Having gone through the initial stage of my chemo cycle I was able to make a quick visit to Frieze London towards the end of the fair. I was pleased to find that the ten choices I had made online were all even better in real life! One of the factors you do miss on a screen, though, is materiality. And I was struck by several inventive works demonstrating how there seems no end to artists using materials in unusual ways…
Alicja Kwade: From light to dark in 3 months I (91 days/2184 hours), 2025, at i8 Gallery, Reykjavik
Alicja Kwade has an ongoing series of works made with brass clock hands: she’s told me that they are ‘about the idea of order and how time is a system – but as Einstein said, the only test you can make of the system is that the clock is moving when you look at it!’ Here the number of clock hands match the number of hours in the period covered, forming a pattern suggesting light or sound waves as well as a clock. In what was a new move to me, an extra dimension of time is built in by controlling the variable degree of tarnish affecting the brass.
Sam Moyer: Fern Oblivion, 2025 at Sean Kelly, New York
Industrial mining meets natural form in Sam Moyer’s Clippings series. For the substantial stone paintings – this is 2.5m wide – she arranges marble and granite fragments into compositions that echo the silhouettes of plants. That transforms heavyweight matter into delicate, botanical gestures, bringing fleeting and geological timescales together and suggesting some sort of alternate fossilisation.
T. Venkanna: She Know’s the Right Way to Use It, 2023, at Gallery Maskara, Mumbai
First, the materials: this is 2m high, but Venkanna restricts himself to black, blue and yellow inks on rice paper on canvas. He was nominated by Bharti Kher in the welcome ‘Artist to Artist’ section. As for the scene, the gallery provides a full description: ‘A woman squats, centred and grounded. She holds a sword, a historical symbol of violence and conquest, now transformed into an object of domesticity and pleasure. With biting irony and sensual assertion, T. Venkanna reimagines the sword not as a weapon of aggression but as an object of domesticity and pleasure. The aubergine, a stand-in for the phallus, is not destroyed but handled, redirected, controlled. The other suggests an act of self-satisfaction. This figure is neither a femme fatale nor a passive muse; she is an autonomous subject attending to her desires… In this work, sex becomes a language for critiquing patriarchy, power, and historical violence… not a provocation but a portrait of self-possession and embodied resistance.’
Laure Prouvost: Hive seen you, 2025, at Lisson Gallery, London / New York
Also a candidate for ‘pun of the fair’ is Laure Prouvost’s suspended Murano glass bulb-lit breast encircled by a swarm of bees. In the gallery’s words: ‘Breasts are a recurring motif in Prouvost’s practice, often appearing detached from their usual context in ways that are playful, absurd, and sensual. They serve as reflections on embodiment, motherhood and the female form as well as representing a nod to Surrealism. The bees, meanwhile, evoke notions of interconnection and interdependence between humanity and the natural world in the age of climate change and mass migration.’ That said, I’d be a little worried, were I the breast – even if my nipple-eye has spotted the bees.
Gray Wielebinski: Gungrip #4, 2025, at N?COLETT?, London
London-based Texan Gray Wielebinski alludes to a fairground shooting booth by casting seductively threatening resin sculptures from gun grips. Would this, with its added pencils, ballpoint pen and pompom, suit a school desk? They were displayed, explained the gallery, ‘on a gaming table whose shape evokes the infinity sign (or the number 8), suggesting a haunting parallel between American sports culture and the seemingly endless recurrence of high school shootings’.
Michelle Uckotter: Guitarist, 2025 at King’s Leap, New York
Hauser & Wirth’s London space currently has Nicholas Party’s painting-styled pastels, which he relished applying directly by hand to maximise the intensity of maximum pigment. Very different from Michelle Uckotter, who’s approach includes mixing pastel with linseed oil and manipulating it with Q tips to make grungier use of the medium. Her kookily filmic scenes seek, she says, to achieve ‘a detachment from identity’. The American artist showed at both Matthew Brown and in the Focus Section, where King’s Leap’s prize-winning booth was peculiarly shallow. That was because two performers were hidden in the back – you could observe them through mirrors, re-enacting possible scenes from Uckotter paintings…
Sandra Poulson: Dust as an Accidental Gift, 2023 at ChertLüdde, Berlin
This is from an installation in which the Angolan artist reconstructs the entrance of Luanda’s Kikolo Market, one of the city’s busiest commercial hubs – and a very dusty one. The dust defines social boundaries, as the poor cannot afford to keep fully clean, but it does benefit them indirectly through the employment provided by ridding the better-off of their dust. Here discarded cardboard and cornstarch are used to evoke the improvised flows of daily life and the dust’s pervasive presence.
SUPERFLEX: Headquarters, 2025, at Albarrán Bourdais, Madrid / Menorca
Actually these are not sponges but ceramics mounted on steel, brass and concrete from the ever-inventive Danish collective SUPERFLEX. But the idea is that they are underwater buildings in the form of sponges, acting as corporate headquarters using a new kind of architecture in which, rather than resisting the elements, the many conjoined chambers of the sponge rooms allow the water in alongside, presumably, some sophisticated system to render them habitable. Perhaps there’s a lift up the steel rod…
