Frieze Sculpture, Regent’s Park, London, October 2025 – Is it smaller this year, does it seem a little more subtle, a touch more refined? Is this the 13th year in terms of Frieze Sculpture? It is always good, especially if you can catch it on a glorious early Autumn day alive with beautiful light just like yesterday was. Yesterday in this case was last Saturday afternoon and we really are on the brink of Frieze week now on this Monday morning after Frieze’s rather damp squib of an East London Day yesterday – yesterday proper, Saturday was spent on the exploring of Frieze Sculpture alongside other things like that car crash at Newport Street, Sunday was East London day and galleries closed when we were told they’d be open, that all comes later though, the Sculpture was excellent, let’s start the week on  good note proper in the Sunshine of the Sculpture and Regent’s Park. 

It is so easy to let Frieze Sculpture pass you by as you rush from the main fair to Masters, it is a mistake to try and take it in on the same day, if time allows and you are in the area then it is well worth just going to the park for the Sculpture and not filling your head with all the other noise from the fair. And of of course unlike the expensive ticket price of the fair itself, Frieze Sculpture in free and there for anyone who just wishes to walk around the park and view it all. It is relatively compact, you probably could walk around it all in twenty or so minutes if you didn’t linger too long at each of the pieces (some of which are well worth lingering over and just enjoying)    

“The free public display returns to The Regent’s Park, with artists including Assemble, Elmgreen and Dragset, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Erwin Wurm” says the Frierze website. Actually finding a simple list of the fifteen or so pieces on the official website isn’t that easy, where is it? I guess we’re all all expected to walk around phone in hand pointing at bloody QR codes, I guess we’re supposed to spend as much time on the actual day looking at out phones as the art (I was in a gallery full of paintings yesterday where the curator was berating for refusing to point my phone at a damn QR code to read about the paintings I was looking at, he was most irate about it). “Discover Frieze Sculpture with Bloomberg Connect. Bloomberg Connects is the Official Digital Guide to Frieze Sculpture”. No, I want to look at the sculpture, I want to walk around the sculpture, maybe exchange a word with the person next to me about a piece, maybe use my phone as camera but nothing more and then I want to go home, look at the photos I took and consider it all in my own time and space, then I need a list… I spent a glorious couple of hours in the park and now all I want is simple web page with a list of names and pieces, ah there we are, at last, finally found it, a simple list of the 14 pieces (I’ve damn well burnt my toast now, I guess we should all have a toasters operated by a phones as well? Frieze you owe me two pieces of sliced bread). 

The Sculpture Park is a delight, yes, I know that’s a bit of a throwaway thing to say, a shallow reaction when I really should be stroking my chin and expanding on it all, yes I really I should be showing the work far more respect that just throwing out what a delight it is. I should be witting about the pieces, asking questions, wondering as I re-run my wonder around it all. What is all saying? the who what and where of it all, cherry picking – Reena Saini Kallat‘s, Requiem (The Last Call), is a wonderfully inter active piece although who everyone insists on putting the sound speakers to their ears when clearly they just need to be held at a distance is rather fascinating. The rather large piece is presented by Nature Morte. From the collection of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, India (each of the fourteen pieces are presented by a gallery, Nature Morte is a gallery always worth checking out at Frieze) 

“In this artwork, Reena Saini Kallat presents the recorded sounds of extinct bird species, transmitted through two sculptural horns modelled on early 20th-century wartime listening devices. From the podium, visitors can listen to a sequence of bird calls recorded in the wild, but now only available in scientific or archival repositories.  Among the species featured are the poo-uli, last seen on the Hawaiian island of Maui in 2004; the dusky seaside sparrow, once native to Florida, confirmed extinct in 1987; and the kauaʻi ʻōʻō, whose final known song, a mating call sung by a solitary male with no partner, was recorded in 1987. These sounds are no longer part of living ecosystems but endure as traces of vanished life….”  

 Here’s another #43SecondFilm…

Oh look, Frieze Sculpture is about discovery, exploring, experiencing, sharing if you want to, solitude, just you and the art if that is your way. I don’t want to be here analysing each piece, although the giant dogo is fun and if you come at it from the right direction, quite a theatrical first encounter.  Frieze Sculpture is a rather positive experience, you can walk around and just enjoy it, or you can stand there really considering it all, there’s no pressure to really do anything other than just enjoy what is a really strong positive set of experiences in the way you choose to. As one great whole it really works, I really don’t want to pick things out even although I already have and Andy Holden and his use of old telegraph poles as totems that do indeed evoke both natural fragility and technological obsolescence for his Auguries (Lament) piece (presented by Seventeen and Hidde van Seggelen) is a relatively uncomplicated standout. David Altmejd‘s Nymph 1 Nymph 2 Nymph 3 is just in the right space at the right time echoing that Leonora Carrington piece from last year in the glowing sunshine with the the golds of the leaves and the landing ladybirds.

