The 15 Best Booths at Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2023

Some 20 years since its iconic white tent first arrived at Regent’s Park in central London, Frieze returned for what the fair’s artistic director Eva Langret hailed as its “most international edition to date.” More than 200 exhibitors from six continents are taking part in Frieze London and Frieze Masters this year, with some 28 participants now showing for the 20th consecutive year.

“As the international art world descends on London, we look forward to seeing the spirit of collaboration ripple across the city and for everyone to see our cultural capital shine,” added a bullish Langret.

On the VIP day of the fair, the Frieze London tent was bustling from nearly the moment it opened at 11 a.m., while a relatively calmer crowd took to the serene aisles of Frieze Masters. The list of celebrities in attendance included Michael Bloomberg, Tracey Emin, Rami Malek, Andrew Garfield, FKA Twigs, Raf Simons, Florence Pugh, and Sadiq Khan.

“Day one of the Frieze art fair, 20 years after it began, is as active and engaging as we could imagine,” said Gagosian senior director Millicent Wilner.

A steady slate of opening-day sales were reported, led by Hauser & Wirth, which sold a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois for $3 million. Other exhibitors with notable sales included Pace Gallery, which sold a Louise Nevelson sculpture for $2 million; Thaddaeus Ropac, which sold a Georg Baselitz painting for €1,200,000 ($1,270,000); and White Cube, which sold a painting by Tracey Emin for £1,200,000 ($1,470,000). Check back on Monday for our full recap of reported sales.

Here, we present our 15 favorite booths from Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2023.

Blindspot Gallery

Frieze London, Booth G13

With works by Sin Wai Kin, Xiyadie, Trevor Yeung, and Angela Su

Blindspot Gallery’s Frieze booth welcomes viewers with a moment of calm. Sin Wai Kin’s video The One (2021) shows the Turner-Prize-nominated artist’s face—which has a woman in a provocative stance painted on it—breathing in a meditative state in front of a screensaver-esque blue sky with clouds. As is typical in the artist’s practice, the makeup wipe used to remove this face-paint is also on display, like a mask that has been removed—a comment on the performative nature of gender.

Nearby, meticulous paper cutouts by the Chinese artist Xiyadie, which were exhibited in a recent solo show at New York’s Drawing Center, are also displayed. These colorful, intricate works take a narrative approach to identity, using traditional Chinese paper-cutting techniques to depict the artist’s struggle with coming out. For example, Gate (1992), shows Xiyadie himself hiding his blossoming homosexuality from his wife and children.

Elsewhere, sculptural works by Trevor Yeung appropriate tiny mushroom-shaped light bulbs that sprout out of a multitude of power adapters (a comment on the resilience of human lives during troubled times, perhaps). Opposite, a work made with hair sewn into linen by Angela Su depicts a breast with its nipple being pierced by a needle, evoking the violence against women’s bodies. Both artists have been selected to represent Hong Kong at the Venice Biennale: Su for the recent edition in 2022, and Yeung for the forthcoming presentation in 2024.

—Josie Thaddeus-Johns

Clearing

Frieze London, Booth D18

With works by Marguerite Humeau

Marguerite Humeau never disappoints. Known for her research-intensive process that taps into science, human history, mythology, and more, the French-born, London-based artist has become a regular on the international biennial circuit, recognized consistently over the past decade for her spectacular, otherworldly sculptures and installations.

With this solo booth presented by Clearing, Humeau drew upon Orisons (2023), the earthwork she created in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. “The presentation directly stems from Marguerite’s acclaimed land art installation, which will be on view for two years in the south Colorado desert,” noted Clearing director John Utterson. “So it’s 160 acres of work compressed seamlessly into a 50-square-meter space. It’s almost as if the sculptures had been uprooted from Colorado and transplanted in London.”

To create Orisons, Humeau sought to understand the land and its history, and collaborated with Indigenous communities, conservationists, and geomancers. She channeled their findings into a series of 80 kinetic sculptures installed on the land and activated by wind.

The sculptures on view at Frieze—made from zinc-passivated steel, hard-carved wood, stoneware, and luster glaze—are recreations of these works, each one consisting of a wind instrument on top and placed on tentacular “roots.” Though some appear to mimic real, organic material, the roots were all designed by programmers, realized in wax, then cast in bronze. Each work is inspired by a plant or animal found on the land.

