FRIEZE LONDON 2023
EXHIBITIONS ROUND-UP
Frieze London is here! The fair consistently generates excitement and interest within the art world and beyond, apart from the show itself and, of course, Frieze Masters. Here are our picks of the exhibitions to visit.
11 October 2023 – 14 January 2024
Whitechapel Gallery will present the first UK survey of American artist Nicole Eisenman. A leading protagonist of the New York art scene since the 1990s, her critical, highly imaginative and often humorous work offers a commentary on the ever-changing nature of public life. While addressing political power structures and challenging normative conceptions of gender, Eisenman draws on a variety of sources, from Renaissance masterpieces to socialist murals of the 1930s and contemporary underground comics. Approximately 100 paintings, drawings and sculptures dating from 1992 to the present day will be displayed across Whitechapel Gallery’s spaces. The exhibition will be divided into eight chronological and thematic chapters, including sections on lesbian communities in the 1990s, the life of the artist, technology and American politics during the Trump years.
18 September – 28 October 2023
Curated by Jonathan Anderson, ‘On Foot’ at Offer Waterman will bring contemporary artists into dialogue with iconic works of modern British art alongside Anderson’s own fashion designs for JW Anderson and LOEWE. Pieces from recent seasons will act as viewers and bystanders to the works, chosen for the ways in which they give the body sculptural potential. The exhibition will unfold like a walk through London, embracing the stark contrasts and unlikely juxtapositions that even a short journey through the city offers up. The galleries will each act as a pause at one of the social spaces or experiences along the journey. Artists will include Igshaan Adams, Frank Auerbach, Lynette Yiadam-Boakye, Lucian Freud, Anthea Hamilton, Barbara Hepworth and Florian Krewer, among others.
KETTLE’S YARD at CASA LOEWE LONDON
11 October – 15 October 2023
Limited edition sets of buttons, created by ten leading artists in support of Kettle’s Yard, will be on display in LOEWE’s flagship London store during Frieze week. Contributing artists include Ai Weiwei, Jonathan Anderson, Rana Begum, Antony Gormley, Callum Innes, Jennifer Lee, Cornelia Parker, Vicken Parsons, Edmund de Waal and Caroline Walker. Drawing inspiration from Kettle’s Yard's recent exhibition, ‘Lucie Rie: The Adventure of Pottery’, each artist will explore diverse materials and techniques, bringing their own styles and approaches to making buttons. The buttons will be available for purchase in-store at Kettle’s Yard and online from 11 October 2023.
11 October – 16 December 2023
Igshaan Adams’s first exhibition with the Thomas Dane Gallery will present new large-scale weavings and sculptures in a body of work conceived for the space and installed across the walls and gallery floor. Drawing on the geography and memories of his hometown of Bonteheuwel, a township near Cape Town, these intricate works, made using beads, shells, glass, rope, wire and found objects, both elevate the material aspects of lived spaces and illuminate the personal and political histories and stories that they hold. Concurrently with the Thomas Dane Gallery exhibition, Adams is presenting a major new commission as part of the 35th São Paulo Biennial, ‘Choreographies of the Impossible’ (until 10 December 2023), curated by Diane Lima, Grada Kilomba, Hélio Menezes and Manuel Borja-Villel.
4 October 2023 – 25 February 2024
The Garden Museum will present a major exhibition of landscape and nature paintings by Antiguan artist, writer and environmentalist Frank Walter, one of the most significant Caribbean visual artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Bringing together over 100 paintings and sculptures, the majority of which have never been exhibited, ‘Artist, Gardener, Radical’ will explore Walter’s relationship to Antigua through works that explore environmentalism and Caribbean and Black identity. On display will be paintings from the last 25 years of Walter’s life, a period in which he spent mostly in seclusion on Bailey’s Hill in rural Antiqua, where he established his oceanside garden and studio. Depicting both real and imagined coastal landscapes, these works are painted on cardboard and other found objects in a vivid colour palette. The exhibition will also feature a recreation of Walter’s Antiguan studio.
