscapes then still featured recognizable landmarks and figures, such as horizons, or trees.
Recently, though, her paintings have inched closer towards abstraction, suggesting landscapes through miniscule brushstrokes set against a monochrome background. These brushstrokes recall 19th-century Pointillism, textile stitches, and pixels. The patterns they create, and the empty space between them, can conjure aerial images, ocean waves, or the jagged surfaces of cliffs. Because they are unpopulated and seemingly outside of time, Rheingantz’s recent landscapes have been compared to wastelands and ruins.
While the paintings of Jhonatan Pulido may at first glance appear abstract, they are in fact direct responses to elements of the urban fabric in his native Colombia. Pulido grew up in the midst of the civil conflict during the 1990s, when the walls of buildings were graffitied by guerrilla and paramilitary groups with threats and to signal territorial ownership. The messages were then painted over again by local residents or the police.
These political, public, and communal interventions in the urban fabric are synthetized by Pulido into luminous, pastel color fields. Though two-dimensional, his works have a sense of depth. He layers paint, which he then scrapes or sandblasts away before partially painting it over again. The result is a palimpsest with the look of an abstract painting, evoking the political gravitas of the walls he grew up with, and the emotive charge of a memory.
James Lee Byars and Seung-taek Lee, “Invisible Questions That Fill the Air”
Michael Werner
Sep. 21–Nov. 18
The exhibition brings together sculptures by James Lee Byars and Seung-taek Lee. Born the same year on different continents (Byars in the U.S.; Lee in unified Korea), the two artists never met, yet share a sensibility in their materials, themes, and forms.
Interestingly, while Byars tied his practice to the decade he spent in Japan, Lee seeks to distance himself from Japan’s artistic influence on his country. He creates “non-sculptures” with natural objects, such as rocks and tree branches, as well as Korean folk objects, which he then places in an art context. Byars similarly used humble materials, such as sea sponges, which he stacked into totem-like sculptures. Together, the works touch upon themes of the ephemeral, the fragile, the cosmic, and the invisible.
Ernesto Burgos, “When a bird lands on the ground it invariably stops singing”
The Sunday Painter
Sep. 22–Oct. 28
In his earliest works, Ernesto Burgos created free-standing sculptures resembling couches that had been cut up and stitched back together into odd arrangements. In his current exhibition at The Sunday Painter, the artist presents wall-mounted pieces that are halfway between sculpture and painting. According to the accompanying exhibition essay, Burgos was initially reluctant to engage with the rectangular and flat picture of painting, but these works “wanted” to be hung on the wall.
For this exhibition, he bent, cut, tore, and glued materials like fiberglass, cardboard, and resin. The final forms curl at the edges, as though straining against an invisible force. They are adorned with energetic, gestural marks evocative of some Abstract Expressionist paintings. Titles like Carpool, Yurei (named after a Japanese folk ghost), and Belfry (an element of a clocktower) evoke a variety of realms and inspirations, from the communal to the mythological.
Anthony Cudahy, Wolfsbane stare ii, 2023. Photo by JSP Art Photography. Courtesy of the artist and GRIMM, Amsterdam | New York | London.
Anthony Cudahy, Sebastian, before or after, 2023. Photo by JSP Art Photography. Courtesy of the Artist and GRIMM, Amsterdam | New York | London.
In this exhibition, set across two London galleries (Hales Gallery in Shoreditch and GRIMM in Mayfair), the painter Anthony Cudahy explores mirror effects and doubles. The exhibition presents large-scale figurative paintings featuring the intimate and dreamlike scenes of everyday life the artist is known for. Taking its name from an Icelandic stone that can double anything viewed through it, the exhibition features repeated gestures and figures both within individual works and across different paintings.
As he has done in the past, Cudahy also includes elements from other artists, past and present. One pose is based on a painting by the Renaissance artist Pietro Perugino, while a contemporary photograph by Billy Sullivan decorates another painted interior. Through this doubling-up, Cudahy suggests the conversations he is having with other artists across time, as well as with his own work.
