30 Artists to Watch at Frieze London

Mira Dancy

B. 1979, Kent, U.K. LIVES AND WORKS IN NEW YORK, NEW YORK

AVAILABLE AT: NIGHT GALLERY

Up and Coming: In London, Paris, and New York, Mira Dancy’s Nudes Reclaim the Female Body

When Mira Dancy entered undergrad at Bard College in 1997, it wasn’t for painting. “I went there with the intention of studying writing and poetry, but the art teachers were totally electrifying,” she says, sitting in her high-ceilinged Gowanus cubicle amid black-and-white murals and colorful paintings of muscular female nudes, diving or in states of languorous repose. “Amy Sillman and Elizabeth Murray were two of my first painting teachers. Working with them versus the professors in the poetry department—who were mostly 80-year-old men? They just had this energy.” 

Dancy’s nudes will be concurrently on view in Paris (at Galerie Éric Hussenot), London (in a solo booth with Night Gallery at Frieze London), and MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York” next week. They have migrated from canvases and wall paintings to neon light works, projected images, and shower curtains in recent years, what she calls the “fugitive image.” “Right away it was about painting these women who were sort of people that I knew, sort of me, sort of people from my family—but the picture was always open and undetermined. Mostly I was interested in not knowing who they were.”

At “Greater New York,” a quinquennial survey of artwork being produced in the city, Dancy will show a mural, painting, and purple neon, alongside the photo collages and wall drawings of feminist artist Mary Beth Edelson. “She has this Amazonian strength to her,” Dancy says of the neon. “It’s a little bit more of a street scene, which is something I’ve been interested in with the neon pieces. They’re also about these images that you see while walking around, the infiltration of something like a billboard.”

Read full profile by Tess Thackara.

Charbel-joseph H. Boutros

B. 1981, BIKFAYA, LEBANON. LIVES AND WORKS IN PARIS AND BEIRUT
AVAILABLE AT: GREY NOISE

Conceptual art has rarely been created with a lighter touch than that of Boutros, nor a more haunting one. The artist’s three works on view at Frieze are no exception: two vials hold a single tear from each of the artist’s eyes; each page of a Lebanese day calendar is yellowed apace with its place in the year; the sun burns the phrase “the sun is my only ally” into a sheet of newsprint stolen from a Lebanese newspaper. 

Catharine Ahearn

B. 1985, JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA. LIVES AND WORKS IN LOS ANGELES, california
AVAILABLE AT: OFFICE BAROQUE

Sinks filled with soap paintings that slowly dissolve beneath running water and a tangled iron sculpture gripped by giant fists, à la Incredible Hulk, were among the highlights of Ahearn’s spring exhibition at Milan nonprofit Peep-Hole—her first solo exhibition at an institution. At Frieze, the sculptor will unveil more cast iron forms wrung by massive clenching hands at Office Baroque, with whom she’ll have a solo in 2016; offsite, she’ll mount a solo show at London gallery CHEWDAY’S.

Nicole Wermers

B. 1971, EMSDETTEN, GERMANY. LIVES AND WORKS IN LONDON, u.k.
AVAILABLE AT: TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY, HERALD ST

Wermers earned a Turner Prize nomination this year for her exhibition at London’s Herald St, in which a series of sleek Bauhaus chairs backed with regal fur coats invoked the consumerist trappings of wealth and status. Stitched irreparably into the furniture, the hirsute drapes also suggest something darker about the suffocating constraints of class. That undercurrent carries through her “Dishwashing Sculptures” (one of which is on view at Frieze), where piles of fine china and other table accoutrements jostle for space in dishwashing racks. 

Gery Georgieva

B. 1986, VARNA, BULGARIA. LIVES AND WORKS IN LONDON, U.K.
SHOWING AT: FRIEZE FILM

A student at London’s Royal Academy, Georgieva remains deeply influenced by her Bulgarian heritage, exploring themes of cultural belonging in the dynamic, shimmering videos that characterize her practice. Her work commissioned for Frieze Film points a lens at the culture surrounding Bulgaria’s bawdy and sexually charged nightclubs known for chalga, a style of music that combines traditional Eastern European sounds with contemporary dance rhythms.

