This year marks the tenth anniversary of Frieze Masters in London and visitors to the fair can time-travel deep into the distant past. Whether you’re after 154-million-year-old dinosaur skeletons or Egyptian sarcophagi, Old Masters or modern icons of the 20th century, it’s all here.
Some of the most exciting offerings can be found in the Spotlight section dedicated to trailblazing women artists born between 1900 and 1951. Curator Camille Morineau and the team at Paris-based AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions) have made a point of focusing Spotlight on under-recognized women as part of their wider goal of realigning the art canon.
Below is a look at some of the top picks of the fair, which runs through Sunday, October 16.
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Pre-Columbian textiles and three Brazilian women artists at Paul Hughes
Image Credit: Damian Griffiths This presentation lives up to its title, “Resonances,” orchestrating a thrilling dialogue between female makers across 1,500 years. Wiltshire, England–based Paul Hughes Fine Arts and Brazilian Gallery MAPA have collaborated on this eye-catching show which features pre-Columbian textiles with feathers alongside Brazilian artists Mira Schendel, Jandyra Waters, and Delba Marcolini.
Few passing by the booth could resist the pull of the large crimson Nazca tunic from ca. 600 C.E., made from camelid fibers with applied feathers, or a striped red, white and blue abstract tunic, both of which felt incredibly modern. (It was no surprise to learn that similar works have found admirers in artists Josef and Anni Albers, Brice Marden, and Sean Scully.) Juxtaposed with these tactile feather tunics and panels were bright geometric painted wood reliefs by Waters, a dress by Schendel, and a woven wall sculpture by Marcolini composed of agave fibers, painted cotton, sheep’s wool and rustic yarns.
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Japanese modernists at Gallery Shibunkaku
Image Credit: Courtesy of Gallery Shibunkaku This elegant booth is devoted to the work of some of Japan’s foremost avant-garde artists who flourished between 1960 and 1980 within different homegrown art scenes. Shibunkaku has brought together a vibrant 1964 painting by Gutai member Motonaga Sadamasa with lyrical calligraphic works by Morita Shiryū and Inoue Yūichi of the Bokujinkai movement, and sculptures by Sodeisha members Yagi Kazuo, Suzuki Osamu, and Miyanaga Rikichi. There’s also a beautiful textured 1962 piece (titled Work) in oil and powdered marble by the experimental artist Miyawaki Aiko.
Seeing all these works together conveys a sense of the feverish atmosphere of creativity that prevailed in Japan as artists spurred each other on. Picasso’s Tête d’homme (1969) is also on display here, a reminder that these artists were not working in a vacuum, but were instead often responding to artistic developments in the West.
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Modern masters and mistresses at Kasmin
Image Credit: © 2022 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Kasmin’s booth is dominated by a monumental geometric painting, Number 2 by Lee Krasner, which has not been displayed in public since it was created in 1951. Painted in blocks of warm earthy tones, it is one of just two surviving paintings from Krasner’s first solo exhibition at Betty Parsons that same year. The artist had a tendency to destroy or work over many of her canvases.
Kasmin’s booth presents 20 modern masters, most of them American, engaging in lots of mini-conversations; one is between Krasner and Lynne Drexler, both of whom were trained by Hans Hofmann, and there are affinities between Number 2 and Drexler’s previously unseen abstract work Tribute (1963), a gorgeous riot of oranges, reds, and pinks set against green and indigo evoking a landscape. Another dynamic exchange is going on between SO BE IT (1999), a fluid brushstroke painting by the multidisciplinary conceptual artist James Nares, and Column of Five Lines with Gimbal II (1990), a poetic sculpture by sculptor George Rickey comprised of five stainless steel blades that sway gently without ever touching.
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Ancient artifacts at David Aaron
Image Credit: Courtesy of David Aaron gallery This booth is something of a showstopper, with a 154-million-year-old Camptosaurus dinosaur skeletongracing the entrance. A fourth-generation family business specializing in ancient Islamic, Egyptian, and Classical art among others, London-based David Aaron has a plethora of astonishing artifacts on display, each dramatically lit and beautifully mounted.
Highlights among them include an intact juvenile Triceratops skull that is between 66 million and 68 million years old; a handsome wood statue of Anubis, the Egyptian god of the afterlife often represented as a jackal, from ca. 751–414 B.C.E.; and a finely carved Roman marble bust of a patrician man from ca. 100–20 C.E. with extraordinarily detailed beard and eyebrows. Also worth a mention is a haughty Egyptian bronze seated cat from ca. 332–30 B.C.E. in remarkable condition, retaining a thin lapis lazuli inlay around its eyes.
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Flemish masters at De Jonckheere
Image Credit: Photo by Michael Adair/Courtesy of Frieze De Jonckheere’s booth has a jaw-dropping selection of Flemish masters this year. There’s a lactating Madonna by the entourage of Rogier van der Weyden, a penetrating portrait of Martin Luther by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his studio, and three tondi representing the seasons by Pieter Brueghel the Younger. All of humanity is here in the latter’s exquisite village scenes, and one could easily spend several hours poring over them.
