The layout of Frieze London has been shaken up this year, and the fair feels fresh. As ever, though, it’s a struggle for attention when there is so much to be seen. So, first, you have to be drawn to a work. When you go on to explore it, is there an interesting story involved? In these ten cases, I believe there is…
Manuel Solano: ‘If You Need My Attention 1’, 2024, at Peres Projects – Berlin / Seoul / Milan.
This 1.45 m acrylic grabs attention from a distance. Up close, you can read that the badge says ‘I’m blind – touch my hand if you need my attention’, and that there are pinpricks in the canvas. Manuel Solano, currently transitioning from male to female, lost their sight in 2014 due to complications from an HIV-related infection. This, then is a self-portrait made blind by the Mexican artist, who started out with a hyper-realistic style and now uses a transfer process from a photographic source to set their paintings under way. They often turn to the autobiographical to explore, says the gallery, ‘the relationship that memory and the imaginary share, how sincerity and camp operate together, and how popular culture is a container for our personal self, intimate relationships, and shared histories’.
Raqs Media Collective: Moon Clock, 2024, at Frith Street – London
The long-running New Delhi Raqs Media Collective explain that in several languages ‘the word ‘raqs’ denotes an intensification of awareness and presence attained by whirling, turning, being in a state of revolution’. They take this to mean ‘a restless and energetic entanglement with the world, and with time’. Consistent with that, Raqs’ notably diverse practice has included several clocks that play on the differences between time as measured and time as experienced. It was ten past knot when I came across their latest subversion of conventional timekeeping. I was reminded of the ‘red moon’ caused by lunar eclipse, and of how the moon affects the world’s rhythms. I also warmed to how particular times might be mentioned: ‘See you at Frith Street at quarter past simmer’, ‘How did you feel at five to rapture?’
Anne Imhof: Point Break, 2024, at Sprüth Magers – Berlin / London / Los Angeles / New York (Photo: Timo Ohler)
The German artist Anne Imhof, most famous for performance works, regards her multi-faceted practice as essentially pictorial. She’s often used a drill bit to scratch onto aluminium painted in the factory colours used by luxury car manufacturers to make ‘drawings’ that suggest the violence of ‘keying’ a car door. Here a 2m-high AI-generated image evokes a customisation along the lines of ‘Pimp My Ride’, the 2004-07 TV series in which cars were customised to reflect their Californian owner’s characteristics and interests. Imhof loves LA, and the rhythms of her scratching echo the surfably large wave. The title – shared with a Hollywood film – is the surfing term for where a wave breaks as it hits a point of land jutting out from the coastline.
Richard Forster: Ostalgie Spee packet I, and Ostalgie ‘Omega’ vacuum, from the series ‘Alternative Architectures (after Michael Graves)’, 2020-23, at Ingleby Gallery – Edinburgh
Is known for his meticulous pencil drawings from manipulated photocopy sources (one is one the rear wall). Recently he has also made ‘facsimile sculptures’, cast in jesmonite, resin and aluminium and then painstakingly hand-painted. The series of twelve explores Ostalgie, the nostalgia for life in Communist East Germany, when there was only one type of washing power to choose and life was simpler. Of course that – like these objects – is more construct rather than reality: for example, the GDR had a consistently high suicide rate. This particular pairing nods to Warhol and Koons (as well as to Beuys in the tape crosses left on the packaging). The title, referencing the American architect Michael Graves, suggest we might see object and box together as apartment blocks – for dwelling in the past, presumably.
Georg Baselitz: Bob fliegt in den Himmel (Bob Flies up into the Sky), 2023, at White Cube – London / Hong Kong / Paris / New York / West Palm Beach
It was hard to miss this enormous – almost five metre wide – Baselitz. It’s typical of his recent way of ‘remixing’ past subjects – indeed, he has a drawing of two eagles made when just 14. The birds talk to military history, the decline of Empire and of the loss of national pride. We might ask if they are falling or simply flying upside down, though the title suggests they are flying up, but hung upside down. Two interesting features are the use of collaged plastic for the eyes, and the scrape marks across the paint – caused by the ageing painter’s walking frame as he works on the horizontal.