Sara Barker

B. 1980, MANCHESTER, U.K. LIVES AND WORKS IN GLASGOW, U.K.
AVAILABLE AT: MARY MARY, The Approach

Brass, aluminum, and perspex converge to surprisingly delicate effect in Barker’s sculptures. Inspired by modernist literature from the likes of Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, and Gertrude Stein, Barker begins by making lively drawings, then translates the images into welded structures, which range from painterly wall-based compositions like Sea heaves in a glass (2015), on view at Frieze, to lithe public sculptures of grand proportions. 

Stano Filko

B. 1937, VELKA HRADNA, SLOVAK REPUBLIC. LIVES AND WORKS IN BRATISLAVA
AVAILABLE AT: GALERIE EMANUEL LAYR

Often overlooked, Filko was integral to the development of conceptual art, creating immersive installations, paintings, drawings, and large-scale environmental interventions that challenged the prevailing formal conceptions of objects. Filko’s personal cosmological system is spotlighted at Frieze through monochrome blue paintings and metal rockets representing the cosmos, and complemented by an audio work that mingles Filko’s own voice chanting the word “cosmos” with the ambient noise of his studio. 

Jennifer Packer

B. 1984, PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA. LIVES AND WORKS IN NEW YORK, New York
AVAILABLE AT: CORVI-MORA

Ranging from still lifes to portraits captured in the intimacy of the sitter’s home, Packer’s oil paintings present a subjective, fluid view of reality—one that exposes subjects to the viewer and yet retains a certain elusiveness. A solo show of Packer’s work runs concurrent to the fair at Corvi-Mora’s homebase in southeast London. 

Lucy Beech

B. 1985, Kingston upon hull, u.k. LIVES AND WORKS IN LONDON, u.k.
AVAILABLE AT: SOUTHARD REID

Beech appears at Frieze with longtime collaborator Edward Thomasson for a dance-based performance in the fair’s auditorium that considers the contradictions of “public intimacy.” Both artists also work individually, with Beech focusing her efforts on performance and film. Her collaborative performance at Frieze comes on the heels of a U.S. debut at James Fuentes LLC and her first major U.K. solo show, “Me and Mine,” at The Tetley this past summer, which presented her video work tracing (fictitious) female narratives.

Rachel Rose

B. 1986. LIVES AND WORKS IN NEW YORK, new york
AVAILABLE AT: FRIEZE PROJECTS

With a show currently open at London’s Serpentine, a special presentation at Frieze, and an upcoming solo show at the Whitney Museum as part of the institution’s new Emerging Artist Series, 2015 Frieze Artist Award-winner Rose is poised to storm the art world this fall. Rose’s glitchy, hypnotic videos and sound works burrow deep into the layered histories embedded in places, also exploring the visceral and psychological experiences of space. For Frieze, Rose has created a model of the fair structure from the perceptual standpoint of the animal life inhabiting Regent’s Park—her first foray into installation work.

Ryan Mosley

B. 1980, CHESTERFIELD, U.K. LIVES AND WORKS IN LONDON, U.K.
AVAILABLE AT: ALISON JACQUES GALLERY AND GALERIE EIGEN + ART

Though painting isn’t dead (despite the occasional declaration to the contrary), the carnivalesque figures in Mosley’s dynamic paintings look close to it. Mosley’s work at Frieze employs muted colors to depict reality as it might look if it were reflected in a macabrely humorous mirror. Equal parts eerie and witty (see the slender performer reaching towards a memento mori resting on another man’s hat), Mosley’s work captivates. 

Shana Moulton

B. 1976, OAKHURST, CALIFORNIA. LIVES AND WORKS IN OAKHURST, CALIFORNIA
AVAILABLE AT: GREGOR STAIGER

A massage table furnished with a portal to an Activia yogurt commercial—starring Shakira—is but one reason to seek out Moulton’s work at Frieze. The video and performance artist, who moved from New York to her native California this summer, will also show a collaboration with painter Lucy Stein—look for an exercise video filmed in front of a yacht store’s 8-monitor screens.

