A Window on the (Art) World

Cathy Lomax encounters windows, doors, curtains and an ex prime minister at Frieze London 2024

Frieze London, as many commentators have noted, was a little different this year. Laid out in four sections with distinct connecting portals it felt easier to navigate. It also messed with the usual hierarchy of visibility with the ‘focus’ section made up of young galleries at the front of the fair rather than the back. This meant that it was White Cube, Gagosian and David Zwirner that were encountered wearily after trudging through acres of art rather than Someday, Gallery Artbeat and Stars. 

I like to have a theme at Frieze to provide a framework for my art looking, something I decide upon unscientifically after surveying a few stands. The rejigged running order and the connecting points between the different sections of the fair led to my 2024 theme — windows, doors and curtains —domestic devices which facilitate connections and divisions and, in the process, may be both revealing and concealing. I have chosen ten works and one area to represent this theme which are set out as they were encountered.

 

Charlotte Edey, The Tower, 2024, freshwater pearl, glass beads, tourmaline, onyx, obsidian, aventurine, white jade, silk, organza, woven jacquard, soft pastel on sanded paper, sapele panel frame, 124 x 47 x 4 cm

Charlotte Edey, The Tower at Ginny on Frederick, London
Edey’s detailed polished work, which includes tapestries and pastel drawings, aligns with a current renewed interest in surrealism. The gallery press release describes her mark-making as ‘acts of introspection, where materials become windows into deeper psychological states.’ The Tower quite literally depicts windows, and indeed curtains, laid out in a partitioned wooden frame to create something akin to a dolls house or picture book.

Georgina Hill, City Lights

 

Georgina Hill, City Lights at South Parade, London

Hill’s solo presentation City Lights in South Parade’s Focus booth is populated by stained-glass light boxes that illuminate and dim. These immediately link to fanlights, sidelights and transom windows, that is windows in, alongside and above front doors, part of British 19th and 20th century housing vernacular. They all evoke an aesthetic that populates the communal spaces of churches and pubs – places where people gather and commune.  As the Frieze website sets out: ‘Flashing on and off, Hill’s installation is in constant flux, mapping London’s social constellations in colour and texture.’

Paul Anthony Smith, Eye Fi Di Tropics, Saint Martin, 2024, unique picotage on inkjet print

Paul Anthony Smith, Eye Fi Di Tropics, Saint Martin at Timothy Taylor, London & New York

The curtains in this work by Paul Anthony Smith are added to an idyllic view of a Caribbean sunset with Smith’s signature technique, picotage. Borrowed from a process used in textile manufacturing picotage involves picking at the surface with a needle to create raised areas. These textural curtains are added by Smith to remind us that we are looking and we are not actually there. 

Louise Giovanelli, Dado, 2024, oil on canvas

 

Louise Giovanelli, Dado, at Grimm, Amsterdam, London & New York

Giovanelli’s flawless paintings of incidental subjects, such as curtains (which she has painted numerous times), use their subject as a sumptuous vehicle to explore the formal qualities of colour meeting light meeting texture. They are however not mere exercises in technique. Instead, as Giovanelli explains, the ambiguousness invites imaginative thinking: ‘These curtains, once thrown back, offer this promise to enter another realm – and once closed, contain that promise. The painting hangs in a suspended state, leaving us wondering whether the show is over, or in fact just beginning.’

Dirk Braeckman T.S.-0.5.-18 #1, 2018, gelatin silver print reversibly mounted on aluminium support and frame

Dirk Braeckman T.S.-0.5.-18 #1 at Grimm, Amsterdam, London & New York

Braeckman’s numbered works feature images from his daily surroundings. He uses his darkroom as a painter might use their studio, to experiment with images, thereby suggesingt forms and creating atmosphere. The artist’s biography on the gallery website fittingly describes his work as offering ‘a window into an unidentified reality’.

Merlin James, Hanger, 2016, mixed materials, 69 × 109 cm

Merlin James, Hanger, at Maureen Paley, London

In Hanger we see what appears to be the reverse of a stretched canvas — the generally unseen, hidden side. Using a translucent fabric to indicate curtains and darkly stained wooden stretcher bars to form the structure of a window, James creates an intriguing formal work which conceals more than it reveals. 

Kayla Witt, Please Ring Doorbell Twice, 2024 oil on canvas wrapped panel

Kayla Witt, Please Ring Doorbell Twice, at Night Gallery, Los Angeles

Witt uses doors, storefronts, and symbols of wellness culture in her surreal meditations on the marketing of pain and healing. Her door with its sunburst fanlight and fiery window framework is a door sized oil on canvas painting which if it didn’t look so domestic could be an additional escape route from the fair.

Lubaina Himid, Lost Door, 2015 acrylic on wood

Lubaina Himid, Lost Door at Hollybush Gardens, London

The second door on show is by Lubiana Himid, an artist has a history of painting on doors. Her series Five Conversations featured portraits of everyday stylish women on reclaimed doors from Georgian houses which were displayed along the New York High Line and positioned to allow the painted women to converse. Lost Door is a similarly reclaimed door with door furniture intact, but it stands on its own hinged to the wall and slightly (and invitingly) ajar. Painted in earthy tones with animal and camera motifs and repeat patterning, it seems to reference the type of fabric that reads as quintessentially African but in actuality reveals the role of colonisation in the formation of cultural stereotypes.

Ha Chong-Hyun, Conjunction 14-694, 2014 oil on hemp cloth

Ha Chong-Hyun, Conjunction 14-694 at Tina Kim Gallery, New York

Ha Chong-Hyun began his Conjunction series in the 1970s. The conjunction is the physical connection between method and materials. He uses burlap rather than canvas to allow him to approach the canvas from the reverse, pushing thick paint through the loose weave to diminish the trace of human agency. 

Isabel Nolan, For elsewhere, 2024, painted mild steel, 260 x 146 x 1 cm

 

Isabel Nolan, For elsewhere at Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
Nolan’s work which ranges from the architectural – steel sculptures that frame or obstruct our path – to small handmade objects in clay, hand-tufted wool rugs, and drawings and paintings using gouache or colouring pencils, explores the ‘intimacy of materiality’. The linking thread is the communication of being equally enchanted by and afraid of the world around us, expressing humanity’s fear of mortality and deep need for connection.

Manuel Chavajay’s work at Pedro Cera in the Smoke section being viewed by ex-prime minister Rushi Sunak

 

Smoke (and mirrors)

Beyond the big galleries, on the furthest fringe of the tent, lies Smoke, organised by Pablo José Ramírez (Curator, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles), this new themed section features galleries showing ceramic works that explore diasporic and indigenous histories. Each gallery in Smoke is separated not by a wall but by a filmy smoky-toned translucent curtain, with an arch shaped hole cut in it to facilitate drifting between the spaces. When I looked back at my photographs, I realised that I had captured an image of former prime minister Rushi Sunak being shown around Manuel Chavajay’s pots at Pedro Cera (I hadn’t noticed him when taking the picture). On the wall to the right of Sunak, is a painting of what looks like, through the smoky boundary, a curtain (by an unidentified artist). In this chance merging of these accumulated layers and a prominent politician it is hard to resist comparing the curtain, a device designed to obscure a clear view and end a performance, with the world of politics – as alien to the artworld as the glossy environs of Frieze are to the artist labouring in their studio. 

Cathy Lomax

Frieze London

Regents Park, London NW1

9-13 October 2024