The wall-hung works nearby, made from hand-cast wax and embroidery, are inspired by the map of Orisons. They also reflect on the spirit and inhabitants of the land, incorporating not just physical features but also celestial charts, the climate, and the way that light touches the land. It’s a highly ambitious, poetic body of work that we can only hope will surface again in a gallery, if not an institution, in the near future. “We couldn’t be happier,” Utterson said of the presentation. “It’s been a very generative fair.”

—Casey Lesser

DAG

Frieze Masters, Booth G10

With works by Biren De, G.R Santosh, P.T. Reddy, Satish Gujral, Shobba Broota, Sobhan Qadri, and Sunil Das

This tightly curated booth from New Delhi gallery DAG focuses on Tantra, a philosophy that has its roots in medieval India and revolves around attaining an enlightened form of liberation. When the movement experienced a strong revival in the West during the mid-20th century and became associated with humanitarian protest movements, it prompted a broader re-examination of the philosophy among Indian artists, leading to an abstract movement known as Neo-tantra.

From the mechanical, geometric wall pieces of Satish Gurjal to the delicate, contemplative watercolors of Shobha Broota, the works on view here represent the range of vibrant and experimental art of this movement. Enlightenment here is addressed through diverse meditations on color, form, and representation.

“Even though these artists are practicing Tantra, the way they re-interpret it is very different,” said Aishwarya Rana, a vice president at the gallery. Indeed, the clear influence of such experimentalism is evident today. G.R. Santosh’s sensuous colors and dense lines have influenced contemporary artists including Loie Hollowell and Harminder Judge, for example, who presented several of the artist’s works for a show they co-curated at Pace Gallery last year.

“These are of course very Indian works, [but] the language is very international,” added Rana.“It’s really nice to see people being very open to exploring and understanding.”

—Arun Kakar

Galerie EIGEN + ART

Frieze London, Booth A16

With works by Martin Eder

Elysium, a paradise for immortal heroes in Greek mythology, is not exactly a setting one would associate with a high-stakes, highly trafficked commercial art fair. Yet the German artist Martin Eder has harnessed this concept of an idyll to realize his own strange world, fit for the age of meme culture and online makeup tutorials, populated by dewy figures and surreal kittens, all painted in the artist’s luminous, hyperrealistic style.

Presented by the Berlin and Leipzig–based Galerie EIGEN + ART, the booth is frankly hard to miss given its bright, rainbow walls printed with “Elysium” in large letters. Plus, there are the kittens, deftly painted in a host of unusual scenarios, like a grayish one that appears be earnestly praying; a stone-faced white one sitting in a bucket of round, red fruits and roses; and a two-faced, sinister one that seems to be staring down a flying fish. Gallery owner Gerd Harry Lybke noted that Eder had taken such a big risk with this body of work, that the gallery couldn’t not support his vision at the fair. It’s a welcome dose of levity and existentialism, with works priced between €40,000 and €110,000 each.

—C.L.

Hauser & Wirth

Frieze London, Booth D5

With works by Barbara Chase-Riboud

Barbara Chase-Riboud’s characteristic bronze sculptures are the focal point of her solo booth at Hauser & Wirth. This series of black, eight-foot-tall abstract sculptures, entitled “Standing Black Women of Venice,” represent the three first-known female poets from across the ancient world: Vijja, Praxilla, and Nossis. The sculptures tower over the viewer, their surface rippled in vertically stacked tiles—based on modules that were originally created for the artist’s floor work Bathers (1969–72). Along the sides of the black-walled booth are works on paper by the artist: loops of white silk sewn in lines that form textural geometric shapes seen faintly against the pale paper.

The Frieze presentation precedes a solo exhibition for Chase-Riboud at Hauser & Wirth’s soon-to-open space on Wooster Street in New York, the first since the mega-gallery announced representation of the artist earlier this year. That exhibition, explained Madeline Warren, senior director at Hauser & Wirth, will similarly offer a dialogue between Chase-Riboud’s earlier career and her current work.

Chase-Riboud has been seeing an overdue recognition of her work over the last few years, as greater museum and scholarly attention has turned to the mostly Black artists associated with New York’s JAM (Just Above Midtown) gallery in the 1970s. A recent dual exhibition with Giacometti at MoMA, as well as a solo at the Serpentine Gallery (her first institutional presentation in London), was likely contributing to the crowds at the Frieze booth, where the artist sat greeting visitors on the preview day.

