London, the “Frieze Art Fair” starts, and the crowd returns to animate Regent’s Park for the coolest event

LONDON. Herbs, remedies and intertwined bodies drape 28 meters across the ceiling of the entrance corridor of the Frieze Art Fair. We are in London, Regent’s Park, and the English artist Emma Talbot officially opens the most famous art fair in Great Britain welcoming visitors with her work “21st Century Herbal”, a maxi tapestry in colorful silk that contains secrets inspired by the medieval herbal medicine for pain and sorrow, painted in black and red letters on the fabric next to embroidered flowers that hang over visitors’ heads.

The week of art in the English capital has begun and black BMWs parade through Regent’s Park leaving gallery owners, collectors, artists and onlookers in front of the green Frieze London printed mural at the entrance, where they stop for a shot under the flashes of some photographers in look for familiar faces. With a calendar full of events, the city is preparing to welcome the contemporary avant-garde, on show to the public from 14 to 16 October, in the now classic white pavilion in the center of the park. Launched in 2003 in London, since 2012 it has also been exported to New York and Los Angeles and from this year also to Seoul. Frieze is now synonymous with novelty and quality for contemporary artists and gathers galleries from all over the world: 160 in London alone for this 2022 edition.

And in the heart of the fair you immediately come across the Main Section, the super central wing that has always been dedicated to large galleries: this year we are welcomed by a fiery red sun setting in the blue sea painted on a monumental canvas. It is the work of the Swiss Ugo Rondinone who covers the walls of Sadie Coles HQ with his “Mattituck” sunsets in a single show. Then there are Lisson, Ryan Lee, Pilar Corrias, James Cohan, PPOW, Lehman Maupin and Gagosian, who dedicates the entire stand to 7 maxi abstract canvases by the Englishman Jadé Fadojutimi. The London gallery Thomas Dane does not go unnoticed, which sets up the entire stand covered by checked carpet with a selection of works curated by the English artist Anthea Hamilton, winner of the prestigious Turner Prize in 2016, among which two huge orange pumpkins by the artist stand out itself (Giant Pumpkin No. 1 and No. 4, 2022). Young galleries (no more than 12 years old) instead present the emerging ones in the Focus section, in the right wing of the fair, where, among the various names, Soft Opening, Emalin, Blindspot Gallery, Addis Fine Art and Galerie Noah Klink emerge.

New this year is Indra’s Net, a section curated by the art historian and former Guggenheim curator Sandhini Poddar, created to give space to international figures of art who are reflected in the proposed theme: the name, the network of Indra, in fact, it derives from the Buddhist concept often used to describe the interconnection of the universe and the individual for which each artist-human is a multifaceted diamond that reflects the others, embroidered on a large canvas that covers the cosmos. Here we find a video-meditation by Martha Atienza, born in Manila, who follows a Filipino fisherman on the waves of the river and the sea (Tigpanalipod – The Protector 11 ° 02’06.4 “N 123 ° 36’24.1” E, 2022) for the Silverlens gallery in Manila, and a large black sculpture fountain flown over by water-spitting butterflies-gargoiles created by Tomás Díaz Cedeño for Peana Gallery, Mexico City, entitled «Wishing Well, Dream of Permanence». Other names include Richard Mosse, Shirazeh Houshiary, Tuan Andrew Nguyen and Jamilah Sabur.

If Frieze London exhibits post-2000 artists, for lovers of the classic there is the sister fair on the other side of the park, Frieze Masters, which contains all the best pre-2000 names under the white awning and which this year celebrates the 10 years of opening, directed by Nathan Clements-Gillespie. Among the masters are Mirò, Brugel and Niki de Saint Phalle, Pistoletto, Egon Schiele and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Next to the main section, Stand Out returns for the second time, curated by the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge Luke Syson, this year entitled “Global Exchange”, while the Spotlight section, curated by Camille Morineau, is entirely dedicated to 26 pioneering women artists of the twentieth century including Nike Davies-Okundaye, Leonor Fini, Sister Gertrude Morgan and the Iranian Sonia Balassanian. Brooklyn photographer Tyler Mitchen is awarded the Special Commission, a space dedicated each year to an emerging artist who promises to observe the past through present art. Mitchen, already known for portraying Beyoncé for the cover of Vogue in September 2018, presents a portfolio of photographs inspired by paintings from the past that look at Black beauty and desire in the contemporary landscape.

Frieze closes on October 16th but the art does not stop: Regent’s Park will still host the Sculpture Park until November 13th. The 19 large-scale installations color the London park and allow everyone to interact with great contemporary artists selected by Clare Lilley, former curator of Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Here “Please Do Not Read” appears on an ironic sign by John Wood and Paul Harrison (10 Signs for a Park, 2022), a poem by John Giorno is engraved on a boulder (Space Mirror Minds, 2022 ), while the huge blue rock with a yellow head by Ugo Rondinone (Yellow Blue Monk, 2020) evokes mystical landscapes like a large totem to be adored on autumn art days.

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