Samara Scott

B. 1985, LONDON, U.K. LIVES AND WORKS IN LONDON, U.K.
AVAILABLE AT: THE SUNDAY PAINTER

Sculptural wall-mounted works and experiential installations embedded with shells, scrunchies, and soft drinks, Scott’s works are like futuristic geodes dotted with 21st-century detritus. This year, her home gallery fills its booth with Lonely Planet, a mesmerizing, watery floor relief where iridescent areas of color and texture collide with everyday objects like noodles, tights, and insulation foam. 

Rancourt/Yatsuk

JUSTIN RANCOURT, B. 1983, DAYTONA, FLORIDA; CHUCK YATSUK, B. 1984, ORLANDO, FLORIDA. LIVE AND WORK IN BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
AVAILABLE AT: KATE WERBLE

This Florida duo’s early work blended grandiose corporate lingo with that of huckster infomercials to create irreverent videos about commodification. At Frieze, Rancourt/Yatsuk will be a part of the Live section, performing at least once a day for the fair’s duration. Under the guise of a promotional event, their piece, Villagio (2015), leads visitors through a tour of a fictional tropical resort, highlighting the sheen of paradise and revealing what’s hidden beneath.

Sol Calero

B. 1982, CARACAS, VENEZUELA. LIVES AND WORKS IN BERLIN
AVAILABLE AT: LAURA BARTLETT

Up and Coming: Sol Calero Turns Studio Voltaire into a Kitsch-ified Caribbean Classroom

On Friday, London’s Studio Voltaire debuts “La Escuela del Sur,” Berlin-based artist Sol Calero’s largest exhibition—and the most radical transformation of Studio Voltaire’s space—to date. Calero has spent the past five weeks turning the institution into an exaggeratedly kitsch-ified version of a Caribbean school where members of the local community and the art world will come to take classes on Latin American art history, among other activities that will develop over the next two months.

“La Escuela del Sur” is the first of Calero’s colorful installations to take a specifically educational bent. In the past, she’s decked out a Berlin salsa school with pastel-colored paintings of tropical fruit, palm trees, and dancing couples. She’s turned London gallery Laura Bartlett into a similarly exoticized hair salon, and the gallery’s 2014 booth at Frieze London into a verdant internet cafe. (She’ll have a set of school furniture from the same series presented at Voltaire at Bartlett’s Frieze booth next week.) And she’s created a Caribbean-style house in the parking lot of Basel-based project space, SALTS. She also runs Berlin project space Kinderhook & Caracas with her husband, fellow artist Christopher Kline. 

“I often start my projects by researching the spaces I have to work with, in order to create the social aspect of the installations,” the artists tells me while putting the finishing touches into her Studio Voltaire show. Pulling from the Sunday School past of the institution’s home (it used to be a Victorian chapel), Calero decided to create a school for the surrounding community, which is bisected by a balcony where viewers can watch the activities unfold.

Read full profile by Alexander Forbes.

James Hoff

B. 1975, FORT WAYNE, indiana. LIVES AND WORKS IN BROOKLYN, New york
AVAILABLE AT: CALLICOON FINE ARTS

Hoff’s abstract paintings are made by infecting monochrome images with source code from computer viruses like Skywiper and Stuxnet—both used by the U.S. for espionage in the Middle East—and then printing the result on aluminum. At Frieze, he’ll show the largest paintings yet from his “Skywiper” series, as well as a series of sound works, which are also the product of gone-rogue code. On October 14th, look for the artist behind the DJ booth at London’s Ace Hotel.

Maria Pinińska-Bereś

B. 1931, POZNAŃ, POLAND. D. 1999, KRAKOW, POLAND
AVAILABLE AT: DAWID RADZISZEWSKI

Polish artist Pinińska-Bereś spent the later part of her career assembling intimate, abstract sculptures that explore female psychology and sexuality. Employing a range of media, including rocks, textiles, sponges, cushions, and papier-mâché, Pinińska-Bereś presents an image of femininity that includes both gentle and rough characteristics, as well as a subtle eroticism. Also on view at Frieze is a series of drawings: simple studies of the female form, sketches for sculptures, and plans for performance works.

