Frieze London 2015: The artists

For the 13th edition of Frieze Art Fair, 164 galleries from 27 countries have joined the venture of one of the busiest weeks for galleries and art lovers in London.

With the new director Victoria Siddall on board, Frieze London arrives in Regent’s Park for its 2015 edition promising to show art “from the emerging to the iconic”.

Art fairs are obviously events where to sell art, but they are also space for enjoying art, falling in love with artworks and getting inspired. Artdependence visited the fair this week and found out that the best way to talk about Frieze is through those who nurture the fair: the artists. We present a wide-ranging and extensive selection of artists through which to give our highlights about the fair.

Sol Calero

Sol Calero’s works challenge Latin American exoticised imagery at the same time that redefine cultural identities through installation and representation of icons. Her solo show presentation ‘Ciber Café' was brought to Frieze in 2014 by Laura Bartlett Gallery (London). Coinciding with her show ‘La Escuela del Sur' at Studio Voltaire, the artist has created a new drawing at the gallery stand, especially for this year’s edition. Calero was born in Venezuela in 1982 and is currently based in Berlin where she runs the project space Kinderhook & Caracas along with her husband, the artist Christopher Kline.

Sol Calero, Installation view, La Escuela del Sur, Studio Voltaire, London, 2015. Courtesy: the Artist and Laura Bartlett Gallery.

Jesse Wine

The young artist Jesse Wine (Chester, 1983) works mostly with ceramics, creating pieces that may approach multiple aspects, like the contemporary reinterpretation of art masters, autobiographical references or the use of language.

With a consistent and promising career, the artist is present in three sections of Frieze 2015. In Frieze’s Sculpture Park, Wine presents a new ceramic ‘totem pole’, he has a solo show at Limoncello gallery (London) at the Focus section and pieces at Mary Mary (Glasgow) in the main gallery section.

Jesse Wine, Limoncello Gallery, installation view. Photograph by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.

Rachel Rose

New York-based artist Rachel Rose (1986) was announced last April as the winner of the 2015 Frieze Artist Award, which gave her the opportunity to realise a major commission at the fair as part of Frieze Projects. Rose has created a scale-model of the fair tent that allows visitor to get in and experience through light and sound the sensorial perspective of the animals inhabiting The Regent’s Park.

Currently exhibiting at Serpentine Galleries, the artist’s forthcoming solo exhibitions include those at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, CAstello di Rivoli, Turin and the Aspen Museum.

Rachel Rose, Frieze Artist Award, Frieze Projects 2015. Photograph by Lewis Ronald. Courtesy of Lewis Ronald/Frieze.

Ken Okiishi

The artist presents work at Take Ninagawa (Tokyo) and a solo presentation at Pilar Corrias (London), for which he has created new pieces that include Okiishi’s most extensive incorporation of slow feedback within the series ‘gesture/data’. Addressing topics related to the new ways we have of reading memory and images through gestures, the display also shows Okiishi’s recent return to film-production. Playing with the architecture of the space and offering new experience perspectives, the painted screen televisions and sound installations are displayed on the open space of the booth, while other two video pieces are placed in narrow and long corridors.

Ken Okiishi, gesture-data (feedback), 2015. Oil Paint on flat-screen televisions, feedback .mp4 files (color, silent), 2 panels- 107.4 x 61.9 x 5.1 cm (each). Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias Gallery. 

Gary Webb

The east London gallery The Approach presents, among other artists, two pieces by Gary Webb including one of his playful and dreamful mirrored palm trees.

He had his first solo show at the gallery in 1998, a year after graduating, and from then on he has exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, Whitechapel gallery, London, Bortolamy Dayan, New York, and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Massachusetts. 

Webb plays with a wide range of industrial material to create colourful and often humorous installations and sculptures that approach the multiple relations between form and idea.

Yngve Holen

Holen was chosen by Stuart Shave/Modern Art (London) as one of the two artists to represent the gallery at Frieze (along with Mark Flood). The gallery has won the Stand Prize, which recognises an outstanding gallery presentation at Frieze London with a prize of £10,000.

The artist’s installation layers washing machines, honeycomb cardboards, model airplanes and plexiglass to build a dialogue between consumerism, new communications and engineering with the domestic sphere.

