Shall we go on with all this? Has the point already passed? Was there ever one? Part Four came to a conclusion with that Alvaro Barrington piece that certainly demanded attention a little more than most things at this year’s fair did. This is still (mostly) an exercise in cherry picking, pulling out the highlights and mostly hiding our Cynical Smile t-shirt. This is now becoming way too much of a piece and like we already said, If you missed Part One or Two or Three or indeed Four may we politely suggest you go back and start by standing on that buffed floor of the tube train that was under out feet as we made our way to the Fair. We are trying to focus on the actual art here, although most commentators do seem to be focused on the business of it all for really that is what Frieze is all about, the whole sordid business of art…
And to repeat by way of introduction to this page if you haven’t already read the previous parts of this piece: more than five hours carefully following those numbers up above the endless booths; meticulous, relentless, thorough, determined, looking for the cherries. We did say back in Part One that we know we could easily just post a couple of thousands scathing (attention seeking?) words about all the bad art, the unassuming uninspiring disconnecting artlessness of so so much of it, or alternatively we could just assume you know there was going to be a lot of not really worth a mention art and let’s just get on with the cherry picking of the best bits. On we go…
Candace Hill Montgomery is over there, well her spear with a rather bright mixed-media textile piece hanging from it is over there: “An 81-year-old New York legend, Candace Hill-Montgomery, an artist who’s work spans painting, photography, installation, assemblage, textiles and writing…” a powerful mix of crafted chaos and a piece presented by London’s Hollybush Gardens, a piece that stood out a little, well rather a lot really…
Singapore’s STPI have a lot of noisy colour at the front of their booth, the noise is made by Aaron Curry, it seems to be popular in terms of selfies. Who are all these people who walk around in their designer clothes with their Champaign glasses, you do suspect that for some, this is their one interaction with art in any given year. Actually does anyone here ever go rooting around back street galleries, the artist-led shows, quite obviously the designer clothes and Champaign glasses brigade don’t, but does anyone here? And yes I am including the people who run the galleries in that question. And no, really, no! Please don’t hand me your camera and ask me to take your photo in front of the damn art you haven’t really looked at for gawdsake!
There’s a couple of Dawn Ng paintings, well painterly mixed media pieces really, over in Kate Macgarry‘s booth that are worth more that the moments most can afford to them in here. Fellow London gallery Union Pacific have another rather strong Nour Jaouda piece (we have enjoyed her work at Frieze before back in 2024 – Five from the Fair, Lee Bae’s black abyss, Nour Jaouda’s layers, those two Chang Ling paintings, Jo Messer’s intrigue, Peter Uka’s hints and a bit of Peter Buggenhout at Holtermann Fine Art as we get going on it all… )
Nour Jaouda has another big piece on the Union Pacific wall again this year, a piece that at first glance looks like textile work, it is more a textural work, a sculptural piece called A few winds away from the place I know – a coming together of Hand-dyed cotton textile and steel so the label tells us (and it is good to see everything in Frieze is clearly unobtrusively labelled, something the current rather annoying just-out-of-London-art-school crowd really need to take onboard with their unhelpful labels-are-so-uncool mantras. I don’t know how many artist-led group shows I’ve been to in the last couple of years where I’ve come away with no idea in terms of who’s work I might have been looking at)
That Nour Jaouda piece really is a beautiful thing to just look at before you even start to think about searching it a little more deeply (I am a sucker for a hand dyed piece of cotton, especially when it looks like it might involved natural dye processes)
On we go, there’s a not that impressive still life of an apple over there, why? It probably sold on the first day for half a million.
Onward, looking for the next cherry to pick, impossible not to do a bit of people watching, trying not to hear some of the comments (did I really just hear that? How can I unhear that?!)
The heads down in the laptops of the gallerinas is becoming amusing now, the men in their regulation suits, shirt a little bit rebelliously unbuttoned so we know they’re one of us, that they’re on art’s side – no tie of course, brightly coloured socks, the uniform. What are they all doing on those laptops that’s so important? Fly half way around the world to spend the week mostly avoiding eye contact…
More edges of paintings. Now there are two paintings in Night Gallery‘s booth (a Los Angeles gallery) that probably don’t look like much when photographed, they are in fact wonderful, as are their edges. The work of Atlanta-based artist Hasani Sahlehe, lots of deliciously thick acrylic paint on raw canvas, beautifully considered edges, glowing blocks and stripes, colours that meet in such a crisp exciting way – clean, paint really generously laid on. I so wanted to touch them, stroke them, I very nearly asked if I could, The two pieces do look good in photographs, but nothing like how gorgeously delicious they are in real life. When you allow yourself to just stand there in front of them and shut everything else out you can really (really) enjoy that paint, the think texture of the paint, the pureness, the life that a photograph sucks out. Now those two Hasani Sahlehe paintings were two glorious moments….
And that underwear on the floor in the corner of the Night Gallery booth, well I didn’t know until I looked things up just now, that the piece, by Reza Aramesh, a piece called Action 478, Oukacha Rehabilitation Centre, 28 July 2016, Progression #231 (2026) is actually hand-carved and polished Bianco Michelangelo marble. I just thought there was some underwear in the corner. Brilliant! (I shall leave that information with you and go do some more research on the piece and the artist later, I told you already I was writing this piece more for me than I am for you). Rather like that Andy Woll triptych that Night Gallery are showing as well although it looks like there was originally four paintings – Rubble (Four Seasons) – oil on canvas. 119x361cm (2026)
On to the Richard Saltoun Gallery booth and the still rather provocative Helen Chadwick‘s Piss Flowers (1991-92). Helen might have passed away some thirty years ago now (at the age of just 42), her work still resonates, those flowers were so good to see…
And yes, I did go back for another linger in front of those Hasani Sahlehe that I probably won’t ever see get to see in real life again before going on with whatever I was going on with. How many hours has it been now?
