The highlights then, the pick of the week or the nine or ten days that made up London’s Frieze Week 2024…
But first, a thought or two and then in came all the sales figures and the self-congratulating reports and as someone else said, “the function of art now is to avoid frightening or shocking or, God forbid, exciting anyone” but that’s last year’s Ten Frieze Week Highlights feature opening line and once again it feels like we’ve still been reading far more about the business of art rather then the actual art itself over the last week and a bit. Apparently 90,000 people attended Frieze London or Frieze Masters over the five days that both fairs were on, numbers up a bit on last year and once again those sales reports are eye watering, they’d be depressing if, as artists, we gave a shit about the prices and this is mostly a cut ‘n paste of last year’s editorial as the press releases for the next stops on the never-ending circus ride come flooding in. All off to Paris, people at galleries are asking in all seriousness if we are going like we naturally would be, have they no clue how the other 99% live? Climate change? Financial crisis? What? Hey, never mind that, sales are up.
Frieze London wasn’t quite as conservative as last year, not quite, there was good art at the fair, of course there was, but was there anything really that dangerous or daring? Was it nearly mostly almost all rather playing it conservatively safe again? Hey, sales were up, “Sales were robust, with reports of high-value works selling throughout the week. Dealers were optimistic, citing a renewed energy in the market. Several significant galleries reported that blue-chip pieces and emerging artists attracted strong interest, with some works selling almost immediately”.
“Blue chip pieces” yeah right!
Enough of blue chips, where were the disrupters or at least the disruption? If only there had been blue chips or blue ice cream, cut to the chaise and the art and the proof reading is still in the pudding though and there’s no time for custard and what to make of Frieze week again this year? And what of the alternatives? There was The Other Art Fair again but that has always looked like a rather artist-unfriendly not very alternative thing and at least Frieze are honest about the way they do things, there’s no pretence with Frieze, it is what it says on the tin and doesn’t pretend otherwise and anyway, still not that comfortable about events in Trumans Brewery after the way they’ve been treating the Brick Lane community in recent years. Sure art and artists need to be part of communities, respectful to those communities? I guess There was that Minor Attractions thing, we did have a look, we didn’t say anything much about it, make of that what you will, you know the review policy around here. Where were the real alternatives? Where were the challenging things like that thing that beautifully raw thing that happened over in Docklands a few years back? Or even those car park shows that are so long long gone now? Moniker never really did it for me, the very conservative business of street art or urban art or whatever you want to call it, but hey, even that seems long gone now. Ten years ago last weekend we were all in a car park, that all fizzled out with the white lines of the parking places when it could and should have been so much more. Truth is there really was a lack of any real excitement or any kind of alternatives anywhere during Freeze week this year, the few that there were appeared as conservative and by the book as Frieze itself, there surely really really needs to be something more, it all seems so fractured, so polite.
Hey, Frieze London 2024 happened, most of the big name galleries played it safe, most rolled out the old names as they congratulated themselves, meanwhile the smaller galleries at the actual main event of the fair were mostly very (very) conservative, but then way too many of the new breed of galleries, however much that might talk it, are actually walking it very conservative way. Where is the bite? Where’s the bad behaviour?
But there was good art, of course there was, enough of the editorial, there was, in amongst it all, some very very rewarding art. Here come the highlights, our highlights, the best of what we saw, and we did a lot, to repeat things again, if there were 270 galleries from more than 43 countries and if I saw most of them then at a guess, that’s at least 3000 pieces of art at both Frieze London and Frieze Masters, (if we’re averaging about ten or eleven pieces per gallery and some galleries did show way way more than a dozen pieces), and then there was all the other art fairs last week, there was those six galleries including The Approach here in East London and that Collapse show over in Peckham last Saturday, there was all the art in a dozen or so galleries on Sunday’s so called East End Day, some more on Monday and a quick dash t othe West End on Tuesday evening after an day when Mixtape was being put together and opened, and there was those five hours in Frieze followed by the sculptures on Wednesday, there was Cork Street and that Ken Currie opening and that The excellent Peter Buggenhout show at Holtermann Fine Art (that needs to be covered in a moment) and all the others in the surrounding area and another twenty or so galleries on Thursday evening, and then back to Frieze and then Frieze Masters on Friday for hours and hours (and hours), then a last look at the show at Guts Gallery here in Hackney on Saturday afternoon along with a couple of other spaces, and then an almost art free day and seaside treats with Cardiacs in Brighton on Sunday, although there there were #43Leaves pieces left and now you mention it there were four or five galleries that couldn’t be passed without a look during the day by the seaside before an early morning rush back to town, more about that later and shall we have a full stop now? Miraculously, I didn’t go anywhere near a gallery yesterday, I have been to a meeting at one this morning though and today, Tuesday, well no I didn’t go to any more galleries today (actually I shall probably hold off for a couple of days unless something really demands I go, there are hundreds of e.mails from galleries that have landed here in the last week that remain unopened). I think we might have looked at more than 5000 pieces of art in real time and real life over the so called Frieze week….
