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) 

 

Trial and Error

Jennifer Caroline Campbell’s visit to an exhibition of Frank Auerbach’s work became flavoured by his death which was announced later that day...

 

‘I feel as though I’m stumbling around, going wrong in every single possible way until something happens’

 

– Frank Auerbach talking at the Royal Academy, 2016

 

Sometimes the to-and-fro between frustration and compulsion that I experience when painting makes more sense than anything else in this absurd world. At other times the habit feels like partaking in an unhealthy obsession upheld by deranged weirdos. So it can be a real tonic to hear other painters/deranged weirdos talk about their process. The words of Frank Auerbach make particularly fortifying vitamins for me, because of the way he makes work, the quality of that work and his relentless commitment to the process. 

 

I stand in front of a hefty ochre painting called Maples Demolition, Euston Road, 1960. It is part of an exhibition called Frank Auerbach: Portraits of London' at Francis Outred and Offer Waterman. I drink in the bristling marks, scratches, sweeps and bumps, their collective irregular rhythm dancing between agitation, courage and doubt. A lumpy but ridged mustard line runs diagonally from the left side of the top edge to the right-ish side of the bottom edge and seems to sit on top of all the other shapes and marks. If it were not for this sturdy line the contents of the painting might tumble out at me.

 

Auerbach, who was born in Berlin in 1931 and died in London in November 2024, was notorious for his doggedly regular studio practice. Models, often close friends, sat for long stints in his studio while he worked and reworked their equivalent in paint or charcoal, producing his many portraits. For the landscapes he went on local walks, making drawings to bring back to the studio. In both cases he reworked the same image over and over, often scraping all the paint back or rubbing all the charcoal off many times, making the finish point hard to predict. This is not a practical or efficient way to work and serves as a good reminder that the artist is not, and should not be, a production line. His process of multiple attempts is left visible in the finished works, embedding them with the human urge to strive and search. The weight of this trial and error, melded with the works ability to hold up on their own after all, is the tension that creates the aliveness in Auerbach’s best work.

 

A few paintings on, I try (and fail) to decide if these are landscapes or portraits. Initially they read as landscapes, yet somehow they have the feeling of being portraits. Landscape paintings can have a sense of openness, inviting the viewer to enter them. But with Auerbach’s landscapes there is no room for me in them, something is already there. I stop in front a painting called Primrose Hill Study – Autumn Evening, 1979. A hard cold patch of sky is being encroached upon by a shouting mob of angular juicy forms that nearly succeed in shaking off their shared conjuring of a landscape. One bright red mark sits glowing thickly towards the right of the scrambling horizon and feels like it was made last. Like all the gestures in this painting, this red mark is simultaneously a thing in itself, a vivid equivalent to something felt, and a visceral trace of the act that made it.

 

A painting called To the Studios II, 1982 holds me in front of it. In its centre is a frenzied mash of marks that threaten to pull the anchored shapes around it into its greedy belly in a mighty collapse, but it does not, it resists. This painting makes me want to run straight to my own studio to paint. I ask myself what drives the perpetual human trying, this persistent attempt upon attempt, that I always find in Auerbach’s work? And what is it exactly that a painter working in this way wants to find? These kinds of questions are common fuel for the conversations that have shaped my approach to painting in recent years. Friend, painter and occasional teaching colleague Jeb Haward has something to answer for here. Taught by Rose Wylie, Roy Oxlade and Dennis Creffield, Haward has contaminated my thinking and methodology in regard to painting in a particular way. Creffield, Oxlade, and Auerbach were all taught by David Bomberg in his influential evening classes at Borough Polytechnic. Haward, who also corresponded with Auerbach, said that Auerbach’s approach meant that every day and every painting was a new experience and that this is what drove him. 