—J.T-J.

M77 Gallery

Frieze Masters, Booth MW2

With works by Maria Lai

For the inaugural edition of Frieze’s Modern Women section—dedicated to presentations of female artists that worked between 1880 and 1980— Milan-based M77 Gallery presents a series of works by the Sardinian artist Maria Lai.

Perhaps best known for her sculptures and textile works, Lai is a singular artist who consistently resisted associations with an artistic movement. She was close with figures in the Arte Povera and Arte Informale movements that were active in Italy during her career, and this presentation of works from the 1960s and ’70s focuses on the artist at a particularly formative, exploratory period.

“These are the two decades that bridge her from her more traditional training as a painter and sculptor...all the way through to collages and textiles,” explained Chiara Principe, a managing director at the gallery.

Many of the works here draw on Sardinian folklore—a pertinent theme for the artist—in myriad ways. Acrylic and jute twine are melded into canvases, through fabrics that are weaved messily into blocks of wood. Meanwhile, a number of rustic, rugged paintings point to the myths of the world the artist grew up in. It’s a small but powerful snapshot of a standout artist, documenting a moment of underexplored transformation in her career. Exactly, perhaps, what this section was envisioned for.

—A.K.

Marlborough

Frieze Masters, Booth F8

With works by Valentine Hugo, Gluck, Marlow Moss, Paule Vézelay, Nicolaas Warb, Michael West, Dadamaino, and Axell

Curated by Anke Kempkes, Marlborough’s expansive booth, “The Laughing Torso,” takes its title from the memoir of British artist Nina Hamnett and showcases the work of 20th-century women artists who rejected the traditional roles of their time and instead forged their own independent artistic journeys.

The artists selected here are also united by the fact that they all changed their names due to gender identity, discrimination, or political persecution. From the Surrealist works of Valentine Hugo to the radical paintings of Gluck, there is a remarkable breadth here, with works by each artist speaking to one another, in a booth that is as informative as it is artistically interesting.

“All of these artists in some way have crossed paths, either by inspiration or immediate collaboration,” explained James Bayard, a sales director at the gallery. A selection of impactful abstract works by New York artist Michael Corinne West and paintings by Belgian Pop artist Evelyne Axell are among the works to be discovered.

“Fairs are an opportunity to give a platform and voice to artists, and these are artists who have been overlooked until recently, so it feels quite valuable now to spotlight them and highlight them on this occasion,” added Bayard.

—A.K.

Nature Morte

Frieze London, Booth B6

With works by Sagarika Sundaram, Suhasini Kejriwal, Subodh Gupta, Asim Waqif, Kamrooz Aram, and Manisha Parekh

New Delhi gallery Nature Morte’s group presentation focuses on several works by artists from India and the diaspora who engage with handmade crafts. A highlight is textile artist Sagarika Sundaram’s hand-felted wall piece, Siren (2023), made of hand-dyed natural fiber sourced from India and resembling, perhaps, an open mouth. “There’s a strong resonance with the body and movement,” said Vidisha Aggarwal, curator at the gallery, of this piece.

Next to this work are Suhasini Kejriwal’s two sculpted cacti, The Garden of Un-Earthly Delights (2023), which are each collaged with cut-out drawings of plants and birds. These are smaller versions of two works that can be found just outside the fair tent in Frieze Sculpture. In the booth, the works are presented alongside a striking bronze sculpture of a tree, also by Kejriwal, with its leaves replaced by open eyes: a surreal gesture that, Aggarwal noted, gave the impression that “nature is looking back at you.”

The booth included a weirder take on craft, too: An old-fashioned pedal sewing machine, positioned as if in the middle of stitching through reams of material made of smashed porcelain plates, sat at the front of the booth. This new sculpture by Subodh Gupta, entitled Stitching the code (II) (2022–3), was priced at €170,000 ($180,650).

—J.T-J.

Nonaka Hill

Frieze Masters, Booth S7

With works by Zenzaburo Kojima

In the Focus section of Frieze Masters (for galleries in business for 13 years or less), Los Angeles dealer Nonaka Hill presents a series of sumptuous works by Japanese painter Zenzaburo Kojima.