There was good art, of course there was, enough of the editorial, there was, in amongst it all, some very very rewarding art. Here come the highlights, our highlights, the best of what we saw, here come the highlights from the week (and a bit) just gone…
The the obligatory top ten list (at last)
1: Lee Bae and that very (very) black wooden sculpture that you so want to touch, that giant wooden piece that’s actually a bronze and his pulling us into the abysses of that blackness as you walk around it again and again, his different ways of exploring the same subject that Johyun Gallery from Busan, Seoul were showing at Frieze this year. The big big sculpture, big in so many ways, that Brushstroke Sculpture (a bronze edition of three) that you just want to spend the whole day with, his blurred lines somewhere between very big drawings, painting, charcoal, those panels that play some kind of support act to that sculpture and turn the whole booth into what really is a powerfully rewarding installation…
“Based in Seoul and Paris, Lee Bae focuses on the expressive potential of charcoal as a medium” – he really has won Frieze, he’s also got some work in Frieze Masters as we are to later discover, but it was the piece(s) in Frieze itself – okay no, no one won, art is not a vote or an award or a competition, Lee Bae’s work excited me most this year though, art was the winner and I could have stood looking at that black charcoal bronze for hours and hours (and hours), I walked around it again and again, it was jsut wonderful, thank you Lee. Actually I did thank him at the time, he just smiled, neither of us had to say too much more, we both smiled…
2: Jo Messer‘s panels, are we going to call them panels? A big piece of work, several big pieces of work, an offering that demands your time, an offering from the New York artist…
An offering presented by 56 Henry – that’s the gallery name, it makes you think of Hoxton’s No Parking don’t it, or that place way out in that vast building in Leytonstone where that lens based artist had that show, Photos of Other People’s Photos, you know the place, that one time car repair shop still covered in oil stains, that place where Bethany the Gallerina worked (that William Boyd was on about). Anyway, 56 Henry are presenting Jo Messer and all those layers of narratives, her blurring, is that the Last Supper in there in the layers of beautiful colour that I can’t photograph, the line between, hang on – “The artist will present three new works; two triptychs and a polyptych. Panels in disparate colours will be strung together, each one echoing the last as the figures blur into a frenzied abstraction” – I added the u to colors there just so it reads properly, don’t come over here dropping your letters from the King’s English. I love these pieces, I love that I can’t quite see where one ends and the next one starts, that the layers needs to be searched through, that the lines are delicious, that bodies are implied, many things are implied, so much in there, nothing obvious…
This is the thing about Frieze, whatever you or indeed I might be thinking about the whole thing, whatever we might be thinking, there’s always something, there’s always several things, there almost always enough art to make it worth the time and effort and yes there’s whole debates to have, I’ll do that tomorrow, right now I still have Jo Messers big pieces in my head, I have those layers, I still have Peter Uka’s brilliant people paintings of Lady May and the others, I have that blackness of Lee Bae, that Lee Bae sculpture is so powerful, his charcoal… love these Jo Messer pieces, love the layers, my photos are rubbish, they’re far more alive than any photos will have you believe they are. Those Jo Messer pieces really stood out, had to go back for more on the Friday, had to spend more time just looking at them, there’s real guts here…
3: Collapse – Back at the very start week, over in Peckham – Collapse at Peckham’s Safehouse One, another rather powerful rather rewarding artist-led group show as we head into Frieze Week… A short sharp weekend blink and you miss it artist-led group show over in South London to start the whole week off and I’m not if we saw anything better, the link there will take you to more about it, and that’s the think, never mind the hype of Frieze Week, these shows go on every week. I adore Kika Sroka-Miller and the way she uses paint, the way she approaches paint, the nuance, the hints, actually I really like her sense of colour, her palette is just a little different, pieces you can get lost in for a moment or two. I’d never heard of Paul Sullivan before and that Nagasiddhi fish is jsut wonderful. The show in the other part of Peckham’s Safehouse was rather refreshing as well – Tracy McBride, Elemental at Safehouse Two, Peckham, London, SE15 – You would think a show in a house in Peckham, South East London, a rather fallen down part of the capital city, wouldn’t be the place for this, it is though…