 

I have always been drawn to the idea that each painting is a new and unknown territory. If you know what it will look like, what is the point in painting it? Valuing the unplanned in this way is, of course, nothing new in painting. Yet I grow ever more curious about these ideas and their capacity to live on, despite, or maybe because of, the claims that they are inert, or embarrassingly old news. Maybe it’s a result of attending art school in the YBA after-glow and getting quickly bored of the then fashionable idea that everything must be new and cynical in order to have meaning. In her brilliant 2011 essay ‘AB-EX and Disco Balls’ in Art Forum, Amy Sillman says ‘basically, expression’s really embarrassing’. She goes on to consider partaking in abstract expressionism now as a camp re-invention of the left over, repositioning it in relation to gender and queer culture, and reclaiming it from the clique institutionalised trap it has washed up in. Her essay made me see the headliner moments of art history as so many thrift store items, each teaming with new possibilities. I’m not interested in empty remakes or retro nostalgia, but I am excited to mine, reconnect and re-own fragments from paintings trail of adventures. Trying too hard to be new is both old and an echo of commercial logic. Standing in front of Auerbach’s landscapes feels vital and present, not vintage in any way. They speak directly to my mind, body and the current world. 

 

In both the past and the present, a commitment to painting in this unmeasured and impulsive way, brings with it the necessity to embrace uncertainty. Auerbach’s landscapes tell me that uncertainty is a vital part of life and not something that can be banished from it, no matter what politicians and advertisements promise us. Absolute certainty is fleeting, just as absolute safety is a fantasy. The dream of surrounding ourselves with impenetrable boundaries, of purging our communities of all risk, is a dangerous illusion, prone to turning into a cold ordering and violent draining of the world. I do not mean that we should give up taking responsibility for people (creatures or places), that is something very different. In fact, the real danger is that we are increasingly forgetting our empathy towards those living in peril. Auerbach’s biography is a reminder of that innate human responsibility towards the precarious. He arrived in London in 1939 at the age of seven, under the beneficence of Iris Origo and fleeing a Nazi Germany that his parents, tragically, did not survive. The question of what London was to Auerbach, and what home is to anyone, hangs in the air suddenly.

 

More of Auerbach’s words swim into my mind: ‘babies run before they walk because they want to get somewhere’ – Frank Auerbach (on BBC Radio 4 show This Cultural Life, January 2024.)

 

It is the ‘want’ in the sentence that strikes me now. From an infant’s first urge to stand on two feet and move forward, to every act thereafter, an acceptance of the unknown, of risk and of uncertainty are part of the deal. The revealing of this truth in Auerbach’s landscapes of London is what quenches me. The lesson they wordlessly tell me is that aliveness is something that has to be tried at, over and over. This searching and trying is what stops the world becoming, in the words of Federico Campagna in his 2018 book, ‘a stockpiling of dead stuff’.

 

I finally exit the gallery, full of an invisible thing that seems to brighten my insides with an eager sensibility. Suddenly I am very hungry. On the tube I start to make notes for this article. When I get to my studio I look at a painting that I have been working on for weeks with the nagging feeling that it might need to be painted over, again. I make an instant coffee and start re-listening to some podcast interviews with Auerbach. I start painting over the weeks-old painting, full of doubt and impatient hope. In my ear, via my headphone, Auerbach’s voice says, ‘all art comes from dissatisfaction’. I sip some coffee. My friend texts me to tell me the news of Auerbach’s passing. I text back that I will try and write a review of his London Portraits exhibition. I immediately doubt my ability to write this article. I sit with doubt and make friends with it. 

 

I have not included any images of the works because they seem to lack too much as photographs. You can either imagine them or go and see the exhibition, which is at Francis Outred and Offer Waterman Galleries, London until the 7 December 2024. 

Jennifer Caroline Campbell

 

 

Vacuumed Gerbil Maze

Jennifer Caroline Campbell joins the humming mix of fatigue and hype that is the Frieze London crowd in Regents Park

 

The air is not as crisp as it could be and the leaves show just hint of red beginnings. A sign says ‘Only handbags and laptops past this point’ but my rucksack passes. I’m glad because I know I will need a tangerine break. It’s all about finding glimmers of orange —this is what a friend recently told me in an altered state, and she’s right. A glimmer of orange can be many things: a spark of curiosity, a coded cackle, a syrupy invitation, a snag, a fascination, a puncture, a quenching vision or a partially veiled secret, told under the breath. What kind of glimmers will surface for me at the annual art-cram today?