Nina Canell

B. 1979, VÄXJÖ, SWEDEN. LIVES AND WORKS IN BERLIN
AVAILABLE AT: BARBARA WIEN

Canell’s poetic sculptures made of cables—one of which now occupies an entire room of the Lyon Biennial—reflect on ideas of proximity in our globalized, always-connected world. At Frieze, Canell shows another work made of the same material, as well as two sun-bleached blinds (Those Million Tons of Light, 2014) and a floor sculpture created by sending 1,000,000 volts of electricity across a floor tile in one microsecond (Near Here (1 Microsecond), 2014).

Magali Reus

B. 1981, THE HAGUE, THE NETHERLANDS. LIVES AND WORKS IN LONDON, U.K.
AVAILABLE AT: THE APPROACH

Dutch artist Reus’s architectural sculptures—the latest body of which has been co-commissioned by and shown at the Hepworth Wakefield, SculptureCenter, Westfälischer Kunstverein, and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo—repurpose utilitarian materials (wire hangers, refrigerators, aluminum pots, steel rods, PVC-coated folding chairs, old food packaging) into structured works that reimagine the objects’ original forms and functions. 

f.marquespenteado

B. 1955, SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL. LIVES AND WORKS IN PORTO, PORTUGAL
AVAILABLE AT: MENDES WOOD DM

Going by a gender-neutral moniker, f.marquespenteado challenges normative notions of masculinity, often through installations of collage, paintings, and embroideries—including erotic textiles, which received a warm reception at Independent fair last March. At Frieze, f.marquespenteado shows vibrant geometries from his “Common Denominator” series (2012). Hand-stitched with painstaking care, the pieces are best served when hung salon-style, recalling family photographs on the wall of a home.

Mikhael Subotzky

B. 1981, CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA. LIVES AND WORKS IN JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA
AVAILABLE AT: GOODMAN GALLERY

Subotzky has had a busy year, headlined by his large-scale installation in the Venice Biennale’s “All the World’s Futures.” The South African artist’s poignant photographs revolve around post-apartheid daily life and social dynamics. At Frieze, he’ll present work from a recent series, “Sticky-Tape Transfer,” and an older, iconic image from his “Ponte City” project, which focused on the residents of a highrise that has become a nexus of crime and an example of urban decay in Johannesburg. 

Ed Fornieles

B. 1983, PETERSFIELD, U.K. LIVES AND WORKS IN LONDON, U.K.
AVAILABLE AT: CARLOS/ISHIKAWA

Featured in Frieze Focus, postnet artist Fornieles continues to mine digital culture as fodder for humorous, poignant works that explore identity in the internet age. Iterating on his alter-ego—a cartoon fox that has made appearances on his Instagram feed and in saleable photographs—the thirtysomething artist turns the anthropomorphized animal into cushions and benches to sit and drink tea on. 

Meriç Algün Ringborg

B. 1983, ISTANBUL, TURKEY. LIVES AND WORKS IN STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN

AVAILABLE AT: GALERIE NORDENHAKE

Ringborg is a traveler—it’s in her blood. Influenced by her grandfather, who worked on a freighter for nearly five decades, Ringborg often creates works that deal with the networks and supply chains of our globalized economy. Her pieces were featured this year in the main sections of both the Istanbul Biennial and the Venice Biennale. Visitors to the latter may recognize her contribution to Frieze: a lapis globe lined with the shipping routes that carry 90 percent of the world’s goods.

Josh Kolbo

B. 1984, PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA. LIVES AND WORKS IN BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
AVAILABLE AT: SOCIÉTÉ

Kolbo’s latest series of photographs, presented in a solo show last month at Berlin’s Société, are manipulated silver gelatin prints that consider the growing prevalence of simulated reality as it encroaches on the physical world. Kolbo examines the systemic failure of capitalist institutions and their relation to—and reliance on—the virtual realm. 

