As the contemporary art world gears up for what is now known as ‘Frieze Week’, collectors are heading for London from all over the world for Frieze, the Mother of all art fairs. As well as Frieze London and Frieze Masters, there is the 1-54 art fair at Somerset House focussing on art from Africa and the diaspora, PAD London in Berkeley Square for design lovers, the relative newcomer Women in Art Fair on The Mall, The Other Art Fair, and many other smaller fairs.
Since it launched over two decades ago (in 2003), Frieze London has turned into something of an art fair juggernaut and spawned sister fairs in Los Angeles, New York and Seoul. The downside of its growth has been the increasing cost of entry, with a combined ticket to preview Frieze London and Frieze Masters costing a whopping £245, and a cool £56 for a ticket after the opening, making it increasingly elitist and inaccessible for many. Thankfully there are many commercial galleries around the city putting on museum-quality exhibitions with no entry fee. So here is my selection of 9 gallery shows to visit during Frieze Week or beyond if you don’t want to buy a ticket for Frieze!
1. Tracey Emin @ White Cube
Tracey Emin returns to the vast White Cube HQ in Bermondsey with ‘I Followed You to the End’, a powerful solo exhibition exploring love, loss and mortality. Enormous figurative paintings and smaller more delicate canvases depict lone and entwined nude figures with urgent, visceral applications of paint. A palette of dark red and black tones reflect Emin’s near-death experience of cancer, and her subsequent recovery, lending the new paintings an increased intensity and physicality. Emin takes over the entire labyrinth of work with a huge body of new paintings and a gigantic crouching nude sculpture, while a film dedicated to her stoma plays in a darkened room, examining the painful physical effects of her illness.
The exhibition’s titular painting is a lament to lost love, and several solo nudes with texts seem to be addressed to former lovers, with one in particular packing a punch with the words “You made me like this. All of you. You men that I so insanely loved so much. You are the ones that made me feel so alone…”
When I visited the gallery on a Saturday it was as busy as Tate Modern, testament to the popularity of one of the most famous women artists in the world, and the power of the images and words affected one woman so deeply that she was crying in the toilets. An unmissable ode to love, life and rebirth.
Tracey Emin ‘I Followed You to the End’ –10th November 2024 White Cube
2. Thaddaeus Ropac & Pace joint show
A two-part show by Robert Longo staged at Thaddaeus Ropac and Pace Gallery simultaneously, and an exhibition of new work by the Seoul-based artist Heemin Chung.
Robert Longo presents a two-part exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac and Pace, re-visiting his Combine formats for the first time since the 1980s in two monumental new five-panel works, presented alongside a selection of charcoal drawings and a video work. The original body of Combines (1981–89) developed out of Longo’s famed Men in the Cities series and his desire to produce works with multiple possible meanings. Longo draws on Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage and John Berger’s seminal 1972 text, Ways of Seeing, to challenge the way we consume and interpret images in the digital age. Composed of different mediums, each new Combine measures 7.5 metres in length with the five panels comprising a charcoal drawing, a video, a painting, a sculpture and a photograph, exploring the artist’s ‘idea of making a combine in every way to see an image.’
‘Searchers’ is on view at Thaddaeus Ropac from 8th October–20th November and Pace from 9th October-9th November 2024.
3. Jan Fabre @ Mucciaccia Gallery
Acclaimed Belgian artist Jan Fabre takes over Mucciaccia Gallery in Mayfair with ‘Songs of the Canaries: A Tribute to Emiel Fabre and Robert Stroud’. Curated by Dimitri Ozerkov, the exhibition presents a new body of finely carved Carrara marble sculptures.
One of Fabre’s most iconic figures is ‘The Man Who Measures The Clouds’ (1998), which was exhibited at La Biennale di Venezia, SMAK in Ghent, deSingel in Antwerp and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa. Central to the Mucciaccia Gallery exhibition is a reworking of the artwork titled ‘The Man Who Measures His Own Planet’ (2024).
Jan Fabre (b.1958, Antwerp) depicts birds in his artistic practice as metaphysical symbols acting as messengers between earth and sky, life and death. Fabre further investigates this theme with ‘Songs of the Canaries’ with a series of sculptures featuring canaries and parrots perched on human brains, harmonising the sounds of the sky with the echoes of human thoughts.
Jan Fabre ‘Songs of the Canaries: A Tribute to Emiel Fabre and Robert Stroud’ October 12th- November 23rd, 2024.Mucciaccia Gallery
4. Launch of Cadogan Gallery Flagship with Group Exhibition
Cadogan Gallery launches its new flagship space in Belgravia with Cadogan Gallery: A Group Exhibition featuring twenty-one artists. This exhibition aims to tell a story of the past, the present and the future.
Curated by Cadogan Gallery’s Managing Director Freddie Burness to highlight the gallery’s dedication to contemporary abstraction, ‘A Group Exhibition’ distils the aesthetic of the artists into something cohesive, with featured artworks ranging from minimalist mark-making and sculptures to abstract and surreal landscapes. Artists include Deborah Tarr, Terrell James, and Sam Lock, with works like Tarr’s Birches, blending organic elements and movement, and Maximilian Verhas’s bronze pieces, playing with light and shadow, producing dazzling reflections.