22 September 2023 – 18 February 2024
The Foundling Museum’s autumn exhibition will be ‘The Mother & The Weaver: Art from the Ursula Hauser Collection’. The Museum houses the collections of the Foundling Hospital, established in 1739 as a home for children at risk of abandonment. ‘The Mother & The Weaver’ will take the unseen mother, a central part of the Foundling Museum’s story, as a point of departure to explore complex ideas around motherhood, childhood, love, loss, sexuality and identity. Occupying the whole museum, this landmark exhibition will show over 40 works from the Ursula Hauser Collection, all by women artists, in conversation with historic objects and works of art from the Foundling Museum’s own collection. The exhibition will present modern and contemporary works of art in a variety of media, including painting, textiles, sculpture, video and works on paper, by internationally celebrated artists Rita Ackermann, Ida Applebroog, Louise Bourgeois, Berlinde de Bruyckere, Marlene Dumas, Sonia Gomes, Sheila Hicks, Luchita Hurtado, Nicola L, Maria Lassnig, Anna Maria Maiolino, Carol Rama, Pipilotti Rist, Amy Sherald, Lorna Simpson, Sylvia Sleigh and Alina Szapocznikow.
7 October – 11 November 2023
Pippy Houldsworth Gallery will host a solo exhibition of Kenyan artist Wangari Mathenge, comprising new paintings and a room-size installation drawn 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. Mathenge has formerly explored themes of relocation and displacement in her Ascendants series (2020-2021), which interrogated the language of global migration. In A Day of Rest, she returns to the issue, this time taking a closer look at domestic migration within Kenya, and in particular, the narratives of young women who leave rural communities for the city in search of work. In a series of monumental paintings depicting seven domestic workers, arranged variously in tableaux of three or on their own, each woman poses with an object of personal importance.
21 September – 18 November 2023
Michael Werner Gallery, in collaboration with Gallery Hyundai, presents ‘Invisible Questions that Fill the Air: James Lee Byars and Seung-taek Lee’, an exhibition of works by American artist James Lee Byars and Korean artist Seung-taek Lee. Curated by Allegra Pesenti, this exhibition will mark the first time the works of these two artists have been brought into dialogue and will examine their similar trajectories, despite the pair never meeting. Byars’s practice explores themes of spirituality, morality and the nature of art itself, whilst Lee’s work rejects traditional sculptural techniques in its use of unconventional materials such as found objects. The artists share an interest in the recontextualisation of simple, familiar objects from their traditional symbolic and practical uses. The exhibition will include works spanning from the 1950s to the 2010s in a variety of materials, including stone, wood, marble, rope and works on paper.
22 September – 11 November 2023
‘Letting Loose’, an exhibition of works by Paula Rego from the 1980s, will focus on a period of liberation and self-discovery for the artist that led to her great breakthrough and saw her first major exhibitions in the UK and the US. Moving away from her early process of making sophisticated figurative collages from drawn and painted material, Rego began to engage with play as a guiding methodology. She worked rapidly and fluidly, embracing the painterly freedom this approach allowed and inventing a cast of humans, animals and hybrid creatures that empowered her to tell her own story. During this period, she was able to dramatise darker aspects of human nature and delve deeper into her own memories and experiences, giving rise to significant bodies of work, including Girl and Dog, the Opera paintings and The Vivian Girls, which will be on show at Victoria Miro.
4 October 2023 – 7 January 2024
For his first institutional solo exhibition, Solomon will present ‘ARMS’, an eerie mise-en-scène featuring biomorphic sculptures and an experimental 8D soundscape. Working across sculpture, photography, sound and performance, Garçon’s practice considers ‘the mythical underground’, a space in which different times and places simultaneously coexist and overlap. In Garçon’s work, the term might describe geological time or subterranean networks, but also how fiction can inform reality and challenge hidden power structures. With the body a site and subject that is central to his practice, Garçon’s research and performance work draws from figures with mercurial identities, such as the shape-shifting spirit Doro from Octavia Butler’s Patternist series, and the Vodou deity Papa Legba who serves as an intermediary between spirits and humanity. Correspondingly, Garçon explores technology via the body, from racially biased beauty app algorithms to the AI robot BINA48.