Having a weakness for the monstrous and infernal, I was particularly drawn to the hallucinatory canvases by painters working in the tradition of Bosch, such as Jan Wellens de Cock and Pieter Huys, and featuring outlandish hybrid creatures, gigantic disembodied heads and people being gruesomely tortured and devoured by dogs. The imaginative detail in these paintings is nothing short of spectacular.
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Carlos Cruz-Diez at Galleria Continua
Image Credit: Courtesy of Galleria Continua The experiential works of the late Venezuelan Kinetic and Op artist Carlos Cruz-Diez are a zinging presence at this year’s fair. Tracing the evolution of his work, Galleria Continua has presented two abstract canvases and one sculpture characterized by organic forms from the 1950s, which make a fascinating contrast with the later shimmering relief paintings for which he became renowned.
Fisicromia 3, an attractive 1959 casein on cardboard and wood work with cut red forms and vertical lines, marks Cruz-Diez’s transition between styles. His exuberant later works — from his “Physichromie” and “Couleur Additive” series — are the highlight of the booth, especially Physichromie 502 (1970), an ordered jumble of colorful overlapping rectangles set to movement by vertical plastic inserts. It’s sheer energy.
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Lee Kang-So at Gallery Hyundai
Image Credit: Photo by Mark Blower/Courtesy of Gallery Hyundai Amid the bustle of Frieze, Gallery Hyundai’s booth feels like an oasis of tranquility. Dedicated to the multidisciplinary oeuvre of influential South Korean artist Lee Kang-So, who came to prominence in the 1970s, it features painting, sculpture, photography, and serigraphy on burlap. But what lends the booth its calm ambience is a series of meditative large grayscale paintings executed in rough, rhythmic brushstrokes which form a backdrop to Lee’s poetic installation Paljindo (Eight Battle Array), stacks of brick, wood, rope and stones, each with a single rock perched on top. (Apparently Paljindo is an ancient military tactic using natural materials collected from the battlefield to deceive the enemy by creating multi-sensory illusions.)
According to the gallery literature, the artist characterizes his paintings as “pictures that were drawn,” avoiding subjective expression of emotion or intention, preferring “to traverse between the visible and invisible, particles and energy, here and there, being and non-being.”
Kang-So will take part in the Guggenheim’s major survey “The Avant-Garde: Experimental Art in South Korea in the 1960s–1970s,” which opens next spring.
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Ljiljana Blaževska at Alison Jacques, London
Image Credit: Courtesy Alison Jacques/©Ljiljana Blaževska Collection & Archive/Photo Michael Brzezinski Alison Jacques’s booth at Spotlight is a revelation, celebrating the Macedeonia-born artist Ljiljana Blaževska (1944–2020), who lived in Belgrade and participated in the thriving art scene there, but was little known beyond. We find dreamy paintings populated by ghostly figures and exotic birds in swirling, fantastical landscapes which would be at home in Cecilia Alemani’s Venice Biennale show “The Milk of Dreams.”
Blaževska’s mysterious scenes and bewitching creatures call to mind Surrealist women painters such as Remedios Varo or Leonora Carrington, but there is equally something of Chagall in an untitled work from 1995 centered on a red-hatted figure engulfed in a vivid blue atmosphere, from which hovering specters loom. The six works on display span two decades, from 1974 to 1995; I’m fascinated to discover how Blaževska’s practice evolved thereafter.
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Daniela Vinopalova at Stephenson Art, London
Image Credit: Photo by František Ježerský/Courtesy of Stephenson Art A quite different Eastern European artist is showcased at Stephenson Art’s booth at Spotlight, the Czech sculptor Daniela Vinopalová (1928–2017).
Stephenson has focused on a selection of sculptures in plaster, glazed terracotta, tin, and bronze that the artist made in the 1960s, a period of transition in her practice when she shifted away from figuration into abstraction — against the prevailing social realism style. Vinopalová didn’t abandon the figure altogether, as seen by a graceful white plaster kneeling female figure here, but the majority on view are abstract sculptures resembling gloriously lopsided, holed receptacles which explore the tension between mass and void, interior and exterior.
In a vitrine alongside various tools, photos and documents is a letter written by the artist that reads, “Through my work I try to look for a certain order, which I believe is built up of many contradictions, sometimes even of ‘incomprehensible nonsense,’ but in its totality it forms a whole that creates a balance between these contraries that holds it together.”
Vinopalová had her first solo show in 1966, which was followed by a brief spate of group shows, but, after the 1968 Soviet invasion, she would not have another solo exhibition until 1996.
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Chief Nike Davies-Okundaye at Kó Gallery, Nigeria
Image Credit: Photo by Kazeem Adewolu/Courtesy of kó gallery The textile artist Chief Nike Davies-Okundaye has been given the run of Kó’s booth at Spotlight, dazzling with her batiks and Adire-dyed textile works peopled with animals and deities from Yoruba mythology. The works here range from the 1960s to 1980s and encompass beadwork, painting, dyeing, weaving and embroidery. The artist, who is known in her native Nigeria as “Mama Nike,” has spearheaded a revival in traditional crafts, particularly Adire designs, a Yoruba technique using indigo dyes on hand-painted cloth.
Check out the embroidered work Animal World (1968), suggesting a fabulous realm bursting with life, the intricate beadwork of The palmwine tapper and ayo game (1969–1970), and the Adire textile work Osun, The Goddess of the River from 1987.