What to do during Frieze Week 2023

Next week Frieze Week returns to Regent’s Park from the 11^th – 15^th October. Consisting of two art fairs, Frieze London and Frieze Masters, leading artists, galleries and collectors from all around the world descend upon London for what is considered one of the most significant weeks in the art calendar.

This year, Frieze London turns 20 years old and to celebrate they are hosting an exclusive exhibition named Artist-to-Artist showcasing work by eight renowned solo artists around the world, selected by one of their peers.  Meanwhile, its sister fair Frieze Masters, for art before 1980, will introduce a special section dedicated to women artists. 

Alongside the fairs, there are so many amazing events and exhibition going on and we wanted to share a list of our must sees for the week.

This free open air exhibition is curated by Fatoş Üstek and presents works from 22 International artists including Louise Nevelson, Ghada Amer and Hank Willis Thomas, among many others. Learn more here.

This new women artist-only fair launches at the Mall Galleries to ‘redress the gender imbalance in the art industry" by exclusively selling work made by female-identifying artists. More details here.

 

This year Ghanaian artist, El Anatsui will be taking over the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The vast space will be transformed with his hanging sculptures made of cascading arrangements of found materials. 

Stephen Friedman Gallery presents a new exhibition by British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare CBE RA at their new gallery on Cork Street. The exhibition includes a group presentation of African artists, and artists from the African diaspora, curated by Shonibare, many of whom were part of his resident program in Lagos, Nigeria. The show encompasses paintings, sculptures, mixed media, and works on paper, with the initial rooms paying homage to the dada movement's spirit of liberation.

1-54 returns to Somerset house for the 11^th consecutive year, hosting over 60 International exhibitions in its largest edition to date. One of our favourite fairs of the year, this is not one to miss.

Tate Modern presents a landmark exhibition of one of the most remarkable artists of the twentieth century and the first major UK retrospective in 20 years. The exhibition spans more than 100 paintings and drawings from across Guston’s momentous 50-year career. It offers new insight into the artist’s formative early years and activism, his celebrated period of abstraction, and his thought-provoking late works. With an outlook strongly shaped by his experiences of personal tragedy and by social injustice in the US, the exhibition charts the restlessness of an artist who defied categorisation, and never stopped pushing the boundaries of painting.

Featuring 50 women and non-conforming artists working in the realms of photography and film, this major group exhibition explores the relationship between gender and ecology, highlighting the systemic links between the oppression of women and the degradation of the planet. Works in the exhibition explore how women’s understanding of our environment has often resisted the logic of capitalist economies which places the exploitation of the planet at its centre. They are presented alongside works of an activist nature that show how women are regularly at the forefront of advocating and caring for the planet. Reflecting on a range of themes, from extractive industries to the politics of care, RE/SISTERS explores environmental and gender justice as indivisible parts of a global struggle. It seeks to address existing power structures that threaten our increasingly precarious ecosystem.

The Gucci Cosmos exhibition comes to London with an immersive installation showcasing the house’s most iconic designs from its 102-year history. Renowned British artist Es Devlin has created a dedicated set-up at 180 Studios, including elements that pay homage to London and the role the city played in inspiring Gucci. Visitors can expect never-before-seen items from the Gucci Archive, showing how the Italian fashion house has evolved over the last century, alongside looks from previous creative directors such as Tom Ford and Frida Giannini.

This exhibition is the largest retrospective to date of Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, an artist renowned for creating some of the most alluringly enigmatic photographs of our time. This show brings together the artist’s major photographic series, which highlight Sugimoto’s ability to unite the real and the abstract, using the median to both document and invent. Lesser-known works are also on display, revealing Sugimoto’s interest in the history of photography, as well as in mathematics and optical sciences. Learn more here.

Organised in collaboration with PATERSON ZEVI, Smoke and Mirrors, is the culmination of a years work by British-South African artist Katy Stubbs. It debuts a series of ceramic sculptures concerning ideas around deception and magic, telling a cautionary tale about contemporary dating culture, societal pressure to conform to an ideal and the too-good-to-be-true stories on Instagram.

Nicole Eisenman: What Happened brings together over 100 works from across the French-born American artist’s three-decade career – many of which have not previously been shown in the UK.  Encompassing large-scale, monumental paintings alongside sculptures, monoprints, animation and drawings, the exhibition showcases the extraordinary range and formal inventiveness that characterises her practice. Arranged chronologically across eight sections, the exhibition illuminates the critical, yet often highly humorous approach that Eisenman uses to explore some of the most prescient socio-political issues of the day.  These encompass gender, identity and sexual politics, recent civic and governmental turmoil in the United States, protest and activism, and the impact of technology on personal relationships and romantic lives.

Selected with renowned artist Georg Baselitz and taken directly from his studio, Georg Baselitz: Sculptures 2011-2015 features never-before-seen towering sculptures alongside loose, inky drawings. Inviting you to enter a forest of raw, timber sculptures, this exhibition provides new insights into the artist’s process, and how his works inform one another across different mediums.

PAD London art fair is celebrating its fifteenth anniversary this year, bringing together an exceptional showcase of works staged by 62 leading galleries across Contemporary Design, Twenty Century design and Collective Jewellery. Learn more here.

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery presents the second solo exhibition of Wangari Mathenge, comprising of paintings and installation from her new series, A Day of Rest. Prompted by an increase in media depictions of the plight of domestic workers in Kenya, Mathenge conceived of this body of work as a socially engaged project aimed at shifting the narrative around a workforce of over two million people across the country. In a series of monumental paintings depicting seven domestic workers the artist gives visibility to a marginalised group often dehumanised in media representations. In these multifaceted portraits, Mathenge’s sitters take control of their own stories, positing a refusal to be defined by adversity and instead, projecting their varied ambitions.