A major pre-war artist in Japan, Kojima is “in numerous museum collections in Japan and is well-known enough to have a national postage stamp,” explained the gallery’s founder Rodney Nonaka-Hill. The artist drew influence from painterly traditions of East and West in these still lives, nudes, and landscapes, brought to life with a spirited, expressive energy that remains heartfelt.

“I’ve always been attracted to pre-war Japanese art and feel like it is under-known outside of Japan,“ Nonaka-Hill added. “It challenges people’s ideas of what Japanese art looks like.”

Frieze Masters marks a European art fair debut for the gallery, which was founded in 2018 and focuses on Japanese art, and Kojima was a clear choice of subject. “One of the things that’s really special for us because we focus so much on Japan is that the artist is from a couple of generations before—some of the younger artists grew up with him. So it adds historic depth to our program,” noted Nonaka-Hill.

—A.K.

Peres Projects

Frieze London, Booth D15

With works by Cece Philips, Rafa Silvares, Austin Lee, Emily Ludwig Schaffer, Yaerim Ryu, Anton Munar, Jeremy, Bayrol Jiménez, Yves Scherer, Donna Huanca, Tan Mu, Harm Gerdes, Beth Letain, Manuel Solano, Dylan Solomon Kraus, and Sholto Blissett

London-based painter Cece Philips was the star of Peres Projects’s presentation at Frieze. In a narrow, closed-off area inside the booth hung several large oil paintings by the artist, focusing on nighttime scenes in a consistent color palette of complementary blues and yellows. Within this smaller cubicle, Philips’s strangely ambiguous scenes create an odd distance between their subjects and the viewer. Lucky Eyes (2023), for example, peers into a well-lit living room, where women, especially those of color, are socializing confidently; the viewer remains somewhat detached in the blue twilight of the street.

“Frieze London’s 20th anniversary is a perfect occasion to spotlight a Londoner like Cece Philips, whose work is intimately connected with the city and her personal experiences of it,” said a gallery spokesperson at the fair. “Over the past 12 months, we’ve hosted two solo exhibitions of her work, in our Berlin and Seoul galleries, and her paintings consistently attract considerable interest from very diverse audiences, wherever they are displayed.”

Elsewhere, a gigantic recent work by Bolivian American artist Donna Huanca, BLISS POOL #7 (2023), took over the entire exterior wall of Philips’s “mini-show,” as the rest of the booth showed a range of works (mostly paintings) by other artists from Peres Projects’s program. A painting of an exuberant orange flamingo martini glass, Cocktail #3 or Margarita (2023) by Mexican artist Manuel Solano, recalls an experience the artist had before they lost their eyesight, for example. Bayrol Jiménez’s expressive painting El Sueño Del Perro (2023) added to its loopy surreal abstraction with papier mâché feet, propping it up like a pedestal.

—J.T-J.

Pilar Corrias Gallery

Frieze London, Booth A23

With works by Sophie von Hellermann

Sophie von Hellermann’s showstopping solo booth with Pilar Corrias Gallery is a true star of the show. In a single morning before the fair opened, the German-born artist now based in Margate, England took to the walls of the booth, filling the sterile white surfaces with brushy swaths of purples, mauves, and blues. That backdrop, in addition to a rainbow-colored carpet designed by the artist, sets the scene for a series of nine new paintings inspired by Dreamland, the century-old amusement park in Margate.

These paintings, dotted with people riding ferris wheels, swings, and enjoying other charms of the seaside town, are a welcome salve, conveying the artist’s characteristic ethereal lightness. Even within the bustling fair, the gauzy paintings were easy to get swept into, evidenced by the crowd that populated the booth throughout opening day. Closer looking rewards the viewer, offering hints of von Hellermann’s art-historical inspirations, including J.M.W. Turner, another artist who was enchanted by Margate’s charms.

—C.L.

Public Gallery

Frieze London, booth H6

With works by Adam Farah-Saad

The exterior of Public Gallery’s booth transports the viewer to a Virgin Megastore circa 1998 with a CD player and headphones beckoning you to listen to a track or two from Madonna’s Ray of Light, Whitney Houston’s My Love Is Your Love, or Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope. This is one of a boothful of new works by the British artist Adam Farah-Saad that offer nostalgic meditations on specific sites across London, informed by the artist’s own experiences. Public Gallery was announced as the winner of the Frieze Focus Stand Prize on Thursday afternoon.