‘Cadogan Gallery: A Group Exhibition’ October 3rd, 2024, to February 8th, 2025 Cadogan Gallery
5. Lawrence Calcagno @ Amar gallery
The Amar Gallery programme is designed by its founder Amar Singh to provide a global platform for underrepresented artists, and the latest exhibition ‘Lawrence Calcagno: Redux’ features paintings & works on paper by LGBT+ artist Lawrence Calcagno. A transatlantic exhibition in collaboration with 203 Fine Art, USA exhibiting works in their Taos, New Mexico space and Amar Gallery exhibiting works in London.
In 1941 at the beginning of World War II Calcagno joined the United States Army Air Corps, where he served for three years. During his service he was recognised as an artist. The Amar Gallery exhibition aims to shine a spotlight on his art once again.
Calcagno was the student of Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still and his works are held in major museum collections worldwide including the Smithsonian, SF MoMA, and the Whitney Museum. Amar Gallery is exhibiting many of the works for the first time in London, and the exhibition marks the first time a significant collection of works by Calcagno has been exhibited in Europe and the US since the 1950’s. Calcagno supported artists of colour and helped American artist Jack Whitten (who is soon to have a show at MoMA) get an important artists’ grant.
‘Lawrence Calcagno: Redux’ -3rd November, 2024. Amar Gallery
6. ‘Freedom in Multitudes’ @ 1897 Gallery
1897 gallery is inaugurating a new nomadic exhibition programme with an exhibition called ‘Freedom in Multitudes, A cross-cultural dialogue on Black identity’. The exhibition features artists whose works redefine self-perception, and challenges monolithic representations of identity by showcasing the depth and richness of Black identity through explorations of heritage, materialism, fluidity, mythology, and form.
In a profound interrogation of identity, the African Diaspora, and the enduring legacies of colonialism, the exhibition brings together nine artists living across Japan, Nigeria, England, and the US whose works unveil the complex nuances of self-perception, transcending external expectations and societal limitations.
1897 Gallery was founded by Sosa Omorogbe to empower the expansion of an unexpected, manifold conversation on the legacy of colonialism and its impact on modern identity. Marking the first show of a series of exhibitions that will be presented in 2025, ‘Freedom in Multitudes’ transcends 1897 Gallery’s curatorial concept inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness, which he describes as “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”
‘Freedom in Multitudes’ from 5th-14th October, 2024 1897 Gallery, 32 Connaught Street, Connaught Village
7. CONGREGATION @ St Mary le Strand
A vast new installation titled ‘CONGREGATION’ by artist Es Devlin, curated by Ekow Eshun, is on display at St Mary le Strand. Created in partnership with UK for UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, and developed in collaboration with King’s College London and The Courtauld, the installation features chalk and charcoal portraits of 50 Londoners who have experienced forced displacement from their homelands and co-authored the work with Devlin. Examining themes of displacement and migration is even more poignant during an era when more and more people are being displaced through war and conflict.
The drawings are projection-mapped within the 18th century church of St Mary le Strand adjacent to The Courtauld and Somerset House. Devlin’s portraits were inspired by The Courtauld’s collection of 500 years of portraiture from Albrecht Dürer to Frank Auerbach, and Lucian Freud’s sketchbooks in the National Portrait Gallery archive. An accompanying sound sequence composed by Polyphonia features the voices of the sitters.
‘CONGREGATION’ 3rd–9th October 2024 St Mary le Strand
8. ‘Rediscovered Geniuses’ @ Red Eight Gallery
A curated selection of previously unseen paintings from the Estates of Spanish ‘Intra-realist’ Juan Antonio Guirado and Greek Abstract Expressionist Igor Gorsky takes over 2 floors of the Red Eight Gallery in London’s historic Royal Exchange. Rediscovered Geniuses: Juan Antonio Guirado and Igor Gorsky presents previously un-exhibited paintings from the Estates of Juan Antonio Guirado and Igor Gorsky. Juan Antonio Guirado was considered Spain’s leading master painter in the school of “Intrarealism”, and Igor Gorsky was a Greek Abstract Expressionist who moved to the USA and invented a unique pouring technique.
Guirado was one of the most represented Spanish contemporary artists in museums and international collections that included King Hussein of Jordan, J.D. Salinger, and John Schlesinger, and by globally renowned museums including the National Museum Reina Sofia and the National Museum of Fine Arts in Valletta. He also received multiple awards including the gold medal at the El Grollo awards at the Venice Biennale in 1976. ‘Rediscovered Geniuses’ features paintings from Guirado’s ‘VISIONS’ series, and this is the first exhibition of Guirado in the UK since the 1980s.
‘Rediscovered Geniuses: Juan Antonio Guirado and Igor Gorsky’ – 14th November, 2024. Red Eight Gallery
9. Su Yu-Xin @ Albion Jeune
Newcomer to the London gallery scene is Albion Jeune who are presenting ‘Precious’, the first UK solo exhibition of Los Angeles-based artist Su Yu-Xin. Albion Jeune is founded by 26-year-old Lucca Hue-Williams. Launched during Frieze Week in 2023 on Little Portland Street, the young Hue-Williams has rapidly gained attention as an innovative gallerist to watch.
Su Yu-Xin ‘Precious’ features dynamic paintings exploring the history of migration and the changing nature of pigments through a geological lens. Su Yu-Xin uses natural objects from the Californian coast such as sea caves and shells to examine how value is attributed to materials, blending traditional Chinese and Japanese painting techniques. Her work explores the politics of pigment and value, referencing trade, environmental loss, and human labour. Through materials like cowrie shells and oxidized copper, Su connects her diasporic identity with the histories of trade and exploitation.
Su Yu-Xin Precious 7th October – 17th November, Albion Jeune
