Small is a theme this year. Meike Brunkhorst has just reviewed Echo Soho — a beautifully formed, small art fair new to London — and I found myself drawn to some equally refined small artworks at Frieze London, *and one at Frieze Masters.
Kayode Ojo presented by Maureen Paley B16
Kayode Ojo stages sourced objects into sculptures that expose how things perform status and taste. His compositions mirror the spectacle of excess while embracing the fragility and impractical beauty of their parts. Mining fast-fashion sites and online marketplaces, he folds browsing and acquisition into his process. Captions quoting original product listings reveal the algorithmic language driving contemporary desire.
Curtis Tawlst Santiago presented by uffner & Liu C11
uffner & Liu present works from Curtis Talwst Santiago’s Infinity Series — miniature worlds encased in structures built to protect and carry precious objects across generations. Within these intimate, mobile environments, he stages layered scenes that merge personal memory with echoes of art history, pop culture, and politics. Drawing on storytelling traditions from African and Caribbean cultures, Santiago animates these histories with care and precision, reintroducing them into the flow of contemporary discourse.
Sarah Ball presented by Stephen Friedman Gallery B14
Stephen Friedman Gallery presents new portraits by Ball, including a series of exquisitely scaled works that draw the eye in close. Each portrait is meticulously rendered, tracing the nuances of gender, identity, and self-presentation with quiet intensity. Ball captures the subtleties of how we choose to appear in the world — the gestures, features, and surfaces through which inner life finds form. The presentation coincides with her major solo exhibition Oh! You Pretty Things at the Longlati Foundation in Shanghai.
Yutaka Nozawa presented by Kayokoyuki F18
Kayokoyuki presents Yutaka Nozawa’s Canvas Canvas Series — a body of paintings and photographs that circles around the motif of the canvas itself. Traditionally a surface for painting, here the canvas becomes both subject and support. In CANVAS canvas, Nozawa stages a quiet dialogue between mediums: painted still lifes of blank canvases are reimagined through photography, each image echoing the other. A white canvas — hung, leaned, or placed on the floor — appears first in paint, then again as a photographic record of its own representation. The spaces where these works are made become part of the composition, folding time and perspective into one another so that artist, viewer, and image seem to drift between dimensions.
Gray Wielebinski presented by Nicoletti F32
Spanning installation, video, sculpture, and collage, Wielebinski’s practice maps the intersections of political history, power, and gendered desire. Collage — both medium and method — anchors his approach, enabling a process of fragmentation and reassembly that exposes and subverts the dominant iconographies of American mythology and popular culture.
At Frieze, Wielebinski unveils a new series that deepens his exploration of the aestheticisation of violence. Evoking a fairground shooting booth, the installation centres on resin sculptures cast from real gun grips — objects that shimmer between allure and menace. They rest on a gaming table shaped like an infinity symbol, drawing a chilling parallel between the spectacle of American sports and the unending cycle of gun violence that haunts its schools and communities.
AND one from Frieze Masters
Robert Cautelas presented by Loeve&Co S21
And finally, the perfect artist to embody the power of the small artwork: Robert Coutelas, presented by Loeve&Co at Frieze Masters. Born in 1930 and passing in 1985 in Paris, Coutelas lived for years in near solitude at 226 rue de Vaugirard, surrounded by rats, pigeons, and his art. Largely self-taught, he fought to remain true to his vision — breaking contracts and rejecting the market’s attempts to shape him as a “new Utrillo.”
His work, both obsessive and poetic, unfolds in miniature: thousands of hand-painted tarot cards, delicate gouaches (Mes Ancêtres), and tiny sculptures in stone and terracotta. Spirals, towers, hair, and hybrid beings recur like fragments of a private mythology — tender, strange, and timeless. Thanks to Mariko Molia, Coutelas’s work has found posthumous recognition, from the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo to Loeve&Co in Paris and Musée Réattu in Arles. His rediscovery continues at Frieze Masters and soon at Fitzrovia Chapel, London.
Frieze London & Masters continue until Sunday 18th October 6PM
