Tents are returning to Regent’s Park, champagne is on ice: Frieze Week is gearing up to take the pulse of London – although no one seems quite sure what a healthy beat will sound like. The 23rd Frieze London art fair will open next Wednesday with a VIP preview featuring 168 galleries from 43 countries. The art world is as dynamic as ever and is flying in, building up and pretending everything is fine. Maybe yes.
Over the years, Frieze London has been less revealing than calibrating—gauging the degree to which taste, capital, and attention converge in a given season. The art market’s meager momentum since June’s Art Basel has largely dissipated, replaced by the low-level anxiety that was evident at last month’s Armory Show and Frieze Seoul. Still, the London fairs are where autumn really starts – with Art Basel in Paris opening just a week later, so it’s best to get a full diagnosis before the end of October.
When collectors enter the fair on Wednesday, they will be greeted by Portas Vilaseca in Rio de Janeiro, The Pit in Los Angeles and a soft opening in London—three galleries that capture Frieze’s current mood: a little international, a little local and a little serious.
Meanwhile, the big galleries are taking control, favoring individual booths that showcase depth rather than variety—or at least that’s what it seems. Modern Art presents 15 Neolithic sculptures by Sanya Kantarovsky, each in a palette that seems stolen from a fever dream. Lehmann Maupin will present Do-ho Suh’s translucent architectural installations, and Pace will present Willem Munch’s painterly incantations. Stephen Friedman Gallery presents Sarah Ball’s uncanny portraits, faces rendered with such precision that they feel fictional.
Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Xu Daohao, Bathroom, 348 West 22nd Street, Apartment A, New York, NY 10011 (2003) © Do Ho Suh. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul and London.
London-based consultant Arianne Piper says art news Early previews of the show suggest it will be a “conservative year.” She said many dealers come in with established works by established names rather than betting on young artists. “It’s not as shiny as it used to be,” she added half-apologetically. Piper suspects this caution is strategic—a way to avoid the “death stories” that have plagued art market coverage all year. (One might note that London experienced more severe plagues.)
George Rouy, a rising star on London’s contemporary art scene, is gaining attention at Hauser & Wirth, where he is joined by Christina Kimeze, Anj Smith and Allison Katz (who donates a portion of her sales to the Gallery Climate Alliance). The gallery will also show works by Henry Taylor, Avery Singer, Takesada Matsutani and Lee Bul, a typically confident line-up amid reports that profits at the gallery have plummeted in the UK. But don’t be surprised if Hauser has something else up his sleeve: Last year at Art Basel in Paris, the gallery hung $33 million worth of Malevich works on its walls without any warning.
Lauren Halsey will make Gagosian’s booth a part of Los Angeles, complete with sculptural “square signs,” vivid collage wallpaper and prominent carvings that reimagine community monuments as monuments to the community itself. “She will bring South Central Los Angeles to Frieze London,” said director Antwaun Sargent art news. The statement is both mission and flexibility.
Three White Cube artists—Margaret Hummer, Howardina Pindel, and Sara Flores—culminate this grand exhibition, which focuses on the natural world and how artists interpret it. Hume’s speculative sculptures are combined with Pindel’s luminous abstractions and Flores’ bark-cloth paintings from the Peruvian Amazon.
Many of the talks above echo the current institutional fair taking place in London. Lehmann Maupin’s Do Ho Suh stand, for example, coincides with Tate Modern’s ongoing survey of the artist’s work, while White Cube’s stand is dedicated to women, recalling Tate Modern’s efforts to write female artists into the canon. “
These responses may be cautious. New York consultant Wendy Cromwell says art news She was as interested in “what was going on around the city” as what was going on at the fair.
Her highlights include Christopher Wool’s exhibition at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill. The exhibition, which opens on Monday, is billed as his largest in the UK in two decades. Nicolas Party exhibition at Hauser & Wirth is about to open Cloteau A grand Kerry James Marshall exhibition went on display at the Royal Academy on Tuesday and is scheduled to run throughout January. The collector told Cromwell that all three were not to be missed. She also singled out East London’s Emalin Gallery – currently showing a solo show by Tolia Astakhishvili (The Wound on My Plate, opening October 3) – as “small, sharp and really has its finger on the pulse”.
“There’s a really dense concentration of quality galleries here,” Cromwell added.
Curry Manzutto, Ana Segovia, Me duelen los ojos de mirar sin verte: close-up 11 (2025)
Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York.
Back at Frieze, the show is divided into three sections, bringing together fresh voices. “Echoes in the Present,” curated by Jareh Das, explores how artists draw sounds, materials, and memories from the past to make them resonate in the present. A few aisles away is the return of the Artist to Artist program—supported this year by Tiffany & Co.—in which established artists nominate emerging artists. These pairings are often as important to the nominee as they are to the nominee. Abraham Cruzvillegas selected Ana Segovia, who reimagines medieval Spanish and Mexican cinema through an irreverent queer lens; Amy Sherald selected René Trevino, who stitches together fabric sculptures and paintings. The result could be refreshing: a series of private passions made public.
Finally, focus on the focal section of the under-12 gallery, keeping its position close to the center of the floor, and it still feels like the part of Frieze where discovery really happens. Christelle Oyiri’s installation at Gathering delves into the afterlife of colonial pesticides; Gray Wielebinski’s work at Nicoletti transforms American violence into design; and Liu Xin’s dynamic duckweed aquarium installation creates its own small ecosystem, both tranquil and slightly threatening.
Perhaps these segments are the biggest leaders in the market. As Piper explains, everyone in the market right now seems to want relief. “Collectors are very picky. They want to be confident in what they’re buying and not bet on something that’s untested,” she said.
Well, the Frieze Masters might get the biggest boost. Under the leadership of new director Emanuela Tarizzo, the fair brings together 137 galleries from 27 countries to present a familiar array of rediscovered works and classics: Rubens panels, Ptolemaic reliefs, Pious manuscripts and restless modernist anomalies.
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts director Valerie Cassel Oliver’s “Spotlight” gives dated attention to figures from the 1950s to 1970s such as Nevera Ahmed, Iria Leino and Mona Saud, while Sheena Wagstaff and Margrethe Troensegaard The studio section brings contemporary artists into dialogue with historical materials. It includes new and earlier works displayed alongside studio ephemera, tracing how the past lingers in the tools and habits of making. This section promises a quieter kind of spectacle: processed rather than polished, featuring artists such as RH Quaytman, Glenn Brown and Dorothy Cross.
Abby Bangser’s new section, “Reflections,” brings decorative arts into the mix: Roman busts, Mexican tapestries, ceramics from Kettle’s Yard. This reminds us that even connoisseurship has trends.