Hang on, I really, although I said I wouldn’t cherry pick, mention Simon Hitchens and his deliciously tactile Bearing Witness to Things Unseen piece that dates from this year, it really is a piece to walk around again and again, the sides, the ends…

“Simon Hitchens is a British sculptor whose practice investigates time, transience and the material relationship between body and landscape. His sculptures often explore the metaphysical boundaries between rock and flesh, presence and absence.  

Bearing Witness to Things Unseen is a cast of a 250-million-year-old boulder’s dawn shadow, captured on the equinox. The sculpture takes the scale of a human body and reveals a void at one end: a perfect cast of the rock’s intricate textured surface. From it, parallel striations stretch outward like rays of light, echoing the sun’s angle at daybreak. These lines are abruptly halted by a polished flat surface at the other end, where a subtle reflection emerges, placing the viewer inside the silhouette of the rock’s shadow….” 

And Burçak Bingöl‘s brilliantly engaging Unit Terrenum Rosa, also a piece from 2025 (Presented by Galeri Nev İstanbul) – “Unit Terrenum Rosa is a materially rich, site-specific sculpture by Burçak Bingöl, shaped as a one-cubic-metre block of rammed earth, embedded with ceramics. The work is formed from Cappadocia soil from Türkiye and soil collected from the Regent’s Park, which was found to contain clay. The resulting ceramic elements incorporate the images of real roses collected by the artist from her neighbourhood Beyoğlu (Istanbul) – including the Garden of the British Consulate (Pera House) and the Galata Mevlevi House – and roses from Queen Mary’s Rose Garden in the Regent’s Park. In this way, the rose, an important motif in Turkish decorative arts, transforms into a cross-cultural connection. The work rethinks culture and nature through the material of ceramics, its decorative elements, and its connection to earth.   

The sculpture’s geometric form – a perfect cube – offers a striking contrast to the organic irregularity of the surrounding landscape. It disrupts the natural terrain, acting both as a monument to place and a kind of cross-section through the earth. By remaking the park’s flora from a blend of various soils, Unit Terrenum Rosa speaks to ideas of origin, displacement and layered histories, inviting us to reflect on how borders and environments are reassembled, reimagined and transformed—highlighting the artistic and material links across geographies”.  

And yes, it is hard to resist London collective Assemble‘s Fibredog and the fun of it all, a playful piece, a figurative structure made from trees, wood, thatch and branches, materials collected from the park itself and its surroundings, bound together in a ritual of construction. “It recalls ancient seasonal markers and folkloric effigies, standing somewhere between sculpture and communal offering”, will birds move in? Will they burn it at the end, an offering to the art gods? Are there art gods? it doesn’t feel serious enough to be an offering to the art muse. Art should just be fun sometimes maybe? Although I did say the opposite the other day at the Art Car Boot Fair…     

Oh look, fourteen or so pieces of work, fourteen pieces that really work as one whole thing, one whole experience, some of the pieces a little more obvious than others, one or two that we were maybe anticipating more from? Mostly though, strong engaging pieces and when it is good then outdoor sculpture really does engage in a slightly different way to anything else in terms of art. This is extremely good outdoor sculpture that works so well just where it is in the golds, greens and reds of the park, the right pieces in the right space at the right time of year. It all goes on until 2nd November 2025, just go enjoy it, simple as that… (sw) 

Frieze Sculpture in free to view in Regent’s Park, London, not far from Regent Park tube station and that side of the park, until until 2nd November 2025.

Previously

ORGAN: Frieze Week – Alexandre Diop’s debut at Cork Street’s Stephen Friedman Gallery is a show alive with so many exciting layers of…

ORGAN: Frieze Week – Here we go then, but where is the buzz? Well Brandon Ndife’s, Palimpsests at Holtermann Fine Art is at least a good start…

ORGAN: Frieze Week – A walk around Frieze Sculpture, Regent’s Park and works by Leonora Carrington, Theaster Gates, Zanele Muholi, Yoshitomo Nara and more…

Please do click on an image to see the whole thing or to run the probably overlong slide show… (we’ll label the images in a moment)