Inside the booth, another gem of a work is a circular metal drinking fountain spouting out electric-purple grape soda—a drink the artist remembers from childhood. “The booth as a whole is a congregation of ‘momentations,’ which is a reference to Mariah Carey who is an inspiration for a lot of Adam’s work,” said Public Gallery associate director Nicole Estilo Kaiser. “Adam is a psychogeographer, so he’s thinking about how certain emotions are tied to specific locations around London and how memory and desire and trauma all intermingle in objects and sites and spaces.

“His work is raw and unadulterated,” Estilo Kaiser added, “he foregoes gimmicks and extras, instead choosing to reveal parts of himself, his family, and his childhood to his audience. We’re hoping for people to take away from our booth a sort of tranquility, a sense of calm. It’s our first time at the fair and the artist’s first time at Frieze; for us, showing a London-based artist as a London gallery is really meaningful. And his work is about London, too, so to show it in such a highly-attended, international venue is really special.”

—C.L.

Shibunkaku

Frieze Masters, Booth A10

With works by Kumagai Morikazu, Fukuda Heihachirō, Okada Kenzō, Yamaguchi Takeo, Ikeda Yōson, Nakamura Masayoshi, Yvonne Thomas, Ogawa Machiko, and Munakata Shikō

Themes of color, refinement, and form are addressed in this striking booth from the Tokyo- and Kyoto-based gallery Shibunkaku, which is anchored by a vivid, floral painted screen by Munakata Shikō, a key figure in the early 20th-century Japanese mingei (folk art) movement.

“We presume that one of his patrons commissioned the screens for their house, and we’re so lucky to get this,” said Tokutaro Yamauchi, a manager at the gallery. It’s an eye-catching entrance to an interior booth where delicate painterly works of Morikazu Kumagai and Fukuda Heihachirō are on view. The two artists, who both passed away in the 1970s, are represented here with a selection of smaller canvases that represent humble and revelatory scenes of the everyday. Fukuda’s tender depictions of fish, fruit, and bamboo are paired to delightful effect with Morikazu’s animated works of kittens and landscapes.

The booth also considers the impact of the color field movement from the mid-century U.S., looking at how Japanese artists were simultaneously investigating the potentiality of color and bold shapes in a similar way. Works by Yamaguchi Takeo, Ikeda Yōson, and the American color field artist Yvonne Thomas are among the standouts.

—A.K.

The Sunday Painter

Frieze London, Booth B8

With works by Tyra Tingleff and Nicholas Pope

Duo presentations were few and far between at this year’s fair, which makes The Sunday Painter’s pairing of paintings by Tyra Tingleff and sculptures by Nicholas Pope all the more compelling. The artists’ practices and backgrounds are in stark contrast, and so too are their works, creating a compelling effect.

Tingleff, an Oslo- and Berlin-based artist, presents tall, lean canvases that swirl together pools of color and form. The organic shapes that emerge from raw canvas call to mind natural elements and forces, like geodes or weather patterns. Tingleff seems to relish the boundlessness of abstraction, and does well to convey emotion without words.

The celebrated British artist Nicholas Pope—who represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1980 and is a contemporary of Antony Gormley and Richard Deacon—offers a 32-part ceramic sculpture created specifically for Frieze. The work is a family portrait, with each piece representing a family member and their psychological nature. Made from black stoneware clay, these sculptural columns are less concerned with depicting the human form, and instead channel the energy and flaws of human existence, while considering how art can represent and stand in for a person.

—C.L.

Timothy Taylor

Frieze London, Booth A14

With works by Eddie Martinez

Much of the work on show in Timothy Taylor’s Frieze booth is not for sale. Upon entering, visitors find every inch of the available walls covered with scribbles on scraps of paper. This evidence of American painter Eddie Martinez’s process is collaged into a kind of makeshift wallpaper using drawing pins. With the telltale, jigsaw-puzzle edges of ring binder notebooks, many of these drawings are done in a single color. Others have a mix of shades, bright swishes of childlike blue, red, or green, showing the progression of thought in the artist’s mind from sketch to finished painting. The New York–based artist is known for his pushy, expressive brush strokes in these contrasting paintbox colors, bold and almost figurative at times or employing cartoon-esque motifs.