10 Must-See Shows during Frieze London 2025

It’s hard to miss Frieze London when it rolls into town every October. The main fair already features a sprawling public sculpture exhibition and two art-packed tents in Regent’s Park (including the more historically angled Frieze Masters). At the same time, London’s galleries host a mix of shows, from sure-fire favorites to spotlights on innovative emerging names. For 2025, numerous gallery exhibitions feature ambitious sculptural works. Some use unconventional found materials such as furniture and driftwood; others explore the transformative potential of metal.

It’s not a time to hold back. Artists Sonia Gomes and Kudzanai-Violet Hwami (at Pace and Victoria Miro respectively) are each showing bronze sculptures for the first time, reimagining this traditional medium through a contemporary lens while exploring metamorphosis and identity. Experimental painting also takes center stage, from Cai Guo-Qiang’s controversial gunpowder canvases at White Cube to Danielle Fretwell’s sumptuous oil works at Alice Amati.

Here, Artsy highlights 10 of the most compelling gallery exhibitions taking place during Frieze London 2025.

“The Shore”

Hauser & Wirth

Oct. 14–Dec. 20

One of this year’s most inventive Frieze Week exhibitions comes from Cristina Iglesias. For her solo show, “The Shore,” the Spanish artist created three large-scale bronze sculptures inspired by porous and rocky natural forms. They are immersed in running water trickling through their exposed insides at Hauser & Wirth, which recently announced its representation of the artist.

The sculptures are shaped like meteors and represent this meeting point between outer space and the Earth. Iglesias draws on weighty inspirations outside of art, from psychology to mechanics and the state of nature: She originally studied chemical science before moving into ceramics and drawing. Her works make bold use of space, playing with alchemical and permeable aspects of her materials while considering humans’ place in the world.

“Tablescapes”

Alice Amati

Througjh Nov. 8

Danielle Fretwell’s oil paintings are dark and theatrical, featuring still life compositions flooded in deep shadow and sumptuous highlights. For the emerging U.S. artist’s solo show, her third at Alice Amati, she combines historical painting techniques with a photographic sheen, tapping into an eerie Lynchian surrealism. For example, a plate of bloody fruits glistens seductively in Orbital (Sweet Cherries) (2025). Her process involves pressing materials such as fabric into wet paint to create texture in her paintings, blurring the line between still image and physical object. More broadly, her work questions images’ trustworthiness amid their manipulation in the digital age when entire scenes can be created or altered using AI.

“Incantations”

Victoria Miro

Through Nov. 1

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami’s sensitive, fragmented paintings are composed from a mixture of source images, including found archival and personal photographs. The Zimbabwean artist explores how we shape a unified sense of self in the digital age, piecing together seemingly disparate images that often relate to gender, the body, and religion. “Incantations” features her first series of bronze sculptures, which are in dialogue with wall-based vinyls and paintings.

These three sculptures are shaped after the figures of her close friends, taking on protectively curled-up or open poses which consider the bodily expression of survival and intimacy. Other works draw upon multifaceted mythical protagonists who represent conflicting imagery. Her subjects include Persephone, who is both queen of the underworld and a goddess of fertility and harvest, and fallen angels. Ultimately, Hwami celebrates transformation and multiplicity, connecting with nuanced, exploratory expressions of contemporary queerness and Blackness.

Richard Saltoun

Oct. 13–Dec. 13

The resurgence of Surrealism is still going strong. In “Unveiled Desires,” surreal expression is explored as a form of liberation, with artists historic and contemporary drawing upon uncanny and unearthly motifs to discuss fetish and desire. The Richard Saltoun show is curated by Maudji Mendel from RAW (Rediscovering Art by Women), a private collection and curatorial project that highlights overlooked women artists from the last century.

Feminist ideals run throughout, including works from early adopters of surrealism Méret Oppenheim and Mimi Parent, to avant-garde provocateurs Helen Chadwick and Renate Bertlmann. This focus expands to queer expression in the 21st century, featuring artists such as Sin Wai Kin and Jesse Darling who bring radical perspectives on gender and sexual identity.