Installation view of “45 (Between the Seams)” at PM/AM, 2023. Courtesy of PM/AM.
Curated by independent curator Larry Ossei-Mensah and painter Paul Anthony Smith, “45 (Between the Seams)” brings together nine artists whose works expand the concept of interstices (or small, intervening spaces). Interstices here signify not just the physical separation between two elements; the concept is also used to interrogate post-colonial legacies, including questions of hybridity, migration, and memory.
Through the overlap of materials, forms, and patterns tied to specific histories, the exhibition seeks to show how overlooked communities can be fertile spaces for ideas and creativity. Most of the exhibited artists work in painting—conventionally a rectangular, flat, and unified canvas—but trouble its surface through the use of collage and mixed media.
Layo Bright, for instance, hints towards overlapping histories of commerce and migration by fusing glass (a material traded between Europe and Africa for centuries) onto the plaid pattern of a Ghana “must-go” bag (a cheap yet sturdy tote bag sometimes used by migrants to transport their belongings). Samuel Levi Jones deconstructs legal and medical books and newspapers to create a quilt-like surface that evokes the styles of both Robert Rauschenberg and the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers. The exhibition raises questions of intimacy and distance, asking what separates us and what brings us together.
Ali Banisadr, The Changing Past, 2021. © Ali Banisadr. Courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro.
Ali Banisadr once said that painting gives him the opportunity to be free with the fragmented information he’s interested in—from his childhood memories of the Islamic Revolution and the Iran–Iraq war, to Persian miniatures and Hieronymus Bosch. He brings together these multiple sources through dense, large-scale paintings that feature bold tones and muscular brushstrokes. In their density and rhythm, Banisadr’s paintings evoke chaos, violence, and displacement.
For his first solo exhibition at Victoria Miro since joining the gallery, the New York–based artist will present an ensemble of recent paintings. These will include direct references to Mesopotamian art held in the British Museum and ancient Egyptian symbolism, as well as the toppling of monuments to accommodate shifting ideologies. In this way, it seems that the exhibition “The Changing Past” will evidence Banisadr’s deepening interest in history by questioning how the past may be used and altered to accommodate the present.
Ted Gahl, installation view of “Café Nervosa” at MAMOTH, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and MAMOTH.
Ted Gahl’s paintings have previously been labeled “Connecticut Jugendstil” in reference to the artist’s birthplace and the Art Nouveau movement made famous in Munich, Berlin, and Vienna at the turn of the century. Like other contemporary painters inspired by that era of art history (such as Kai Althoff, Andrew Cranston, or Ernst Yohji Jaeger), Gahl’s works seem both in the present and the past.
Feminine figures clothed in kimonos, caftans, or tutus glide through ethereal fields of golden yellows, either alone or in groups. Several paintings feature scroll-like elements that break up the composition in its center or frame the figure on the sides, like a curtain, as though these were just glimpses of an expansive scene.
This exhibition provides an introduction to an overlooked figure of British Pop Art who has been compared to both Alex Katz and Pauline Boty. In the 1960s and ’70s, Sue Dunkley created brightly colored yet ominous paintings of women and celebrities that spoke of the female body, the male gaze, and the public eye. She often painted people whom she considered to have a distinct look and a dramatic life.
Several of her works are based on images from Life magazine and feature John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Gilbert & George, and Marilyn Monroe. A series of pastel drawings highlights Dunkley’s sensitivity to body language and her ability to arrange figures into mysteriously tense scenes. The Kiss (ca. 1969), drawn in an appealing mix of cerulean blue, turmeric yellow, and ruby red, depicts a man pressing his lips against another figure, though whether the kiss is romantic, life-saving, or unwanted is not entirely clear.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Michael Werner Gallery’s show opened on September 2nd. It opened on September 21st.
