The Frieze fair is the world’s most influential art fair and focuses only on contemporary art and artists who are alive. It takes place every October in Regent’s Park, in the heart of London. London’s galleries and institutions have covered every possible stop in creating a roster of interesting shows and exhibitions this year.
Tai Sahni at Gathering
Gathering, a newcomer to the London art scene, has launched a thrilling, complex, cosmic show “Your Arms Outstretched Above Your Head, Coding with the Angels” by Tai Shani. Tai Shani is a winner of the 2019 Turner Prize. With her choice of film, watercolors, and a trippy sculpture installation, the British artist weaves a fantastical immersive narrative around ergot, a hallucinogenic and potentially fatal fungus found in crops such as rye and wheat.
Shani invites the visitor to a psychedelic feminist odyssey. She combines myriad historical, religious, ideological, and mythological references in her canvasses, from a folkloric tale of a flying witch who stole uninfected bread to distribute it to the poor to incidents of mass poisoning and hallucination from eating ergot-infested rye bread to midwives’ use of the fungus in childbirth.
At Gathering, the vision portrayed is an alternative; where the world is liberated from the capitalist patriarchy, where angels, crones, and magic are celebrated and believed in.
Emmanuel Van der Auwera at Edel Assanti
Emmanuel Van der Auwera’s new show, “Fire and Forget,” presents a reality check on our highly surveilled existence in the age of fake news and internet conspiracies. He does so through an immersive video installation, a film, and light-responsive photographic plates.
The brilliant centerpiece is VideoSculpture XX (The World’s 6th Sense). The World’s 6th Sense is a disorienting forest of tripods bearing polarizing filters. If one were to peer through the filter, the six white wall-mounted LCD screens stripped of their polarizing layers, and suddenly photographic images loom out of the blankness showing close-ups and panoramic shots of citizens in Las Vegas, captured by a military thermal imaging camera.
It makes for unsettling viewing, prompting questions about who is watching us, where, and how often. He drives home this message with a though-evoking video that asks us to understand what is happening around the globe, and realize that actions are not always as easy to understand, as something as black or white.
Caroline Coon and Anne Rothenstein at Stephen Friedman
The duo of these British women painters in their 70s makes for a thrilling pairing. Caroline Coon and Anne Rothenstein have evolved their distinctive styles of figuration, both having found exposure relatively late in life.
Coon, known for her muscular androgynous figures, presents a liberated vision of gender and racial diversity in her work. In a couple of arresting paintings that have the cool, stylized feel of German Expressionism, Coon imagines what all these city dwellers would look like without clothes.
Rothenstein, by contrast, evokes meditative psychological landscapes and domestic interiors. Sparse in detail, her dreamlike, washed-out scenes draw the viewer in with their mysterious hints of narrative.
Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe at Cecilia Brunson Projects
The Yanomami artist Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe has a busy schedule up ahead. His works have been selected to present at the Fondation Cartier and in Cecilia Alemani’s main show at the Venice Biennale main show.
The artist, who was born in Sheroana, a community on the Upper Orinoco River in the Venezuelan Amazon, makes prints, drawings, and paintings that draw on his surroundings and beliefs, and look unlike anything else on display in London right now. Some of the works are clear depictions of the threatened flora of the Amazon, while others offer a partial glimpse into Hakihiiwe’s world, which we cannot ever fully comprehend. But, that is no excuse for not understanding his delicate expressions.
For example, this work which is thick black arching lines striped with a white cross at the center; refers to branches grown with an iridescent fungus, which Hakihiiwe’s tribe uses to see at night. In the context of the climate emergency and the ongoing devastation of the Amazon rainforest by loggers, ranchers, and miners, Hakihiiwe’s creations offer a vital reminder of the wonders of this extraordinary resource.
Sam Gilliam at Pace
This exhibition marks Sam Gilliam’s first solo show in the U.K. It comprises monumental encrusted paintings with beveled edges and watercolor works on Japanese washi paper. The latter works were completed in the last two years before the artist’s death this past June.
Although perhaps best known for his pioneering draped canvases, Gilliam never abandoned wall paintings. The majestic textured canvases exhibited here incorporate sawdust, sand, and fabric, and resemble turbulent landscapes or cosmoses in upheaval.
Gilliam was a determined abstractionist, the artist nonetheless rooted his paintings in everyday life, drawing inspiration from music, poetry, and politics.
Soheila Sokhanvari at Barbican Curve
U.K.-based artist Soheila Sokhanvari celebrates a host of feminist icons from pre-revolution Iran in a series of miniature portraits.
Executed in egg tempera on calf vellum, each is set against a painted backdrop of interlocking geometric patterns. These women actors, singers, dancers, directors, and writers blazed a trail and enjoyed success in their fields, only to be shut down by the conservative Islamic theocracy after 1979 and forced to renounce their careers or face prison.
Many died in penury and several were interned in psychiatric institutions or went into exile in the West. Their stories are tragic ones of repression and fear of female power, and they’re narratives that are being repeated today on a vast and brutal scale, making this exhibition sadly timely.
When visiting the fair, it is worth spending time with Sokhanvari’s bewitching portraits and reading the individual biographies of these remarkable heroes, who defied the established status quo of their families to pursue their dreams.
Somaya Critchlow at Maximilian William
Somaya Critchlow is a rising star, known for her sensuous explorations of the Black female figure.
The artist received her post-graduate degree from London’s Royal Drawing School in 2017, and has already been included in group shows at the British Museum, Hayward Gallery, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas.
This sultry solo show, titled “Afternoon’s Darkness,” presents paintings and drawings inspired by high and low cultural sources ranging from Goya’s “Disasters of War” etchings to Jean Genet’s play The Maids to David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet.
Critchlow plays with Western conventions for female portraiture with subjects in ways that are times uncomfortable.
Afternoon’s Darkness (Agnes), 2022, for example, is a young subject whose gaze is so captivating that you almost miss the sliver of a leg with a black high heel peeking out provocatively from her long gown.
Natasha Tontey at Auto Italia
Auto Italia, celebrating its 15th anniversary this year, was started by a community of artists in a squatted garage in Peckham, South London. The aim was to champion under-represented practices.
Its latest commission is a moving-image work by the Indonesian artist Natasha Tontey called Garden Amidst the Flame, which draws on her research into the ancient knowledge systems and cosmology of the Indigenous
Minahasa people live in the North Sulawesi province of Indonesia. The film opens with the feisty young protagonist Virsay shaving off her eyebrows, which she is told may give her powers to see ghosts. Consequently, Virsay is transported between beguiling fantasy realms where schoolgirls appropriate traditional male-only war dances, a smoking coelacanth spirit on a motorbike imparts ancestral wisdom, and Virsay receives the Minahasan armor of invincibility.
What we witness is a continuous tussle between old and new, Western and Indigenous cultures for the Minahasa.
Virsay’s bedroom may be plastered with Spice Girls posters, but she and her gang also at one point ride a pick-up truck to an ancient burial ground deep in the jungle to take part in a ritual. The cosmic being there in the form of the coelacanth asks: “How am I to tell you a story if you don’t have a history?”
This year’s Frieze fair is a nexus of art styles and artists hailing from different backgrounds that make the fair all the more diverse and worth spending your time in. You might get to learn something new, and that is always worth it!