Michael Dean

B. 1977, NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE, U.K. LIVES AND WORKS IN LONDON, U.K.
AVAILABLE AT: SUPPORTICO LOPEZ, Herald St

Dean’s organic-looking sculptures are built up from clumps of concrete in a two-part process that imbues each piece with a unique story. He begins with a written text that guides the sculptures’ subject matter, then molds them performatively so that they function as a physical record of his physical process. These skeletal works can also be found at Supportico Lopez in Berlin, in a solo show through the end of the month. 

Ryoko Aoki

B. 1973, HYOGO, JAPAN. LIVES AND WORKS IN KYOTO, JAPAN
AVAILABLE AT: TAKE NINAGAWA

Aoki has helped to define the contemporary Japanese art of her generation, primarily through drawing—using imagery culled from children’s encyclopedias, bathroom tiles, manga cartoons, or botanical studies. Her paintings were a hit at Art Basel, and at Frieze, Take Ninagawa will present a reconstruction of an installation Aoki made for the National Museum of Art, Osaka in 2011. Look for hands, leaves, and fossils scrawled in ballpoint pen; patchwork collages; and dreamlike watercolors with titles like The Gate of Heaven.

Jesse Wine

B. 1983, CHESTER, u.k. LIVES AND WORKS IN LONDON, u.k.
AVAILABLE AT: LIMONCELLO, MARY MARY

Up and Coming: Ceramist Jesse Wine on Making Art Accessible

Elephant and Castle is one of South London’s most diverse districts. A bustling pocket of Latin American, West African, and Central Asian cultures, among many others, it is now the site of a long-awaited £3 billion regeneration project that makes recent protests in East London over gentrification seem marginal and obsolete.

County Street, a short walk from “the Elephant,” as it is known in the capital, is a quiet enclave within that melee, a thoroughfare of terraces and lockups, some of which are used as project spaces, workshops, and studios. A replica of Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth—Stephen Hall and LiLi Ren’s work for the street’s Cul De Sac Gallery—nestles at the road’s terminus. Skip next door to that gallery’s neighbor, and you’ll witness yet another iteration of the area’s varied makeup.

The workspace of up-and-coming ceramist Jesse Wine houses a towering, multi-faceted sculpture for Frieze London when I catch him a couple weeks ahead of the fair. In addition to this piece, earmarked for Frieze’s Sculpture Park, Wine is preparing a solo presentation for his London gallery Limoncello—part of Focus, a section dedicated to emerging galleries—and will also have work on view with Glasgow representativeMary Mary. Engaging and gregarious, Wine enthusiastically elaborates on the Sculpture Park project’s genesis: a reimagining of habitual collections of dried fruit from his father’s kitchen sideboard.

Read full profile by Rob Sharp.

Alexandra Kehayoglou

B. 1981, BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA. LIVES AND WORKS IN BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA
AVAILABLE AT: THE BREEDER

A descendant of some of Argentina’s earliest rugmakers, Kehayoglou draws on this heritage (her work at Frieze uses material from her family’s factory) to create lush woven landscapes that are at once ancient and contemporary. Never afraid to apply her elaborate process to a breathtaking scale, Kehayoglou transformed the Dries Van Noten catwalk into a mossy dreamscape during Paris Fashion Week.

Jean-Marie Appriou

B. 1986, BREST, FRANCE. LIVES AND WORKS IN PARIS, FRANCE
AVAILABLE AT: JAN KAPS

Appriou casts melting, mystical forms in bronze (and molds them in ceramic) to produce figures, tables, and wall-mounted reliefs. The sculptor’s imagery hints at the unseen natural world, capturing in metal cycles of growth and decay, accented by imaginary creatures—from winged, alien figures to miniature iron wolves walking on two legs to pastel-colored dinosaurs. Along with a recent solo show at Jan Kaps in Cologne, Appriou was the subject of a solo exhibition at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo last fall. 

Prem Sahib

B. 1982, LONDON, U.K. LIVES AND WORKS IN LONDON, U.K.
AVAILABLE AT: GALLERIA LORCAN O’NEILL