4: Tracey Emin at White Cube – Well yes, it had been open for a few weeks already but it was billed and timed to be part of Frieze Week and well – Tracey Emin, I followed you to the end, opening night at White Cube Bermondsey – it isn’t loud, it isn’t dramatic (although it obviously is), it is almost hushed, intimate, I can’t say beautiful but those lines and the way she moves paint, the sense of the loaded brush and the energy spent…
Not sure this list is any particular order besides the first one, that black black sculpture really was my favourite thing
5: The Leonora Carrington piece, Dancer in the sculpture park – ORGAN: Frieze Week – A walk around Frieze Sculpture, Regent’s Park and works by Leonora Carrington, Theaster Gates, Zanele Muholi, Yoshitomo Nara and more…
6: on to Stéphanie Saadé and those travels of here and now and her pieces look intriguing and then you clue into who she is and where both her and the gallery showing her work, Marfa, are from. Born in 1983 in Lebanon, Stéphanie Saadé lives and works “between Beirut and Paris. Her work develops a language of suggestion, playing with poetics and…” …the encounter of … le chemin du retour, a map of good memories, portraits of places. A gallery from The Lebanon, and all these tickets and stubs and price stickers and labels that we all collect and paste in sketch books and things, but this is a gallery from Beirut and where are those price tickets and receipts from, who’s lives these are, who put those stickers of those items in the first place, who worked in those theatres… and then on you go, looking at art, when who knows what’s happening in the Middle East right now.
“On August 4th, 2020 Beirut was decimated by a criminally negligent bomb resulting in over 200 deaths, 6,000 seriously injured; and 300,000 people left without homes. This unimaginable tragedy took place in the port, the heart of Beirut. The neighbourhood where we have lived and worked for the past five years was destroyed, including Marfa’s gallery space. On May 21, 2021, the gallery reopened its space with a group show titled Water, reuniting all the artists of the gallery…”
It does feel like more heads are buried in even more sand than ever this year, Climate change, oil, Ukraine, Palestine, Israel, giant art fairs circling the world, we have said this already, but it does need repeating (apparently there was some kind of protest outside on the Saturday morning, don’t know who or what, nothing was seen on the days we were there), was there any mention of Climate Change this yes besides that tiny unexplained to most logos on the gallery signs. I mean, should these fairs even be happening? But then getting to inteact with a gallery like Marfa gallery, nothing is as black and white as it might be. i’m reminded we have covered Marfa on these pages before, they were a bit of a standout at Condo at the start of his year with that small Talar Aghbashian show in Annex at The Approach – ORGAN THING: Exploring the East London galleries of Condo 2024 and a few more along the way, Talar Aghbashian at The Approach, Michael Dean at Herald Street and well…
We should give an honoury mention to the man with the blue carpet sweeper who looked after the carpet in the Gagosian booth at Frieze all week The blue of the sweeper was an import part of it all
7: Carol Bove and the big dog booth at the fair that was Gagosian. Last year they rather let us down with those Hirst jizz paintings, before that there was the year Sterling Ruby and the Gagosian saved 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, up ahead of us, 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.
8: Susie Green and another show that had already open and was very much open during Frieze week, it did demand another visit – Susie Green’s Play Time at East London’s Union Gallery – they do demand a smile and yes, the colours are far far brighter than those that usually fill the darker world of dominance and submission.. Do like this rather informally formal gallery in these almost secret back streets and we did recommend this show, one of our five on the week it opened, it looked like it would be fun, Susie Green’s work always looks like fun, we’re rushiing over from other openings in other places….
