FRIEZE 2025 part 3: Sarah Ball's gender fluid pencil portraits

A suite of sensitive portraits, that highlight their subject's made-up faces, capture Cathy Lomax’s attention.

A solo presentation of Sarah Ball’s work at Stephen Friedman Gallery stood out for me amongst the noise and chaos of Frieze. The stand is dominated by a large painting, Anthony and Mr Young McNair, 2025, featuring two figures in tones of pink and lilac wearing turbans and patterned tunics (Ball’s first double portrait). But it is not this work that drew me in. 

Sarah Ball, coloured pencil on paper portraits, 2025

Rather it is a suite of smallish close-ups of faces, softly drawn in coloured pencil on paper, which immediately make them more intimate than the formal, harder edged, oil on canvas paintings that Ball is best known for. The close-up portraits focus on the way each individual, gender-fluid subject, has styled their face – augmenting it with lipstick, blusher, eyeshadow, glam rock style drawn shapes and tendrils of hair to create the person they want to be seen as. 

It occurs to me that coloured pencil is ideal for rendering the made-up faces as it is so like a stick of makeup. There is also a sense that these drawings could be from a makeup manual or a vintage teen magazine – they have a wistful quality which really appeals to me. Above all they are gentle, sympathetic and modestly fabulous, all of which makes the Stephen Friedman stand an inviting escape from the hubbub of the fair.   

 

Cathy Lomax

Frieze and Frieze Masters

The Regent's Park

15-19 October 2025

FRIEZE 2025 part 2: Rosemary Cronin finds new delights and old favourites

Frieze’s Focus section has rich pickings for Rosemary Cronin, but there is also some strong curation at the more familiar gallery stands.

Koak and Caroline Mesquita at Union Pacific

A few years ago, Union Pacific gave away editions of a print by Koak, and that sort of felt like a golden time for Frieze. But I'm happy to say that there is some delicious Koak work back in the Union Pacific booth. On a bare timber frame hangs a portrait of a woman who looks emotional, nervous, inquisitive... in fact a sort of space for you to project your own self onto perhaps? Caroline Mesquita's taps that drip large golden drips that suspend in the air, also bring a whisper of drama to the booth that is well curated, delicate yet powerful.

Delaine Le Bas at Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix and Alex Margo Arden at Ginny on Fredrick

Other Frieze highlights are in the Focus section – Delaine Le Bas' canvas-strewn Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix booth, which feels transformative for Frieze, bringing a well-needed tactility to the fair. Over at Ginny on Fredrick, Alex Margo Arden's decommissioned male models from the National Motor Museum allows the men out from the museum to have a new life as a work of contemporary art, and now they have been acquired by the Arts Council these mannequins have escaped retirement! In the race for brave booths honourable mentions must go to the super sexy Xxijra Hii hall of mirrors with erotic nudes by Glen Pudvine. 

Anne Hardy at Maureen Paley

 

Back to the main drag of the fair, a beautiful mobile of animals by Patrick Goddard at Seventeen Gallery allows them to make the most of their square footage as it suspends from the roof of the big top and captures the gaze as soon as you enter the fair - look out for Bex Massey's hyper realistic work on display there too. Maureen Paley's booth is always a joy to see, and this year the piece that captured my heart was Anne Hardy's sculpture, an arm reaching out ready to ignite the lightbulb next to it... just like magic! And just like that, all-too-soon the fair will be over, and artists will go back to their studios with no fancy breakfasts to hop on to. But for now at least we are reminded of London having such a rich artistic community and some fierce gallerists.

Rosemary Cronin

Frieze and Frieze Masters

The Regent's Park

15-19 October 2025

 

FRIEZE 2025 part 1: Archie Franks at Frieze Masters

From the ever-present Howard Hodgkin to a series of superlative Lucien Freud drawings. Archie Frank's highlight booth at this year's Frieze Masters is Hazlitt Holland Hibbert and Frankie Rossi.