Yngve Holen Winner of the 2015 Stand Prize, Stuart Shave/Modern Art, Frieze London 2015. Photograph by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.

Camille Henrot

Represented by the Frieze’s first-time exhibitors Galerie Kamel Mennour (Paris), Camille Henrot brings new drawings to the 2015 fair edition. Through ironic and explicit portraits, Henrot sings the praises of human daily actions and pushes us to face the possibility of defeat.

Along with the drawings she presents a sculpture that, twisting around itself and through ambiguous curves, challenges the boundaries of sexuality and gender.

Camile Henrot Kamel Mennour, Frieze London 2015. Photograph by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.

Eva Kot’átková

The performance ‘Collection of Suppressed’ (2015) presents a group of old vases on a platform, which are used as containers for voices by the performers. The action works in line with Kot’átková’s approach to art, which employs gestures of openness and reticence positioning the body as an inscription and demarcation between inside and outside, figure and space.

This piece is presented by Meyer Riegger as part of Frieze Live, the art fair programme focused on performance and participatory work.

Eva Koťátková, Meyer Riegger, Live section, Frieze London 2015. Photograph by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.

Amie Siegel

For this year’s Focus section, Raphael Gygax (Migros Museum, Zurich) and Jacob Proctor (Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, University of Chicago) have curated a selection of international outstanding new galleries. Among them, Simon Preston Gallery (New York) exhibits the delicate and (in a sense) sociological work of Amie Siegel. Working with elegant aesthetics but with a highly conceptual background her solo show ‘Double negative’ is a multi-part work that explores notions of otherness, image making and architecture through Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoy and its black copy built in Canberra.

Peter McDonald

The English-Japanese artist creates parallel universes through colourful and apparently naïve drawings. Portraying bubble-faced characters he recreates normal routine actions across the globe and through time that seem to approach a new interpretation of human experiences. His Japanese roots are visible on the works as well as his inspiration from daily life.

Kate MacGarry Galery (London) has presented Peter McDonald’s solo show in the main gallery section of Frieze 2015.

Peter McDonald, Extra Time, 2014, acrylic gouache on paper, 21 x 39.5 cm. Courtesy of Kate MacGarry Gallery.

Susan Hiller

The Brussels and London based gallery MOT international brings to Frieze one of her top artists, Susan Hiller with the work ‘Rough Passage’ (2012).

The influential multimedia London based artist is well-known by her video, audio, performance and writing works including ‘Sisters of Menon’ (1972/79), ‘Dedicated to the Unknown Artists’ (1972–6), ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’ (1983-4) or ‘The J Street Project’ (2002-5). The work displayed at Frieze is part of the exploration of the relationship between painting and photography through archival dry prints that the artists started in 1982.

Rough Passage, 2012. 9 archival colour dry prints. 60 x 90 inches. 152.4 x 228.6 cms. Courtesy of the artist and MOT International.

Alicja Kwade

Although hidden in a corner of the BMW7 Series Lounge, Frieze Sounds is present again in Frieze art fair. On this occasion, along with Xaviera Simmons and Sergei Tcherepnin, Alicja Kwade’s presents ‘Grosses C’. This piece analyses how feminity is represented in Hollywood by reproducing enthusiastic women voices in a soundtrack that could be taken either from classic or pornographic films. The C in the title of the work stands for carbon, the main element of a diamond, which works as a reference for unnecessary needs in consumerist societies.

Do Ho Suh

Suh has has a notable presence in this year’s art fair with works displayed at both Lehmann Maupin (New York) and Victoria Miro (London). The latter, shows three new fabric sculpture that recreate spaces of his domestic environment. The replicas are made of coloured polyester fabric and are often reflections of places previously inhabited by the artist, making visible the characteristics of Korean and Western houses and addressing issues of identity, history, space, and memory.

Specimen Series: Refrigerator, Unit 2, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA, 2015. Polyester fabric, stainless steel wire, and display case with LED lighting. 86.73 x 45.98 x 47.44 inches (vitrine). 220.3 x 116.8 x 120.5 cm. Edition of 3 plus 1 AP.