Susie Green’s work looks playful, a little more that just that though, she does kind of play with the viewer – “Green’s work often has an amped-up, biographical form, with commanding characters taking up space unapologetically. Throughout her work, empowerment through dress, fetish, and disguise returns as a regular preoccupation, with bodies adorned in preparation for scenarios of pleasure, abandon, and release. Figures are shapeshifting and expansive, often appearing on the brink of transcending the confines of their skin or melting into contained worlds…” – the words from the gallery do kind of tell you, well no, the images do the telling, the words kind of back it up what you already read on the canvases on the wall.
And here we are in this small white cube in the back streets of one of the not so edgy parts of Bethnal Green. Four very white walls with mostly large canvases, big images, with play, with images that play, ideas? A scenario or two? Does it depend on how you read them? Submissively maybe? They are powerful, fluid – fluid in the way they’re painted, in the way the paint at some point was so so wet. They are playful paintings, not heavy, not demanding – they do demand a smile and yes, the colours are far far brighter than those that usually fill the world of dominance and submission, the dark reds and blacks you usually find, Ms Green’s offering is an unconventional one, those high heels and ball gags come with soft watery edges and those bright washy watery colours, she’s come with her own set of rules, her own way to play… the link at the top of the Susie piece takes you to the full review, oh here’s the link again
Union Gallery is found at 94 Teesdale Street, London, E2 6PU. The gallery is open midday until 6pm Tuesday to Saturday. Susie Green‘s exhibition runs until 19th October 2024.
9: And there was that much anticipated Ken Currie opening on the Thursday night of the week – Ken Currie’s The Crossing, dark drama on Cork Street, big paintings, people’s extremes, that horse…
Not quite so big a show as his last one and kind of crammed into the Cork Street home of Flowers rather than their much missed much much bigger much more theatrical East London Kingsland Road space. It is still a big show, his paintings always seem big and not just in terms of the size of the canvas, although his canvas is pretty much always big. The Crossing is a proper painting exhibition and like we said last time back in 2022, who paints like this in this day and age?
“We are delighted to announce a solo exhibition, The Crossing, by the acclaimed Scottish artist Ken Currie” shouted the gallery, “People of the Sea. People on the Edge. People at Extremes. Contested Land. Crossing the Sea. Eviction. Evasion. Evacuation. Displacement. Dispossession. Destitution” said the artist. Last time it was rich dark reds, this times its inky blues that are almost black, it does still feel religious, it does feel mysteriously otherly, dark, not for strangers, the edges of a big country, an unknown archipelago, characterised by its desolate and barren islands and towering sea stacks. It could be the Outer Hebrides during the darker periods of the year, it could be somewhere further out, it could e now, it could be five hundred years ago. This time it feels almost like a land totally of his invention, not so much an unforgiving place, more a place that you or I don’t really want to venture to if we can help it, not a place for strangers. And tonight of course there’s a big turnout, many have made a point of coming to the opening night, I admit I was eager, I couldn’t wait for the weekend and some kind of quieter time, I had to hotfoot it (or hot Lizzy line it) to the West End, impatient, in need, seems from the conversations, I’m not the only one, it does feel like an event and of course none of us can see the paintings properly through the dark shapes of people in the crowded gallery. The lighting is low, the lighting is just right for this show, for these works, were all in shadows, the dark paintings surrounding us, a stage set…
Evocative, otherly, a place of their own, these new works, almost a world of their own, a place of folklore, dark, of ways handed down, of ritual, and well read the rest of the review here, we posted it earlier this week
Flowers Cork Street is found at 21 Cork Street, London, W1S 3LZ. The Gallery is open Monday to Saturday, 10am until 6pm. The Ken Currie exhibition goes on until 16th November
And there was that excellent Peter Buggenhout show at Holtermann Fine Art in Cork Street that was jsut up the street from the Ken Currie show that we haven’t even got around to writing about yet. That Peter Buggenhout show is a breath of fresh air right now in the middle of Cork Street circus