 

I work as a tour guide at Frieze Masters fair, and am privy to seeing the fair a day before it opens so that I can get my bearings and plan my tour route. This year it feels like there is less that immediately stands out. But my chosen highlight booth is the reliable Hazlitt Holland Hibbert and Frankie Rossi.

Howard Hodgkin

Every year they bring decent Howard Hodgkin work and this year is no exception. Every year this gives me an opportunity to tell my Howard Hodgkin story to my groups, a story which goes thusly: I met Hodgkin when I was about 16 at an art opening. Although he was very grand he seemed quite genial, and so midway through a conversation I asked if he’d be interested in seeing one of my paintings. He said yes. I proceeded to get out my nokia 32 10 phone which had a photo of one of my paintings on it. Hodgkin took the phone and said ‘oh that’s incredible… amazing’. Pleased as punch I started to say ‘oh wow, you like the painting?!’. Hodgkin replied ‘oh no, the painting is terrible, but the fact you can take a photograph of it on your telephone is amazing’. I tell this story once a year about four times a day over five days working at the fair. Sometimes I even get a laugh.

Lucian Freud

Aside from the Hodgkin paintings there are other fantastic pieces in this booth. A large Paula Rego, a small Michael Andrews, some thick Frank Auerbach. But my favourite works are the Lucian Freud drawings. There are four of them. Two portraits and two still life interior scenes. One of the portraits is of his mother, from that fantastic body of work he made from her late in her life. The other is of a gangster who ratted on his employers and got badly beaten up as a result. Freud draws his scarred face exquisitely. Somehow Freud gets the psychology of portrait painting and drawing. The portraits feel like intense people at traumatic times in both of their lives. The still lives are beautifully observed and described. If you find yourself at the fair my advice is to search out the Freud drawings. And avoid showing anyone your paintings on your phone.

Archie Franks

Frieze and Frieze Masters

The Regent's Park

15-19 October 2025

Expanding a Very Short Story: 'Blitz: the club that shaped the 80s'

Blitz, a short lived but influential club, is the focus of the latest London exhibition which looks back to 1980s youth culture. 

 

The 1980s are big news right now. Current day cool kids are wearing 501 jeans and oversize jackets, and a slew of recent exhibitions have mined the decade, most especially the youth culture angle. In 2025 London has already seen: The Face Magazine: Culture Shift at National Portrait Gallery, Leigh Bowery! at Tate Modern, Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London at Fashion and Textile Museum, and now Blitz: the club that shaped the 80s at the Design Museum.

Outside the Blitz club in 1979. Photograph: Sheila Rock

The back story to explain the flowering of youth culture, as articulated by all these exhibitions, is that the UK was down at heel and depressed in the early 1980s so as a route out of the drab austerity young people made their own clothes and music, created their own subversive (and hugely influential) glitter-filled worlds, and generally cocked a snook at the pervading big and small C conservatism. This explosion of 1980s counterculture was undoubtedly built on the groundwork of punk but with influences from European art movements, literature, cinema, and inspiration supplied by long standing cultural agitators and dreamers (Bowie), the post punk generation effectively created their own fun. It’s hard to overestimate the influence of art schools here, which were of course free, but also, as the Blitz exhibition, and Millennials more generally, point out, London rents were cheap and squats were plentiful. I don’t think the Blitz kids clutched copies of Deleuze and Derrida on the dance floor like some art schooled exponents of the indie new wave, such as Scritti Politti, whose name itself is derived from Gramsci’s ‘Scritti Politici’ (political writings) and in 1981 had a song called ‘Jacques Derrida’. But the thinking behind the looks and the larks was deeper than the hedonistic tag attached to the ‘new romantics’ (the name used to describe the movement which flowered from Blitz and other clubs) suggests, most particularly in the mining of history to create glamour.  

Kim Bowen. Photo Ted Polhemus.

