Part Four you say? Shall we go on? Surely the moment passed already? Monday evening after the weekend before, old old news already? We left it with Galerie Karin Guenther (Hamburg) and that bold Berta Fischer piece on their wall, did we just say that? We are flagging now, do rather like the Ellen Gronemeyer piece as well but we said that at the end of Part Three and if you haven’t read the previous pieces then Part One and Part Two of this piece maybe would be a more sensible starting point? And as was observed at the end of the previous part, there’s a shopping trolley and a whole load of plastic children’s toys over there and a rather bright Samia Halaby painting called Order Disorder Surprising Event and yes, I am flagging now and it is the Monday after the Frieze week before and hey, I was on Brighton Beach art dropping and swimming in the Cardiacs pond until the early hours of this morning but then that’s another story that urgently needs to be told… on with Part Four…

The proof reading is in the pudding and there’s no time for custard, cake or indeed jelly and ice cream. Back from Brighton, on with it. We are flagging, we’ve made it to the washing line full of underwear and none of it is Julia Maddison‘s, is Arnold Layne about? Galerie Lelong & Co of New York have chosen to come all the way over with one of those three-sided rotary washing lines and as we say almost every time Frieze London comes around, not as good as Julia Maddison – Galerie Lelong say they are “pleased to participate in Frieze London 2024 with a group presentation focused on depictions of femininity. Featuring works by Ana Mendieta, Yoko Ono, Martha Rosler, Pinaree Sanpitak and Nancy Spero – five artists of different generations and nationalities working in varying mediums – the presentation highlights the gallery’s longstanding commitment to championing women artists”

– hey I’m just being mischievous when I compare Julia with the late Nancy Spero aren’t I? Do have to smile at her Sheela-Na-Gig at Home piece from 2000, however serious the points she was making were and still are, it is worth a smile, just boldly standing there defiantly in the middle of it all.

Actually there’s lots to enjoy or at least explore in a (very) positive way in the Galerie Lelong & Co booth including an early work by Ana Mendieta called Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants) (1972), made when she was a graduate student at the University of Iowa, a piece documenting a performative act where Mendieta slowly and deliberately transferred the facial hair of a friend onto her own face in the Intermedia studio at the university. Of the work, Mendieta wrote: “I like the idea of transferring hair from one person to another because I think it gives me that person’s strength.” There’s also a new painting by Pinaree Sanpitak, Within the Body (2024), making its debut at the fair. “Following the birth of her son, Sanpitak centred representations of the breast in her practice to epitomize the beauty she found in the experience”. Meanwhile Through North American Waitress, Coffee-Shop Variety (Know Your Servant Series, No. 1) (1976), Martha Rosler interrogates the exploitation of women’s labour and so so much more, it really is, even though we know how sexist things were and are, quite remarkable to look at this work up on the wall of the booth now in 2024 – “a work highlighting through a series of diagrams and documentation mimicking a field guide the inhuman and unattainable standards set for women.” The Galerie Lelongpresentation also includes works on paper by Yoko Ono and the aforementioned Nancy Spero – “Ono’s art has long pioneered the ideas of feminism, and a suite of drawings that depict abstracted bodily forms” while, that clothes line, “a sculptural installation” stands alongside “a large-scale frieze by Spero in her signature styles of collage and printing demonstrate how the artist pushed the medium beyond its conventions and are populated by depictions of women originating from diverse cultures that Spero incorporated into her print-making lexicon”.  Hey, I know, really should have picked out the gallery’s presentation of the five artists in our highlights list that was published at the end of the first day, sorry. Hey, I did say ask me tomorrow and I will have changed my mind and surely we all need time to digest it all, I mean there is so much, that’s my excuse. I was in there for almost five hours and took over two thousand photos on day one alone, and that’s before the idea of going across the park to Masters via the Sculpture Park and those flies all buzzing around was even entertained.  