Are we anywhere near the end of it yet? Is any of this healthy and why is there a big booth full of what appears to be little more than random photographs and small paintings all the same size (it rather looks like someone’s really really random Instagram feed) and why are they all in those cheaper than cheap clip frames that no one ever uses? Actually, in here, in here with all the bling and the champagne and the darling-will-you-be-in-Paris, and the will-I-see-you-in-Miami they kind of work for a moment (until you really look and then they don’t) – maybe it was the purple and white wall, the installation? Are the actual things in the (cheap) frames interesting enough to go have a look at what London’s Frith Street Gallery have to say about them on their website? Probably not. I did though, just for you. AI tells is we were looking at “a room-sized installation combining 210 photographs and paintings arranged rhythmically around the walls above and below an intense line of color… AI can’t spell colour. An installation called Entre Pasos – Between Steps by Juan Uslé then – I don’t know why I took so many photos of it? Maybe the meeting of the purple and the white? On we go…
And there’s a painting of a horse and another of a nose and a whatever that is and to repeat, just because I took a photograph, it doesn’t mean I liked it, the photos at the foot are there to add some flavour. I mean, you go back and look at the hundreds (and hundreds of phone clogging) photos you took and think why did I? And damn, did I miss Pia Camil’s paintings that Mexico City’s OMR Gallery were showing? Damn, her current show at London’s Elizabeth Xi Bauer Gallery has been one of the highlights of the last couple of weeks, a show that is only one of many sides that all make for a compelling whole… I really wanted to see more of Pia Camil’s work in the flesh. I did see and photograph a lot of paintings that I’m not bothering to share on these pages, we are still mostly cherry picking, I am annoyed about Pia Camil, things are getting careless five or so hours in….
Those big Nate Lowman keys on the wall of the David Zwirner booth look very 1990s with their acid house smileys. We are now in the big dog area at the back of the fair so it would seem, we did already point out (back in Part One of this overlong piece) that the Gagosians and such are now at the back, that you need to walk through the whole thing to get to them rather than having them hog the limelight of the entrance, this is rather a good thing, Frieze should be applauded for that move at least (and yes, as already said, did miss Stephen Friedman this year. Whatever went on with the collapse of that operation, just in terms of the art that the gallery would show both here at Frieze and in their big London space, it is a big miss, might not be fashionable to say so, really couldn’t give too hoots about that, that’s a big hole that urgently needs filling in Cork Street).
For a brief moment, rather ridiculously, I did think the big blank wall on the outside of Gagosian’s big booth was some kind of radical comment. No, it was just the outside walls left blank, well I suppose it added a little to the theatre or the anticipation, well you know, whatever you think of Gagosian, the gallery does tend to deliver in their own way (well besides those absolutely dreadful jizz paintings of Hirst’s a few years back, I wonder if any of them ever made it to a wall, are they all just in bank vaults or storage, there to be traded, never to actually be seen?). Last year it was Lauren Halsey bringing a bit of attitude, a bit of a challenge, a bit of bite… and this year, well this year the walk along the black wall and around the corner revealed, and I had avoided all press releases and everything else before hand, I deliberately wanted no idea: “For Frieze London 2026, Gagosian presents six major new, large-scale paintings by Albert Oehlen. In these works, Oehlen continues to explore the still-rich possibilities of a long-established medium and format, riffing on varied fragments, forms, and motifs…”
And well: “A champion of self-consciously amateurish “bad” painting, he infuses his work with mischievous, destabilising attitude” and would it be mischievous to say they didn’t destabilise anything that much? I mean they’re not bad or indeed “bad”, they’re not that “amateurish” however you define it. There probably is an extravagant moustache somewhere in there? What there actually is is more people. mostly in high heels, wanting to be photographed in front of one or other of the six pieces. I mean yes, there is an energy in the colour, in the activity of the artist, in the reducing of it all to an almost positive childlike (rather that “amateurish”) use of material – those marks we’d make that we just can’t get back to now however much we’d like to try to. I guess, although I don’t know why I should guess, that the twists, the sideways swipes the almost different shapes, the random colours and the endings, if these are endings, I guess it does work? Apparently they all sold on the first day (whatever the hell that means, all six off to the same warehouse in Amsterdam or Hong Kong or some such place?). So yes, the actual painting, these are I suppose the (unresolved) endings of something? Is that the concept? Paintings with no resolutions? Whatever they are, the beautiful people are posing in front of them, in front of these “ways of basing painterly decisions on a sort of self-imposed cancellation or disturbance of his own powers”
….and I’m starting to think about that much needed post-Frieze Pint. Why would you wear such impractical footwear if you were serious about walking around this monster of a fair anyway? I don’t know, I guess I kind of liked those Albert Oehlen paintings, all depends on which day you ask me if I like them or not, I guess I’m unresolved? I do wonder what he thinks of the high-heeled theatre of all this? The nonsense of it all? I wonder is anyone has ever put tracking devises in their paintings to see where they actually go? These six supposedly all sold on the first morning, I bet they’ve gone into the same storage facility next to those Hirst Jizz paintings. Time for a pint? No, we’re not finished yet, Part Six in a moment. Here’s another #43SecondFilm (sw)
Frieze London ended Yesterday, 18th October 2026 it all happened in The Regent’s Park, London, it probably will next year, although, with all that’s going on
Previously
And as always, do please click on an image to see the whole thing or to run the slide show…