10: Well we could say number 10 was the whole of Frieze Masters and as I estimated, I suspect I looked at a ridiculous five thousand or more pieces of art in real life during the insanity of Frieze week, and gawd knows how many more were looked at on line, I kind of need to write these Organ pieces just to remind myself and to go back to later on. It really is a stupid week, a disrespectful week in so many ways. As an artist, in terms of the art, Frieze and the week is both exciting and frustrating, it is annoying, confounding, soul-destroying, maybe a tiny bit inspiring in terms of the private moments shared with the actual art or an artist or two. I wish I could un-hear some of the conversations from the week, un-read some of the things I’ve read, but then I did see Lee Bae‘s work and that really really comes to life when you actually see it for real and there were wonderful conversations about his art, I did stand within an inch or two of a couple of Mary Beale paintings from around 1640 and you can’t really appreciate them without seeing them in the flesh and just standing there almost in her shoes for a moment or two (and I haven’t even attempted to cover the many many wonderful things seen at Frieze Masters yet – Frieze London is the hard work, the hard miles, Frieze Masters is where the real treats were waiting, however much I may want to be living for the art of right here right now, I do love all that history at Frieze Masters, things that may never been seen again). Any yes, we do get lots of negative comment about us even covering Frieze, some real vitriolic comment – hey we were covering the art, and if you can’t get emotional standing in front of a Mary Beale portrait then what are we doing here? If you can get excited walking around a giant Lee Bae bronze or just standing looking at looking at a Peter Uka painting or the beautiful guts of those Jo Messer pieces then what is the point. I’m richer in terms of experiences and the art seen at the end of the week than I was at the start…
And yes Peter Uka and that Lady May painting inparticular deserves to me mentioned in the round up and those two big red Chang Ling paintings and those Nour Jaouda layers of leaves and that Berta Fischer sculpture and and that big Joe Bradley painting and the Theaster Gates piece and the Leonora Carrington sculpture that really was magical out in the park as part of the Frieze Sculpture that goes on out there and free for all in Regent’s Park until October 27th and it is easy to be cynical about the whole week and the money and the ticket price and the politics but there was lots and lots of really good art…
Further reading
Oh and the middle of it all we opened Mixtape No.8 – Cultivate presents Mixtape No.8 – an online art exhibition…
THE ORGAN 
9 responses to “ORGAN: Frieze Week, the obligatory top ten, Lee Bae’s blackness, Jo Messer, Collapse back at the very start week, over in Peckham, Stéphanie Saadé and Mafra, Susie Green at Union, that Ken Currie opening at Flowers, Carol Bove and…”
[…] ORGAN: Frieze Week, the obligatory top ten, Lee Bae’s blackness, Jo Messer, Collapse back at the v… […]
[…] Bove and the big dog booth at the fair that was Gagosian was one of our Ten this year. Last year they rather let us down with those Hirst jizz paintings, before that there was the year […]
[…] ORGAN: Frieze Week, the obligatory top ten, Lee Bae’s blackness, Jo Messer, Collapse back at the v… […]
[…] 3: Lee Bae and that very (very) black wooden sculpture that you so want to touch, that giant wooden piece that’s actually a bronze and his pulling us into the abysses of that blackness as you walk around it again and again, his different ways of exploring the same subject that Johyun Gallery from Busan, Seoul are showing at Frieze this year. The big big sculpture, big in so many ways, that Brushstroke Sculpture (a bronze edition of three) that you just want to spend the whole day with, his blurred lines somewhere between very big drawings, painting, charcoal, those panels that play some kind of support act to that sculpture and turn the whole booth into what really is a powerfully rewarding installation… “Based in Seoul and Paris, Lee Bae focuses on the expressive potential of charcoal as a medium”, he really has won Frieze, he’s also got some work in Frieze Masters we are later to discover – okay no, no one won, art is not a vote or an award or a competition, Lee Bae’s work excited me most this year though… – Frieze Week, the obligatory top ten, Lee Bae’s blackness, Jo Messer, Collapse back at the very sta… […]
[…] 3: Lee Bae and that very (very) black wooden sculpture that you so want to touch, that giant wooden piece that’s actually a bronze and his pulling us into the abysses of that blackness as you walk around it again and again, his different ways of exploring the same subject that Johyun Gallery from Busan, Seoul are showing at Frieze this year. The big big sculpture, big in so many ways, that Brushstroke Sculpture (a bronze edition of three) that you just want to spend the whole day with, his blurred lines somewhere between very big drawings, painting, charcoal, those panels that play some kind of support act to that sculpture and turn the whole booth into what really is a powerfully rewarding installation… “Based in Seoul and Paris, Lee Bae focuses on the expressive potential of charcoal as a medium”, he really has won Frieze, he’s also got some work in Frieze Masters we are later to discover – okay no, no one won, art is not a vote or an award or a competition, Lee Bae’s work excited me most this year though… – Frieze Week, the obligatory top ten, Lee Bae’s blackness, Jo Messer, Collapse back at the very sta… […]