Benedikte Bjerre, The Birds, 2017, foil, helium at Palace Enterprise Gallery 

My first find is a cluster of baby penguins swaying gently in the air-conditioned breeze. They take the opportunity to dance to the wafting currents made by the keen art seeking humans, who circulate all around them in an irregular stream. This bobbing flightless crew of helium chicks, The Birds by Benedikte Bjerre, feels like an apt start, playing effectively with both the local and wider context. A child runs through them and the whole group responds by leaning outwards and then right back in towards each other, briefly conspiring. I can sense their collective thirst for oceanic freedom, something that will never be fulfilled within this vacuumed carpet grid. As hypnotic as this installation is, I mustn’t linger here, I need to set an efficient pace. I am a worm with huge greedy eyes, and Frieze art fair is a rarely occurring apple. This is the unnatural mindset that takes hold when viewing art in this very particular way. I plan to navigate the space methodically, following the grid lines and leaving no stone unturned. But I soon get disoriented, and my path becomes the silken thread of a drunken spider surfing Brownian motion. Will the apple be juicy or full of brittle safe bets this year? Capital is leaking out, jeopardy is seeping in. And the bigger question looms over like a silent storm cloud, closer than ever, the question of who gets to see art, who gets to make art and who gets to be human. Art is never made or viewed in a vacuum, no matter how white the walls are. The world that surrounds the microcosm of Frieze this year feels particularly violent, cruel and divisive. I wonder what will retain meaning on the art platter in this kind of moment.

Kiki Furlan at Gianni Manhattan Gallery 

I stop in front of a peachy coloured fish, pictured in felt, part of Kiki Furlan’s solo presentation with Gianni Manhattan Gallery. The fish floats in fuzzy beige water, enveloped from its surroundings. Yet it also edges towards uncanny materiality, like a hidden memory surfacing from the shadows, inching slowly into graspable space. I wouldn’t want to grab this fish though, because the inviting softness of the felt is laced with a hint of something unnerving, like the rot on the underside of fruit when it takes you by surprise. This mix of seduction and repulsion is enriched by this work occupying a place between image and object, between illusion and body. Another of these felted pictures is more like a pretend drawing, black felted lines describe a straggly headless figure with clompy shoes, a soft grey backdrop feels close and a hand reaches towards a tiny tree. 

Gal Schindler, Vagueness was the insides of nature, 2023, oil on wood at Galerie Sultana

Nearby I find Gal Schindler’s quenching paintings in Galerie Sultana’s booth. In an instant Schindler’s paintings undo all the sly poison that I have contracted from looking at various female nudes in numerous old paintings. Suddenly its ok to have a human and feminine body, it’s a treat rather than a trap. I vow to moisturise every inch of myself more often. Slick but unruly, Schindler’s figures unashamedly and playfully take up space, licking across the pastel painted surface, while suggesting that they won’t stay put for long. Unfixed within their frames, they often spill over the edges of the canvas, like excessively applied eyeshadow wondering across a steady face. There is a feeling of chance embraced. Hurrying on, I’m caught by a large Florian Krewer painting (Michael Werner Gallery). Two figures in sporty winter clothes share an urban landscape with two dice, mid roll, perhaps just thrown. The ambiguous setting could be a flood lit carpark or empty motorway. Chance might be cruel or kind here, and all is fleeting, speeding uphill on tarmac. I check my watch; time is ticking too fast already.  

 

Umico Niwa’s installation at Someday Gallery

I rejoin the lazy river of movement, skipping past a few booths. My standards are higher now, having found some treasures already, and I’m quicker to dismiss certain artworks this year. No matter how much I agree (and I do agree) with statements like ‘refugees welcome’ or ‘my body my choice’, I have no interest in these words made in neon or stitch and stuck on a white wall. Maybe it’s the influence of the wider context: a destructive and divided world blinded by reductive slogans. Suddenly I’m drawn down close to the scratchy grey carpet by pieces of fruit, dried twigs and burnt leaves, parading and contorting there. This is Umico Niwa’s installation for Someday Gallery. Some of these fruity shrubby pieces cartwheel up metal ramps, arranging themselves in formation, some teeter on sharp edges, and some recline exhausted in corners. This work brings so many things to mind and twists them. I am reminded of making mazes for my pet gerbils when I was nine. At the same time, I think of futile moments spent trying to function in a world that often feels designed to trip me up. This installation also leads my thoughts to connect with things that I’ve read about microbial cooperation (via Melin Sheldrake) and the changeable behaviours of various genders of animal species (via Lucy Cooke). Niwa’s work snags me in just the right way, and I want to sit on the floor with it, to stretch and giggle. I must keep moving though, more orange slithers await my searching eyes.

