The art fair has had an airy redesign. You now have to walk to the farthest tent to reach the grandest galleries. This forces wealthy punters to traverse Frieze London spreading love (and ideally money) as they go. For regulars, the effect is much like when a supermarket moves its stock around, and you can’t find the rigatoni but emerge 45 minutes later with two jars of grilled artichokes and some crumpets. I’d love to think someone will enter Frieze this week intending to buy a Georg Baselitz but get lost and instead impulse purchase an irresistibly camp history painting by Umar Rashid.
This year’s fair feels comparatively soothing, dominated by appealing paintings and smallish sculptures. A crucible of the fearless avant garde it is not. We live in worrying times and the art market is not immune. Most galleries are hedging their bets, showing works they feel confident they can shift. Ergo – fewer solo presentations and less experimentation. Still, there’s ample material for avid window-shoppers.
If Frieze is the highlight of your year, upstart art magazine Plaster has the merch for you: keep an eye out for fellow enthusiasts wearing its “MILF (man I love Frieze)” T-shirts as you make your way around my highlights …
Mythic magic from Peru
One of the most powerful displays in this year’s Venice Biennale paired the paintings of father and son Rember and Santiago Yahuarcani, artists from Peru whose work draws on the worldview of the Huitoto people. Intensely populated with mythic lifeforms, richly coloured and compositionally dynamic, it is exciting to see some of Rember Yahuarcani’s paintings on show in London. Find them at the Josh Lilley booth.
A touch of the Turner
Hollybush Gardens gallery has two artists on the Turner prize shortlist this year. As a result, its booth resembles a local branch of Tate Britain. Top of my “would steal if I could get away with it” list is a warm and intimate portrait of a young man by Claudette Johnson – Study in Yellow Ochre (2024). And just to remind you that this is not the first time Hollybush Gardens has dominated the Turner shortlist, it’s also showing new paintings by 2017 winner Lubaina Himid.
Self-driving cars need therapists, too
The annual Frieze Artist award is a special commission. Lawrence Lek, this year’s winner, has made a playable “gaming environment” that follows the melancholy Guanyin, a futuristic carebot designed to perform as a therapist for self-driving cars. Lek imagines a world of appealing mechanical melancholy, in which AI creations have become as plagued with anxieties and self-doubt as the flawed humans who designed them.
The sexy go-go sauna
A latex-sculpting merchant of dark fantasies, Jenkin van Zyl has obligingly shrunk his world-building maximalism down to the dimensions of an art fair booth with a film screened inside a customised wooden sauna at the Edel Assanti stand. Here, he conjures up a claustrophobic nightmare in which sexy go-go dancing monsters guzzle one another’s pink sweat, harvested – you guessed it – from the occupants of a sauna.
Disquieting dreamlike drawings
In the fair’s Artist-to-Artist section, six grandees have been invited to nominate six less familiar names for a solo display. Zineb Sedira has chosen the Algerian-born Massinissa Selmani, nominated for France’s Marcel Duchamp prize in 2023 for his dreamlike drawings and animations. Crisp and restrained, they are assembled from precise and sparing details – ladders, huts, walls strung with barbed wire – at once gently surreal and subtly disquieting.
Climb inside Camille Claudel’s soul
Slow, thoughtful and profoundly emotional, the work of painter Celia Paul is not standard art fair fodder (I don’t think I’ve ever seen her work shown at Frieze before). Among her shimmering seascapes on display at Victoria Miro is an intense and haunted portrait of Camille Claudel. Working from a familiar photograph of the French sculptor, Paul seems to have climbed into Claudel’s soul to create a painting that feels as heartbreakingly charged as a self-portrait.
Meet Lilith, the first feminist
Three cheers for painter Rose Wylie, who turns 90 on 14 October. For her birthday present, her gallery David Zwirner has dedicated one end of its (mega) booth to her new (mega) paintings. Among them, Lilith and Gucci Boy (2024), which pairs an ancient statuette from the British Museum with a well-dressed young man in a low-cut T-shirt. “Lilith, eighteen hundred BC / The First Feminist,” reads Wylie’s celebratory text across the middle of the painting.
Watched over by a rabbit-eared spirit
Lisson Gallery’s elegantly designed solo booth for the Japanese-Swiss artist Leiko Ikemura is watched over by her rabbit-eared Usagi spirit. Infused with gentle colour, Ikemura’s washy landscapes have the restrained harmony of Japanese ink paintings, conjuring a misty story-book realm that offers a welcome escape from the relentless jostling.
Dogs doused in motor oil
The fair’s themed section Smoke pulls together work inspired by diverse ceramic traditions. Creeping the hell out of the place, in the best possible way, Karla Ekaterine Canseco’s sculptures are toothy and bony, their skins black and shiny as petroleum. Many carry the heads of xoloitzcuintli dogs, beloved of the Aztecs. Canseco has strung them with little dangling emblems and doused some in motor oil, blending appeals to supernatural forces with environmental concerns.
Is this where making art ends?
Painter Caroline Walker is interested in undervalued labour, in particular acts of caregiving performed by women. Paired with magnificently lush and sinister flower paintings by Clare Woods, Walker presents scenes of nursery teachers at work. These portraits, on display at Stephen Friedman, show the women who look after children so that other women (Walker among them) can work. They are also an art origin story. These paintings teem with the ephemera of creativity – tubs of paints, a mini easel, artworks pegged to a line. Early years education is where many children first encounter artmaking. It may soon also be where artmaking ends, as creative subjects are progressively marginalised within schools.
Your guide to stranded bikes
Danielle Dean pays measured homage to Hemel Hempstead, her Hertfordshire hometown, with watercolours capturing its particular blend of medieval and mid-20th-century architecture. Dean, who can be seen at 47 Canal, has opted to show most of the paintings enrobed in plastic envelopes stacked in racks you can flip through as if in a high street gallery. Dangling white tags offer local information. The cheekiest detail is a cardboard box on the floor containing smaller paintings of “Bikes found stranded in different parts of Hemel Hempstead”. Sadly, the bargain basement vibe does not extend to the pricing.
You can’t beat 125 bouncing helium penguins
In what is destined to be the most photographed work at this year’s fair, Danish artist Benedikte Bjerre has placed a flock of 125 bouncing helium penguins on the floor of Palace Enterprise’s booth. Sensitive to airflow, they move as people pass. The busier this section gets, the more agitated these poster birds for global heating will become.