Art Market
Installation view of Richard Saltoun’s booth at Frieze London 2025. Courtesy of Richard Saltoun.
Samuel Johnson famously quipped that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” But was there this much art to see in 1777? This week, London has turned into a manic whirlwind of art events, with standout shows at galleries and museums anchoring a flurry of openings and parties to keep art lovers up early and out late around town.
The through line of the week is, of course, Frieze London and Frieze Masters, which, for 2025, collectively bring more than 280 exhibitors to their tents in Regent’s Park. Although Frieze is the headliner, there are several other art fairs on the lineup. Minor Attractions, 1-54, and Echo Soho are also taking place this week, with each offering a distinct slice of London’s vibrant contemporary art scene.
Artsy’s editorial team has scoured them all to pick out some of our choice works priced under $10,000.
Frieze London and Frieze Masters
Through October 19th
The Regent’s Park, NW1 4NR
Hosting more than 280 galleries between two venues in Regent’s Park, Frieze London and Frieze Masters are the anchors of London’s annual art market moment. The former hosts cutting-edge contemporary art, while the latter platforms a broader scope of art history.
Presented by Richard Saltoun at Frieze London
Price: £4,500 ($6,053)
Richard Saltoun’s Frieze London booth explores the human body in all its truth and horror. Curated by art historian Lucia Pesapane, the presentation centers on women artists’ use of clay to depict figures both directly and indirectly. New York–based Iranian artist Samira Abbassy, for instance, renders her stylized faces in flat hues in her glazed ceramic figurines (each priced in the low four figures), inspired by Middle Eastern art traditions and Surrealist symbolism.
A little further along the booth is a trio of small glazed ceramic sculptures by British artist Holly Stevenson. Typical of the artist’s sculptural practice, the stoneware work It Unfurled Before My Eye (2021) explores the symbolism of abstract, ovoid forms, with a washed-out, carnivalesque color scheme. The striped, oddly organic shape represents a curvaceous cave, with graphic additions of a blue ball and wire-like tube. In all, it’s a strange work that recalls both a flower and the human body from an uncanny perspective.
Stevenson, who has long focused on transformation and metamorphosis in her stoneware, is one of several contemporary artists taking new inspiration from psychoanalysis (elsewhere at the fair, Russian artist Bogdan Ablozhnyy took home the Frieze Emerging Artist Prize for another Freud-inspired presentation). Earlier this year, Stevenson had an exhibition at London’s Freud Museum exploring the psychoanalyst’s personal archive and its influence on art.
—Josie Thaddeus-Johns, Senior Editor
Madge Gill, Untitled, 1940–50
Presented by The Gallery of Everything at Frieze Masters
Price: £1,500 ($2,017)
Madge Gill, Untitled, 1940–50. Courtesy of The Gallery of Everything.
The late, self-taught British artist Madge Gill is best known for her intricate, otherworldly ink drawings and textile works, often created under what she described as the guidance of a spirit named “Myrninerest.”
In a curated presentation from London’s The Gallery of Everything, a wide range of the artist’s multifaceted practice is on view. Browsing the works, it’s immediately apparent why she is being newly heralded as a significant 20th-century mystical woman artist, in the same lineage as Hilma af Klint and Ithell Colquhoun.
On the outer wall of the gallery’s booth are 30 of the artist’s untitled postcard drawings created between 1940 and 1950, priced at £1,500 ($2,017) a pop. It was hard to pick a favorite, but this one caught my eye: Its densely patterned composition weaves together faces, geometric forms, and linework into a hypnotic visual field.
Figures emerge and dissolve here within a tangled structure—haunting, doll-like presences that seem to inhabit a dreamlike or spiritual dimension. Typical of Gill’s practice, the work balances compulsion and clarity; its monochrome palette feels at once personal, mystical, and infinite. “She may have died in 1961, but I can assure you, she is here on our stand, supervising every sale,” said the gallery’s founder, James Brett. Indeed, among other sales, two works from the gallery’s booth were acquired by the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate Collection on the fair’s first day.
—Arun Kakar, Senior Art Market Editor
Through October 19th
Artist’s House, 14 Manette Street, W1D 4AW
Just launched by London gallerist India Rose James (founder of Soho Revue), Echo Soho brings together a dozen women-led galleries and nearly all works by women artists. It is, as James put it, “just women coming together and celebrating art.”
Presented by Alice Amati
Price: £2,000 ($2,683)
Alice Amati dedicates her Echo presentation to Sophie Birch, the one English artist the London gallery has shown (she was featured in a two-person show at the gallery earlier this year). Birch’s canvases hum with vitality—wisps and washes of color seem to pulse and expand beyond the picture plane. Though Yolk (2025) may appear abstract at first, its title reveals its bodily origins: the glowing coral, soft peach, and streaks of crimson evoke the innards of an egg, a vessel of life.
Birch, who studies anatomy, often channels the invisible rhythms of living beings. As Amati explained, the artist often thinks about “things that contain other things,” whether a book or a body. The work isn’t meant to be framed, allowing its charge to emanate freely into space—a luminous reminder of energy’s endless potential.
—Casey Lesser, Senior Director of Content
Presented by Wilder Gallery
Price: £900 ($1,207) plus VAT
At Wilder Gallery’s Echo Soho booth, Xanthe Burdett presents a body of work titled “Voices Caught in the Earth,” exploring an underworld where human and natural realms entwine. This small painting, Root Walker (2025), is one of several gemlike works—just 7 by 5 inches—that shimmer with oil brushed over metal leaf and speckled with solvent marks.