Rose Wylie, Ballet Backdrop, 2024, oil on canvas in four parts, 366 x 304 cm at David Zwirner 

A Tracy Emin monotype claws out at me unexpectedly, the one open eye of a scratched and scrunched figure holds my gaze. Only the top half of her is visible, held tightly by a black inky swamp. She is one of many, all versions of the same outsider, fiercely holding ground, every mark a corrosion. I hone in on some favourites — paintings by Lynette Yiadom Boakye and Ken Kiff that I was looking forward to seeing. But somehow these works seem disenchanted under the bright lights. Arts fairs can have a strange effect and not all art works thrive here. Swimming onwards I worry that the Rose Wylie paintings (David Zwirner gallery) will have lost their power too. But happily, I’m proved wrong. Wylie’s huge sludgy lines crawl across the canvas with their usual unbridled enthusiasm. Her giant painted girls wear triangular skirts, designer suits and nakedness. They are fragmented, repeated and send out an unapologetic chirping song. It’s like a dressing-up day at the best jumble sale, where everything has become zingy lumpy toothpaste and delicious lipstick is plastered onto parading mouths. 

Georg Baselitz, Bob Flies up into the Sky, 2023, oil and plastic on canvas, 309 x 484 x 5 cm at White Cube 

Just when I thought my headache was going to ground me into pulp, a towering Georg Baselitz (White Cube Gallery) knocks me into a new weightlessness. I gape upwards at the exposed pink bellies of twin birds who glide confidently across a brisk ice sky. Skating swiftly on, I’m strangely welcomed in by a large painting of a quivering reddish tree with specks of mustard (Oliver Bak’s painting with Spruth Magers). Its shadow is like a speckling of cherry stains on dusky low-lying mist. Maybe I need to go outside and look at a squirrel? Maybe a I need to go outside and hold a squirrel? ‘Yes, you do' nods an allied fox, breaking from its usual stealth and making itself visible in a Bill Lynch painting (Approach Gallery). No time for a pinch of park life though, I’ve got to cram some more glimmers into my sagging eyes.  

 

Rory Pilgram, Who do I Choose to Follow, 2023, oil, crayon, pencil & nail polish on paper, 70 x 100 cm at Maureen Paley

I try a booth that attracts me from a distance, but on closer inspection is packed full of formulaic landscape paintings, like giant stagnant jigsaw puzzles. No time for this nothingness. Crawl onwards, I must. Some vibrant works on paper by Rory Pilgram (Maureen Paley Gallery) give me just the vitamin I need. Crayon, pencil and nail polish tell of adventures where horses and humans frequent glowing green and pink lakes under dancing skies, beside galloping fields and whistling sea. Drawings always have a particularly strong voice at Frieze. The architecture of the fair is repetitive, like airport queuing systems, and my already-keen thirst for imperfect human-made lines is ramped up, an antidote to my surroundings. I come across an elegantly splotchy painting of a princess-like lady leaning against an accommodating tree at Almine Rech’s Booth. She wears a powder-blue Miss-Muffet-style dress that is threatening to sail her right up into the fairytale sky above. In the background a pink castle with unblinking windows waits earnestly. This painting is by Genieve Figgis, who lives the Wicklow Mountains near Dublin, and makes fabulous absurd painted retellings of historical subjects, goulash and luscious in equal measure. This painting refuels me.

Naminapu Maymuru-White at Sullivan and Strumpf 

 

Pumped up on these multicoloured fantasies, I worry that a sugar crash is on the horizon. But Naminapu Maymuru-White’s paintings scoop me up just in time. Her works, on display at Sullivan and Strumpf, are all made with white earth pigment on bark and they invite me to dance with my headache instead of resisting it. The cold light of the art fair becomes a thriving shimmer when filtered through her effortless blend of figuration and abstraction. The works are intricate but not fussy, and they flow like a circular story weaving a time-bending rhythm. Maymuru-White lives and works in Yirrkala, Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, Australia, and is one of the first Yolŋu women to be taught to paint miny’tji (sacred creation clan designs). I almost fall over looking at them, a bit like when standing in front of one of Bridget Riley’s monochrome op art paintings. Riley’s hard lines and aggressive illusionary effect often make me nauseous. In contrast, Maymuru-White’s paintings have a singing touch that both elevates and softens their optical effect. She uses repeat and pattern to transcend the surface of the gently warping bark. I want to spend time with these paintings is a very different setting from here. 