 

Although there is treasure to be found in Blitz: the club that shaped the 80s it somewhat lacks the spark and sparkle that photographs of the Blitz kids suggest characterised the club. The clothes on show, such an integral part of the scene, mostly look a little dull – could it be that without the spectacular hair, makeup and attitude they are really not that interesting? It is also apparent that all the promise of the Bowie worship soon morphed into something more trad and the new romantic/Blitz look rapidly became an only slightly veiled version of the traditional attire of the landed gentry – tweeds, spats and rope of pearls (see Spandau Ballet). Maybe the Blitz kids were far more typical of their era than the pull quotes suggest – less revolutionary and more wannabe Loadsamoneys. 

Spandau Ballet’s debut photo shoot at the Warren Street squat, 1980. Photo Graham Smith.

Despite my quibbles (to which I add that I can't remember the term 'new romantic' being mentioned at all in the exhibition texts) there is much to enjoy here for students of British 20th century culture as it journeys from 1970s art to 1980s exploitation. Highlights include Bowie scrapbooks (courtesy of Iain R Webb), 'Looks Even Better on a Girl’, ads for 17 Cosmetics (from 1985 issues of Smash Hits), a map of the London haunts of the Blitz kids, a Swanky Modes dress and even a pack of Sobraine cocktail cigarettes. But aside from gorgeous photographs of Blitz kids, including a dynamic on the dance floor image from Homer Sykes, there is little left of the actual ephemeral experience of the club. 

Blitz attendees on the dance floor., c.1980 Photo Homer Sykes.

This brings me to the weird recreation of the Blitz club with its despeckled and smoothed video projections of dancers, a virtual Rusty Egan in the DJ booth and Spandau Ballet cutting a long story short. Although an amusing oddity this does not feel (or smell) like a basement club and its uncanny glossy veneer makes the dull clothes, on the mannequins, and behind glass, look even less connected to the short story of an influential hub of defiant creativity that (unbelievably) ran for less than two years. 

Cathy Lomax

September 2025

Recreated Blitz club at the Design Museum. Photo Luke Hayes.

Blitz: the club that shaped the 80s

the Design Museum

224 - 238 Kensington High Street

London W8

20 September 2025 – 29 March 2026

Anthony Rudolf’s Pictures to Prove It

 Paula Rego metamorphosises Anthony Rudolf in an exhibition at the Ben Uri Gallery

 

Our lives are shaped by trinkets, trips, memorabilia, parties and passings. For over two decades Anthony Rudolf accumulated gifts and mementoes from Paula Rego. This personal collection of over 50 works by the artist are currently on show at the Ben Uri Gallery in London until 5 September 2025.  

 

Rego had a life before Rudolf, just as he did before her. Throughout the late 1990s the artist and the writer/translator/publisher built a companionship that would continue until Rego’s passing in 2022. More than twenty five years was spent together in and out of her studio. From work, to pleasure, gallery openings, and trips. From the beginning of their relationship Rudolf knew how important and demanding studio hours could be to Rego. 

 

‘I tentatively and nervously put it to her that I would be pleased to model for her if this would be of use to her work and at the same time give her pleasure, She flung her arms around me and said she had I thought you would never ask…’(1)

 

One of the earliest works in the show is Kneeling Chair (1996). Rudolf sits at attention in one of those writers’ computer chairs that seemed to be everywhere in the 1990s, promising good posture, while working endlessly at a bulky PC. Rudolf poses with hands clasped, body straight, gaze to the side, legs back. Rego follows his forms in pencil as she begins the process of rationalising him two dimensionally.

 

If you flip through any of Rego’s catalogues, Rudolf can be found in series after series. Sometimes as a main starring role, sometimes as best supporting actor. Always close to the artist’s stage. The first definitive series of the two working together was pictures related to the novel The Crime of Father Amaro by Eça de Quierós from 1997-8. The pictures had Rudolf playing the adulterous and troublesome priest, in various poses, in states of dress and undress. In one composition, adorned in a luxurious bathrobe, he is oddly posed over and behind a crimson armchair. This grand scaled pastel can be found on the lower level of the show. A photograph upstairs shows the artist posing with an unfinished work from the Amaro series where Rudolf's figure is centred in the still under construction composition. His feet and legs gigantic with foreshortening. Everything blank around him to be filled with four female figures that were all possibly posed for by Rego’s long time model and assistant Lila Nunes.

