It’s that time of the year where Regent’s Park is flooded with peacocks, as the most lavish, flamboyantly dressed join under one roof to partake in Frieze, London’s most prestigious art fair. The 14th edition unites the art world in one space, as people from all over the world flock to observe the world’s most exciting artists, from the emerging to the iconic. Featuring over 1,000 artists, Frieze seeks to inspire and challenge one’s taste, but to help you navigate your palette, we’ve simplified and picked our top five artworks.
Augustas Serapinas
Re-imagining and re-staging socially engaged spaces, is what sets the scene of Lithuanian artist Augustas Serapinas live performance, Jõusaal (gym). Intrigued by the deserted artworks left behind by previous students of the Academy of Arts in Tallinn, Serapinas revitalises and applies a new function to sculpture pieces, creating a gym space within the Academy. His gym joins us here at Frieze Live, where it is once again brought back to life by the Emalin Gallery.
Samara Golden
Canada Gallery brings us face-to-face with Samara Golden’s Missing Pieces From A Fall of Corners #4, a meticulously crafted installation that seems to have fallen out of a Surrealist painting. The L.A.-based artist immerses us within another dimension, destroying our concept of gravity and what is physically possible as furniture, everyday objects and food hang suspended from the wall. These three formally set tables of breakfast, lunch and dinner, invite the audience to examine the hyperrealistic, yet artificially crafted foam sculptures, turning a familiar home space on its head.
Hans Op de Beeck
Upon entering Marianne Boesky, one is greeted with chalky, white-coated walls, a distinctive feature of Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck. The immersive installation, The Silent Library, captures the abstraction of time and space, transporting the audience to a serene monochromatic non-existent space, where a white coated library, along with plants, figures, paintings and animals, create a parallel reality.
Pierre Joseph
Pierre Joseph’s Characters to be Reactivated series was featured as part of the special section The Nineties, an exhibition dedicated to artists of that decade that confronted politics and social issues through their work. The performance piece took over Air de Paris Gallery, where live persons take part of a narrative scenario embodying the identity of past fictional characters. The performance is nostalgic, as we are reminded of these former, mythical heroes and heroines, who died a “pitiful" death in light of passing time and media corruption.
Hauser & Wirth
Hauser & Wirth return once again to Frieze London with a humorous presentation of the artists studio, L’atelier d’artistes. The gallery space is a cliché of the idyllic, romanticised atelier, disguising a plethora of works that all share similar aesthetics as the work of one artist. Upon close inspection of the fantasy studio works, our perception of surface aesthetics is questioned, as we begin to see individual marks of their individual proprietor, whether that be Rodney Graham, Hans Arp or Martin Creed.