Always a showstopper, El Anatsui is famous for his shimmering, hanging pieces which are made from found items like bottle caps. Following the acclaimed Ghanaian artist’s sweeping, glittering installation in Tate’s Turbine Hall in 2023, his work returns to the institution as part of the exhibition “Nigerian Modernism,” which opens during Frieze. At the same time, two of Anatsui’s representing galleries, October Gallery and Goodman Gallery, will present works in a dual exhibition entitled “Go Back and Pick.” Works on view will feature tropical hardwood and tempera wall-mounted sculptures, a new development from his 1980s and ’90s wooden wall reliefs. The individual modules of each work, often taking the form of long strips placed side by side to build works over three meters wide, can be rearranged into new configurations, challenging the usually central role of the artist in defining the final form of a work of art.

“Gunpowder and Abstraction”

White Cube

Through Nov. 9

Another explosive artist (quite literally) is Cai Guo-Qiang, who works with gunpowder to create outdoor explosion performances and paintings. He also previously exhibited in Tate’s Turbine Hall. For his 2003 “Explosion Project,” he made firework drawings in situ within the hall and oversaw a controlled explosion across the Millennium Bridge and the facade of the museum. “Gunpowder and Abstraction” is his first London show in 30 years, featuring works made over the last decade by igniting explosives onto paper, canvas, and glass. Many of his final pieces contain abstracted shapes that appear floral, evoking the still lifes of the Old Masters through unconventional and violent means. His new works at White Cube include more color than usual, which comes from vibrant pyrotechnic powders. The show explores how rhythms in the natural world reflect the wider birth and death of stars in the cosmos, his vibrant explosions capturing both micro and macro impressions of the universe.

Rising contemporary artist Eva Helene Pade paints sublime scenes featuring masses of nude figures soaked in golden light. There are murky undercurrents to the work, which will be on view at the artist’s first solo show in the U.K. at Thaddaeus Ropac’s Dover Street space. The Danish artist is interested in the powerful social forces that flow when bodies are in a space together. In her dreamlike oil paintings, she explores the ways in which groups of people impact one another through unconscious movements and physicality, from the malevolent to the seductive. Her canvases are mounted on floor-to-ceiling metal posts away from the walls, impacting how viewers can navigate the works. Set in ambiguous times and locations, Pade’s crowd scenes might call to mind a contemporary nightclub or a historical battle scene.

“Staged Surfaces”

Cedric Bardawil

Oct. 10–Nov. 8

London-based contemporary artist Hannah Tilson’s paintings are built up using a heady mix of translucent layers, clashing patterns, and bright colors. She crops in close to items of clothing or faces, creating an intimate relationship between the viewer and the work, as though we are standing close to her subject. Play is central to her work: vibrant marks dance before the eyes and empty background spaces are revealed and concealed. For her new show, her fourth at Cedric Bardawil, she expands her ongoing exploration into pattern and color with a large installation made from sheer fabric, reflecting the delicate layers of her paintings. Life-sized figures reference vintage cut-out dolls, her characters jumping off the canvas and into three-dimensional space.

“Rust Never Sleeps”

Carpenters Workshop Gallery

Oct. 14–Feb. 14, 2026

Visitors in town for the design fair PAD London, which runs concurrently with Frieze, would do well to head to Carpenters Workshop Gallery this week. U.S. mega-designer Rick Owens, known for his subversive fashion and love of contemporary gothic aesthetics, is presenting a new show, entitled “Rust Never Sleeps.” The exhibition is inspired by London’s stark brutalist architecture, featuring sculptural furniture pieces that explore the impact of environmental factors on metal. These experimental, characteristically punk-couture beds, tables, and seats toe the line between the realms of art and collectible design. The show is curated by Michèle Lamy, Owens’s long-term creative and romantic partner whose practice also centers around fusing clashing art forms, haunting aesthetics, and mercurial materials.

“É preciso não ter medo de criar” (“One must not be afraid to create”)

Pace

Oct. 14–Nov. 15, 2025