 

‘He’s very angular, with long feet and forearms.  I can get him quickly, and I can draw him over and over again like I can Lila.  But he doesn’t change like she does because I can’t identify with him as I can with her, can’t play the same games.’ (2)

 

Once asked by writer Marina Warner to respond to Ovid’s Metamorphosis for an exhibition, Rego winced. She loathed the idea of all those Gods up to nonsense. A fellow curator, Fiona Bradley, suggested Kafka’s Metamorphosis as a solution. A light went on for Rego. The tale of a man’s bodily transformation from human to insect after a night’s sleep is a story of embarrassment. Waking up immobile in bed on his back, horrified by his situation, petrified that his family will find out. On top of this he is nervous he will be late to work. The parents denounce their son, ashamed of his horrific state. While his sister sickened by his condition has pity on her sibling, throwing scraps of food into his bedroom.  

 

Anyone who has ever seen a bug on its back knows the helplessness that exudes in that moment. Rego devised a pose to literally harness the dangling wiry nature of bug-ness by placing Rudolf on his back with constructed pulleys and ropes to hold his ankles and wrists in aerial positions for the duration of posing. ‘He was like a prisoner’, said Rego, ‘He had to be naked because he was a beetle.’ (3)

 

Four versions exist by Rego confronting Kafka’s tale – two studies and two solidified versions. The ropes were left out so everything dangles. The first version has Rudolf’s body going from feet, torso, hands, head, in a room of severe Italian perspective. With an array of food scraps thrown to the floor referencing the sister’s charity from the tale. The exhibited Metamorphosis study presents the second version where the body and pose is turned the other way completely. Resting his lower limbs on an armchair, twisted hands are placed cupped to his chest. The tones of the face are pushed back and darkened, it is more the neck down that Rego wants us to digest and take in.  

 

Rego seems to realize not just how incredible Rudolf’s limbs are in length but also the deep cavity that his ribs could create from a reclining pose. His trunk down seems to be like a water slide from ribs to the groin. The torso and softness of the shallow belly create a swooping motion which she grasps in pastel. It is the most naked male flesh Rego had or will show in her oeuvre, and it wins. There is tenderness here, but there is something raw underneath that brings a strong whiff of the Spanish master Jusepe de Ribera, the true inventor of body horror in painting.

 

This whole process is alluded to in a celebratory drawing displayed upstairs called Writing Yes, Reading No. Here Rudolf is shown typing away at his computer screen with pleasure with one of Rego’s abortion series pictures is mischievously displayed on the screen. Books overflow everywhere like ocean waves. While the picture is predominately ink, flashes of colour come alive on objects on the shelf and the yellow towel that clads his body.  While under his work desk a huge insect hides in the shadow, approaching or leaving the writers bare legs. Look carefully or you’ll miss it.

 

There have been many exhibitions of Rego’s work over the past few years.  With many more to come where curators plead angles and theories. These are all valid but at times things are lost or repressed. This show is not presented in an ivory tower of art but has more heart and charm than most. The book lined walls of the gallery’s lower level makes the exhibition feel like a place of visual study. In a sense Rego has curated this exhibition herself for her beloved, with Rudolf ready to share its power. For anyone who has ever met her the show brings back the wide eyed, smart, unflinchable Rego as she truly was. The sensations are real and human.

Michael Ajerman

July 2025

'The Anthony Rudolf Collection – Works Gifted to him by Paula Rego'

Ben Uri Gallery, London NW8

Until 5 September 2025

 

1: Anthony Rudolf, The Anthony Rudolf Collection: Ben Uri Gallery Guide (2025)

2: Catherine Lampert, ‘Paula Rego Obedience and Defiance’ (2019), p39

3: ‘Paula Rego – Metamorphosis’, Web of Stories – Life Stories of Remarkable People (YouTube Channel)