Mira Dancy

Night Gallery (Los Angeles) presents a solo show with recent works by Mira Dancy as part of the Focus section. This new body of work is indicative of her larger painting practice that always includes female figures and has visible influences of German expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Matisse. She often starts the works by creating drawings that she will bring on to the computer applying layering techniques, an essential part of her work. The works at Frieze use a magenta and blue pallet, but other works may be created from black and white. Without being too political, the works can be considered feminist paintings, something that is more palpable when looking at the dialogue between the paintings and the piece ‘You Will Never Own Me’ (2015).

Blue Angel, 2015. Acrylic on canvas. 162.5 x 147.32 cm. Courtesy of Night Gallery.

Tania Bruguera

The political artist Tania Bruguera has become a symbol of the fight for freedom of speech in Cuba since she was detained in December 2014 in La Habana’s Revolution Square after her recent representation of the performance ‘Tatlin’s Whisper’. In this performance, every person in the audience was offered a space on the podium to talk for one minute about a subject of their choice. Bruguera has been selected by the curators of Frieze Magazine to participate in Frieze Talks, where she shared her experience, her work and the reaction to the international campaign ‘#Yo También Exijo’ (I Also Demand).

Tania Bruguera, Frieze Talks, Frieze London 2015 photograph by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.

Lutz Bacher

When first entering the art fair, visitors walk through a black corridor painted with phrases like “Welcome to purgatory” or “Don’t stop now, the end is near”. It’s the new commissioned work by American conceptual artist Lutz Bacher as part of her participation in Frieze Projects. For over four decades, Bacher’s practice has subvert artistic and personal identity (she doesn’t reveal her real name, doesn’t appear publicly and her press presentations are close to a performance format), playfully and often discomfortingly employing the ephemera of everyday public and personal lives.

Samara Scott

The piece ‘Lonely Planet’ consists on a ‘water relief’ installation that occupies the entire floor of The Sunday Painter’s (London) stand. Her author is the young UK talent Samara Scott (1985), who explores issues of superficiality through a sort of floor pool where she has trapped easy-buyable elements: a wine glass, spring onions, plastic bracelets. This piece has definitely caught the public and critic’s attention, who already had an eye on her after her recent shows including Silks, Eastside Projects (Birmingham, 2015), High Street, Zabludowicz Collection (London, 2014) and Baggy, Mars! (Frankfurt, 2013).

Samara Scott, The Sunday Painter, Focus section, Frieze London 201. Photograph by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.

Tunga

Another work of Frieze Live programme is the re-staging of Brazilian artist Tunga’s rare piece Xifópagas Capilares (Siamese Hair Twins, 1987) brought to the fair by Luhring Augustine and Galleria Franco Noero).  In this disturbing piece twin girls walk around conjoined by a long braid of hair that hangs between them, like a mythical anthropological specimen. Tunga (Antônio José de Barros de Carvalho, 1952) is a reference of his generation and has works in the collections of Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Tunga, Xifópagas Capilares, 1984, fine art, 33,5 x 25 cm. Image courtesy: the artist / Galleria Franco Noero, Torino and Luhring Augustine, New York.

Daniel Jacoby

The young Jacoby (1985) displays his work ‘Sydney y las guerras de Guerrero’ at Maisterravalbuena Gallery (Madrid) along with artists Maria Loboda, Néstor Sanmiguel Diest and B.Wurtz. The artist puts on centre stage a well-known, yet controversial Peruvian entrepreneur, Pablo Guerrero, who coming from a poor background became one of the biggest producers and exporters of cotton underwear in Perú. Javoby uses Guerrero’s store window displays as a reference for his own work to address modernist ideas of progress.

Daniel Jacoby, Maisterravalbuena, installation view. Courtesy of the gallery.

B. Ingrid Olson

The recent graduated photographer B. Ingrid Olson deals with the fragmentation of the feminine body through self-portraits that she captures in front of a mirror or reflective surface playing with the abstraction of her own body in the intersection of different images.

Her works are displayed at Simone Subal next to Kiki Kogelnik’s paintings, a major artist from a complete different generation, who shares with Olson an interest in a non-descriptive and fragmented feminine representation.