Gabriella Boyd at Grimm Gallery 

 

With a taste for abstraction alight in my belly, I am excited to find two tall paintings by Gabriella Boyd. Previously I have enjoyed Boyd’s paintings for their ability to hover between internal and external, between recognisable and not. These two paintings (named Sun (i) and Sun (ii), part of Grimm Gallery’s display) seem to burst into a new zone, her usual textured and prancing brush marks move further towards an abstract space that could have been sculpted by sudden sunlight. I could step into these spaces, hold the twisted forms and untangle the darting spurts of line. But I would not want to because that would undo this concoction of touched energy. 

Ali Eyal, Look what I Remember, 2024, oil on canvas, 83 x 101 cm at ChertLüdde

 

Despite my now hastening gait, I look for a long while into a splintered goofy landscape populated with bodies that seem horribly soft, like jittery legs after a clanky rollercoaster. Ali Eyal’s painting, Look what I Remember at ChertLüdde, lets me know about both old and present disasters in a new way. Like a child’s memory pulling at an adult’s shirt sleeve, it is a necessary reminder of the brutal steamroller of destruction still rolling in the distance, and all the unimaginable crumbling crying worlds it leaves in its wake. It reminds me of Phillip Guston’s skill with fleshy cartoonised motifs, in the sense that a comic voice can be the jester in the room, speaking about the things that other voices cannot. But in contrast to Guston, this is a small and intricate painting, more wispy than slabby. It interjects an effective unease, while only speaking as loudly as a tea stain. Its sickened landscape, populated by lost shoes and subtly contorting men in beige uniforms, brings the looming question to the surface again, the question of who gets to be human. It is a truthfully distorting window through time and space and a necessary puncture in the art fair bubble. I flick back into the present, blinking. Time is running out. 

  

An oversized, ruddied and bejewelled, extraterrestrial crustacean threatens to devour me. This is Nils Alix Tabeling’s sculpture, and it might jump out of Public gallery’s booth, as fast as a mother tarantula in bristling stilettos. In the centre of her body hangs an intricate gathering of sacred charms that might bewitch me if she desires. She is spiky and influential, like the glamorous but hardy person at the party who can throw shade as casually as a blow dart. Ellen Berkenblit’s painting (at Contemporary Fine Art) gives me a similar feeling of a sharp yet muted aggression. A claustrophobically cropped figure looks towards something outside of the frame, with a seething glare, while a gramophone horn shouts at the back of her head, where her hair is ironed perfectly straight. An untethered light bulb is beginning to flash a red warning while threatening to plug into her collar bone. It’s a freeze-frame of a nightmare and the protagonist is reassuringly tough, her eyes hardened over like a digital insect. My eyes, in contrast, are becoming mushy with overload, unscreened they have let everything in.  

Eva Gold at Rose Easton 

Just as I’m about to escape into the park with my uneaten tangerine and dry mouth, I spot Eva Gold’s installation in Rose Easton’s booth, where an off-white leather sofa faces a mute charcoal drawing of a burning shed. It is as if the drawing itself is waiting to combust. A pile of printouts where a coffee table should be offer confessional notes that feel close to the bone. This curbed outpouring, fictitious or not (or both), clings to my exhausted thoughts like a sour flavour. James Baldwin once said, ‘art has to be a kind of confession’ and he is right. He also said, ‘Artists are here to disturb the peace’. True enough, but this is so often taken the wrong way. Try too hard to be loud and you become invisible, blending into the racket that is the backdrop to current living. Gold gets it just right with this icy twin of a living room, slotted in amongst the art hustle. It is a quiet disrupter and its staged atmosphere of control is a glint of realness, pinning down the entire art fair like a carefully flung shard of plastic. 

Eva Gold, Acts of Violence (after Haneke), 2024, at Rose Easton

I stumble out into the dimming park, where small dogs in fashionable jackets yap into the coming night. I witness a crow drinking coffee from a discarded takeaway cup. Flooded with the afterimages of all that I have seen, and the connected tangle of thoughts, I pop a paracetamol and gratefully head home for a jacket potato.

Jennifer Caroline Campbell

Frieze London

Regents Park, London NW1

9-13 October 2024