Trevor Yeung: ‘Night Mushroom Colon (M+)’ at Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong
Growing up in mainland China, Trevor Yeung recalls the tank displaying what could be eaten in the seafood restaurant run by his family, and years of subsequent fishkeeping have fed into the aquatic system being shown in Venice currently by Hong Kong’s representative. He also collects cacti and palms – there are over 200 in his studio. So perhaps it’s not surprising that plastic vegetation made for aquaria, together with mushroom nightlights and multiple plug adaptors electric sockets, are among the found items combined in these more modest systems. Yeung talks about seeking intimacy ‘between the audience and the artworks, but also between myself and the material’. The night mushroom series ongoing since 2020, fits with that – but I was also reminded of how mushrooms can thrive by growing up through cracks. That makes them a good analogy for the persistence in difficult circumstances that is needed in a repressive regime. Perhaps life can become one long set of adaptations.
Jitish Kallat: ‘Here after Here after Here’, 2024, at Nature Morte, New Delhi
You may have seen Mumbai based artist Jitish Kallat’s courtyard commission for Somerset House in 2023: two intersecting spirals, 336 metres long, which echoed the signage of UK roads and connected them to locations across the planet and the distant universe. This tangled infinity comparably interlaces the immediate and the cosmic: London meets Melbourne, Shangri La, the planets, the Sun and distant galaxies – wrapped up in them even if the distances cited can be large: 77.8m kilometres to Phobos… It’s redolent of how the digital age has collapsed physical distance, but also made me wonder how long it would be to reach Victoria Miro at the other end of the fair. More substantially, one can cite as influencing factors the mythic symbol of the uro buros, ancient eternal knots, alchemical diagrams and sacred geometry…
Kinke Kooi: ‘Meditation on Vanity’, 2024, at Adams and Ollman, Portland, Oregon
Dutch artist Kinke Kooi’s intoxicatingly detailed paintings typically incorporate many small objects. But who is the man collaged in here? He is Canon Joris van der Paele, a devout figure of religious authority, as painted by Jan Van Eyck’s in around 1435. Kooi often channels the irony of giving him a front-row seat to view her explorations of the body and pleasure: a close look reveals fleshy folds and breasts as well as clams, pearls, flowers, seedpods – and orifices ready to be penetrated by the characteristic presence of Q-tips. As the gallery says, ‘multi-faceted feminism is woven together with a seductive, sinewy line that blurs and merges inside and outside, convex and concave, surface and depth, ornament and function, emotional and verbal, high and low, flora and fauna’.
Yin Xiuzhen: ‘Weapon’, 2003-07, at Beijing Commune
Yin Xiuzhen’s ‘Weapon’ series has been widely shown since all 210 ‘missiles’ populated China’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007. She constructs their four metre lengths by stretching used clothing over such ‘daily life things’ as bowls and baskets, with a kitchen knife forming the bayonet end. Yin Xiuzhen sees the form as combining the ‘hard power’ of the military with the ’soft power’ of a TV tower; while the clothing acts as a repository for personal experiences, ruminating on how to maintains individual identity against those dual means of control in a collective culture. But just how lethal are they? It turns out that for display at Frieze, the gallery was required to replace the metal knives with plastic ones.
Emily Kraus: ‘Agon (ambidextral)’, 2024, at The Sunday Painter, London – plus studio portrait
The one-work stand can be a striking and confident statement: The Sunday Painter shows just a single three metre wide work by London-based American Emily Kraus. The size gains in impact once you know that it was actually painted in a box-like space in which the artist is surrounded by the work on all sides. Faced by the confines of a small studio as a student, she engineered a cube-like structure using struts that function as rollers, around which she looped raw canvas. As she applies oil paint by hand and pulls the canvas around the constructed room, the structure smears, spreads, and unfolds the paint, forming patterns that repeat but continually evolve to capture, in the gallery’s words ‘time in an image’ through a pattern-like iconography that ‘recalls the sinuous texture of snakeskin, a network of veins, the fluctuations of an electrocardiogram’ or ‘the warping frequencies and rhythms of a musical score’.
FREIZE LONDON continues until Sunday 13th October frieze.com/frieze-london
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