And on we go, didn;t see anything from the usually rewarding P.P.O.W Gallery (New York), have they not bothered this year? Word is quite a few international galleries you’d expect haven’t (although we later learn that ” This year, the fairs brought together more than 270 galleries from 43 countries to showcase contemporary and historic art. Significant collectors and representatives from leading museums were also in attendance. This fair has a reputation for showcasing important works and has a growing global influence. Frieze is a central meeting point in the art market, attracting visitors from more than 110 countries” and that “Strong Sales and Global Interest Bring Frieze London 2024” (so say Artlyst this morning, I’ll read more than their headline later whe nthis is done).

We haven’t got to the Gagosian booth yet, the big dog booth, surely we should have come to that one by now?  Last year they rather let us down with those Hirst jizz paintings, before that there was the year Sterling Ruby and the Gagosian save it all with the help of Joyce Pensato’s giant Mickey, and there was that, oh no time to look back, here comes the Gagosian both, we can see those pieces, those Carol Bove installations, we had seen the advance publicity…

“Bove’s installation comprises a group of nine approximately ten-foot-tall abstract sculptures titled Grove I–Grove IX. Each slender, vertically oriented form incorporates a chain, a painted disc, or one of the artist’s now-familiar painted and partially crumpled square-profile stainless-steel tubes, each of which has been attached to a cluster of raw mild steel fragments. Bove conceived the new sculptures with both indoor and outdoor settings in mind, and with the expectation that, in the latter case, viewers’ perceptions of them would change along with the seasons, the treated and untreated elements of each one advancing or receding visually in accordance with ambient environmental coloration. While distinguishing the natural from the digital does not usually pose a problem, these works contrast the former—in the shape of raw steel, or of steel painted so that it blends in with its environment—with the vividly colored tubes’ and discs’ occasionally “digital” appearance of flawlessness. The artificiality of the fair booth further challenges our perception of these distinctions”.    

Actually now you mention “digital” it does kind of look like it was all put together to look good on digital medial, on Instagram feeds, on line, those colours are bold, striking, and I did ask the guy pushing the blue manual carpet sweeper hoover thing around them when I encountered his for a second time on Friday’s return visit, and yes he has been employed just by Gagosian (or was it the artist?) just to walk around the nice yellow and green installations when clearly he didn’t need to in terms of keeping the carpet clean. Actually he got rather pissy when I asked him, like he had been discovered or something, he was a positive if largely unnoticed and maybe unintentional part of the performance though, I’ll post him on YouTube later, hey, it was a great piece of performance art.  

Hey, I kind of like the giant Gagosian gallery organisation, I like their weekly newsletters and their online presence, I like going to their London shows although I hardly ever feel the need to mention them. Rather like Frieze itself, the gallery doesn’t hide what it kind of all is about with all those tentacles it has spread out over the globe these days, did they hold up in terms of being the big dog this year though? Well who cares what I think, but hey, I think I liked those big Carol Cove pieces that kind of demand to be walked up to and then walked around and looked at from different angles, there is a kind of “poetic use of artifacts and materials including found objects and industrial hardware”, do like the rhythm of it all, but then I stand and watch for a bit, and no on is looking at them, no one is really walking around them, people are talking to each other in the middle of them, talking in the phones in the calming space Gagosian have provided – actually I really like them, the more I think about it the more and more I like the pieces, the whole installation, the space, the man with the blue hoover, the chains, the yellows, the greens – not that Gagosian or anyone care much what I think, certainly Hirst doesn’t, he’s only ever said two words to me and the second one was “off”,but I think these Carol Bove pieces are wonderful, a return to form from Gagosian in the middle of a fair that overall does feel a lot more rewarding than it did last year. On we go…   

 And yes indeed, on we go, Part Five in a moment, now we’re motoring, we’ll sleep tomorrow and maybe proof read after that… (sw)

Frieze London and Frieze Masters ended on Sunday October 13th 2024 (hey, we put up several pieces while the event was still on, don’t be moaning at us, we’ve said far more about the actual than most)

Do as always, click on an image to enlarge and see the whole thing or to run the slide show (more titles to be added in part five, it was a long day, it has been a long week, and we haven’t thought about covering all the amazing things, the treats at Frieze Masters…)