[…] 3: Lee Bae and that very (very) black wooden sculpture that you so want to touch, that giant wooden piece that’s actually a bronze and his pulling us into the abysses of that blackness as you walk around it again and again, his different ways of exploring the same subject that Johyun Gallery from Busan, Seoul are showing at Frieze this year. The big big sculpture, big in so many ways, that Brushstroke Sculpture (a bronze edition of three) that you just want to spend the whole day with, his blurred lines somewhere between very big drawings, painting, charcoal, those panels that play some kind of support act to that sculpture and turn the whole booth into what really is a powerfully rewarding installation… “Based in Seoul and Paris, Lee Bae focuses on the expressive potential of charcoal as a medium”, he really has won Frieze, he’s also got some work in Frieze Masters we are later to discover – okay no, no one won, art is not a vote or an award or a competition, Lee Bae’s work excited me most this year though… – Frieze Week, the obligatory top ten, Lee Bae’s blackness, Jo Messer, Collapse back at the very sta… […]
[…] 3: Lee Bae and that very (very) black wooden sculpture that you so want to touch, that giant wooden piece that’s actually a bronze and his pulling us into the abysses of that blackness as you walk around it again and again, his different ways of exploring the same subject that Johyun Gallery from Busan, Seoul are showing at Frieze this year. The big big sculpture, big in so many ways, that Brushstroke Sculpture (a bronze edition of three) that you just want to spend the whole day with, his blurred lines somewhere between very big drawings, painting, charcoal, those panels that play some kind of support act to that sculpture and turn the whole booth into what really is a powerfully rewarding installation… “Based in Seoul and Paris, Lee Bae focuses on the expressive potential of charcoal as a medium”, he really has won Frieze, he’s also got some work in Frieze Masters we are later to discover – okay no, no one won, art is not a vote or an award or a competition, Lee Bae’s work excited me most this year though… – Frieze Week, the obligatory top ten, Lee Bae’s blackness, Jo Messer, Collapse back at the very sta… […]
[…] 3: Lee Bae and that very (very) black wooden sculpture that you so want to touch, that giant wooden piece that’s actually a bronze and his pulling us into the abysses of that blackness as you walk around it again and again, his different ways of exploring the same subject that Johyun Gallery from Busan, Seoul are showing at Frieze this year. The big big sculpture, big in so many ways, that Brushstroke Sculpture (a bronze edition of three) that you just want to spend the whole day with, his blurred lines somewhere between very big drawings, painting, charcoal, those panels that play some kind of support act to that sculpture and turn the whole booth into what really is a powerfully rewarding installation… “Based in Seoul and Paris, Lee Bae focuses on the expressive potential of charcoal as a medium”, he really has won Frieze, he’s also got some work in Frieze Masters we are later to discover – okay no, no one won, art is not a vote or an award or a competition, Lee Bae’s work excited me most this year though… – Frieze Week, the obligatory top ten, Lee Bae’s blackness, Jo Messer, Collapse back at the very sta… […]
[…] 3: Lee Bae and that very (very) black wooden sculpture that you so want to touch, that giant wooden piece that’s actually a bronze and his pulling us into the abysses of that blackness as you walk around it again and again, his different ways of exploring the same subject that Johyun Gallery from Busan, Seoul are showing at Frieze this year. The big big sculpture, big in so many ways, that Brushstroke Sculpture (a bronze edition of three) that you just want to spend the whole day with, his blurred lines somewhere between very big drawings, painting, charcoal, those panels that play some kind of support act to that sculpture and turn the whole booth into what really is a powerfully rewarding installation… “Based in Seoul and Paris, Lee Bae focuses on the expressive potential of charcoal as a medium”, he really has won Frieze, he’s also got some work in Frieze Masters we are later to discover – okay no, no one won, art is not a vote or an award or a competition, Lee Bae’s work excited me most this year though… – Frieze Week, the obligatory top ten, Lee Bae’s blackness, Jo Messer, Collapse back at the very sta… […]