We see a figure surfacing from the soil as though she’s coming up for air, her face emerald green. Burdett described the works as “this idea of memory and history being caught in the ground and the earth beneath us—this space of the mythological animal world, but also this really fertile place that we can’t look into as humans.” Root Walker feels both luminous and earthen, evoking soil, spirit, and myth. Later this fall, the artist will bring this vision to New York for a solo show at Palo Gallery.
—C.L.
Through October 19th
The Mandrake Hotel, 20-21 Newman Street, W1T 1PG
This maze-like fair hosts 70 galleries, featuring mostly emerging artists, in a swanky Fitzrovia hotel. Works hang in surprising spots, including rooms, staircases, bars, lounging areas, and outdoor spaces.
Presented by Cedric Bardawil
Price: £4,000 ($5,316)
Husband and wife Eddie Ruscha and Francesca Gabbiani join forces for the first time for a series of new, kaleidoscopic works on paper. Displayed mostly around the bed in London gallery Cedric Bardawil’s hotel room, which the London dealer is sharing with Sydney space LAILA, the works fuse both artists’ signature styles. Ruscha’s psychedelic gradients serve as rhythmic backdrops for Gabbiani’s intricate cut-paper depictions of flowers.
“They’re very much about the landscape of Los Angeles, that feeling of a certain time of day, the effervescence of a sunrise, sunset, and the Californian light—it’s quite unique,” said Bardawil, who has shown both artists independently at his gallery.
Echoes (2025) is a striking example of this juxtaposition of organic and optical elements. The work focuses on a cut-paper flowering stalk, rendered with almost sculptural precision, surrounded by undulating waves of pinks and ochers. The small work appears to pulse outward, giving the impression of motion—as if the paper itself is responding to the plant.
—A.K.
Presented by CON_
Price: £2,500 ($3,356)
Tokyo tastemaker CON_ shared its hotel room-cum-booth with London gallery Season 4 Episode 6 and displayed works by BIEN around its bed, bathroom, and windowsills. The Japanese artist’s moody, layered pieces gave many visitors cause for meditative pause on the fair’s opening day.
untitled(skeleton conductor #scene1) (2025) is part of a new series by the artist in which he investigates the relationship between writing and painting on canvas. Subtle layers of muted green and ocher tones merge to create a sense of depth and quiet luminosity while delicate, ghostly gestures emerge through the surface, suggesting organic or calligraphic forms that seem to float within the misty color field.
“He’s trying to explain how we interpret painting as a material and how we interpret the meaning of painting,” said the gallery’s director, Eri Mura. The painting balances restraint and movement. Its soft gradients evoke natural light filtering through foliage or mist, while the faint traces of drawing introduce a sense of fleeting presence.
—A.K.
1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair London
Through October 19th
Somerset House, Strand, WC2R 1LA
A standout selection of art from Africa and its diaspora is housed throughout the historic Somerset House complex. More than 50 galleries from 18 countries feature at the fair, where strong craft-inspired works and photography are particularly notable.
Presented by TERN Gallery
Price: $9,750
The presentation of the Bahamian gallery TERN ranges from cheeky appropriated sculptures by Blue Curry to a huge gestural abstract landscape painting by Leasho Johnson. The standout, however, is a series of oil paintings by Marisa Willoughby Holland, a Jamaican painter who now lives in London.
Caribbean Queen (2024) is a majestic portrait of the artist’s sister, who is depicted resplendent in a traditional Jamaican quadrille dress and seated on a rearing horse in an evocative, marshlike landscape. According to the artist, who was in attendance on the fair’s opening day, each detail of the oil painting has a personal resonance, recalling the rich symbolism of Surrealist artists like Frida Kahlo.
“I tend to portray either myself or my sister, but this one also has my mother as a young woman,” she explained, pointing to a figure in a blue dress. Family comes to stand for wider themes in Willoughby Holland’s work: Her sister, a former Miss Jamaica, seems to represent both her homeland and the adventurous spirit of femininity.
Other details, from the Jamaican ginger lilies that populate her paintings to ominous floating skeletons, each have their own emotional significance to the artist. “I really have to feel it,” she explained. Priced at $9,750, the painting is filled with a rich history that feels timeless and unique.
—J.T.J.
Presented by: THK Gallery
Price: €4,500 ($5,255)
Sahlah Davids’s works glitter from the walls of THK Gallery’s 1-54 booth. Thousands of shimmering beads, sequins, and fabrics are strung together into sparkling thorns and stalactites, evoking a bejeweled coral formation. The emerging South African artist is influenced by her childhood growing up in the Muslim Cape Malay community in Cape Town, where beadwork plays a key role. “She remembers, growing up, women would sit around and work on these sorts of collective projects,” said Linda Pyke, director at the gallery. “She just continued that, and these exploded to be much more elaborate.”
Davids has shown at several other South African galleries, from WHATIFTHEWORLD to Eclectica Contemporary, but this is one of the first times her work is being shown outside of her home country. Each work is named after personal moments of significance to the artist, and I found something special about Uncle Maghdi’s Fabric Stall, Grand Parade (2024): For me, its title captures some of the childlike obsession with tactile commercial experiences.
Elsewhere at the booth, my eye was also caught by Driaan Claassen’s stunning stained teak totem, I’m Not Giving Up (2022), carved into a smooth, minimalist statement piece.
—J.T.J.
