The tents will be back up in Regent’s Park, the champagne on ice: Frieze Week is preparing to take London’s pulse—though no one seems entirely sure what a healthy rhythm would even sound like anymore. The 23rd edition of Frieze London opens next Wednesday with its VIP preview, featuring 168 galleries from 43 countries. And the art world, resilient as ever, is flying in, setting up, and pretending that everything is fine. Maybe it is.
For years, Frieze London has been less about revelation than calibration—a gauge of where taste, capital, and attention converge in a given season. Since Art Basel in June, what little momentum the art market had has largely dissipated, replaced by a low-grade anxiety that was palpable at both the Armory Show and Frieze Seoul last month. Still, the London fair is where the fall season really begins—and with Art Basel Paris opening just one week later, it may be wise to withhold a full diagnosis until the end of October.
When collectors enter the fair Wednesday, they’ll be greeted by Rio de Janeiro’s Portas Vilaseca, Los Angeles’s The Pit, and London’s Soft Opening—a trio of galleries that capture Frieze’s current mood: a little international, a little local, and a little earnest.
The big galleries, meanwhile, are keeping things contained, favoring solo booths that showcase depth over variety—or at least appear to. Modern Art is bringing 15 new stoneware sculptures by Sanya Kantarovsky, each glazed in a palette that seems stolen from a fever dream. Lehmann Maupin will present Do Ho Suh’s translucent architectural installations and Pace will offer up William Monk’s painterly mantras. Stephen Friedman Gallery presents Sarah Ball’s uncanny portraits, with faces rendered so precisely they begin to feel fictional.
Lehmann Maupin, Do Ho Suh, Bathroom, 348 West 22nd St., Apt. A, New York, NY 10011 (2003) © Do Ho Suh. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
Arianne Piper, a London-based adviser, told ARTnews that the fair’s early previews suggest “a conservative year.” Many dealers, she said, are arriving with recognizable works by established names rather than betting on younger artists. “It’s not as shiny as it used to be,” she added, half-apologetically. Piper suspects this caution is strategic—a way to fend off the death-rattle narrative that’s haunted art-market coverage all year. (One could note that London has lived through worse plagues.)
George Rouy, a rising star of London’s contemporary art scene, takes the spotlight at Hauser & Wirth, joined by Christina Kimeze, Anj Smith, and Allison Katz (who’s donating part of her sales to the Gallery Climate Coalition). The gallery will also show work by Henry Taylor, Avery Singer, Takesada Matsutani, and Lee Bul—a characteristically confident lineup amid reports that the gallery’s UK profits have dropped precipitously. But don’t be surprised if Hauser has something else up its sleeve: last year at Art Basel Paris, the gallery hung a $33 million Malevich on its wall without warning.
Lauren Halsey will transform Gagosian’s booth into a slice of Los Angeles, with a sculptural “plaza sign,” vivid collage wallpaper, and protruding engravings that reimagine community monuments as monuments to community itself. “She’s bringing South Central Los Angeles to Frieze London,” director Antwaun Sargent told ARTnews. The statement doubles as a mission and a flex.
Rounding out the megas is White Cube’s three-artist presentation—Marguerite Humeau, Howardena Pindell, and Sara Flores—which focuses on the natural world and how artists interpret it. Humeau’s speculative sculptures meet Pindell’s luminous abstractions and Flores’s bark-cloth paintings from the Peruvian Amazon.
Many of the above presentations echo institutional shows on view in London right now. Lehmann Maupin’s Do Ho Suh booth, for example, comes as the artist’s work is being surveyed at Tate Modern, while White Cube’s booth, with its focus on women, recalls Tate’s efforts to write female artists into the canon.”
Those echoes may be prudent. Wendy Cromwell, a New York–based adviser, told ARTnews that she is just as interested in “what’s happening around the city” as what’s at the fair.
Her highlights include Christopher Wool’s show at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill. The exhibition, which opens Monday, has been billed as his largest UK show in two decades. Hauser & Wirth will open its Nicolas Party exhibition Clotho on Tuesday, and a grand Kerry James Marshall exhibition is already on view at the Royal Academy, with plans to run through January. Collectors have told Cromwell that all three are not to be missed. She also singled out East London’s Emalin Gallery—currently showing a solo by Tolia Astakhishvili (“a wound on my plate,” opened October 3)—as “small, sharp, and really with its finger on the pulse.”
“There’s just a real density of good galleries here,” Cromwell added.
Kurimanzutto, Ana Segovia, Me duelen los ojos de mirar sin verte: closeup 11 (2025)
Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York.
Back at Frieze, the fair has three sections that pull together fresher voices. “Echoes in the Present,” a section curated by Jareh Das, explores how artists pull sound, material, and memory out of the past to make the present vibrate. A few aisles away is the returning Artist-to-Artist program—this year backed by Tiffany & Co.—in which established artists nominate emerging ones. The pairings often say as much about the nominators as the nominees. Abraham Cruzvillegas has chosen Ana Segovia, who reimagines mid-century Spanish and Mexican cinema through an irreverent queer lens; Amy Sherald picked René Treviño, who stitches together fabric sculptures and paintings. The result could feel refreshingly uncurated: a series of private enthusiasms made public.
Lastly, the Focus section, devoted to galleries under 12 years old, keeps its spot near the center of the floor—and it still feels like the part of Frieze where discovery actually happens. Christelle Oyiri’s installation at Gathering digs into the colonial afterlife of pesticides; Gray Wielebinski’s work at Nicoletti turns American violence into design; Xin Liu’s kinetic duckweed aquarium installation creates its own small ecosystem, both serene and slightly menacing.
It’s perhaps those sections that are the biggest bellwethers of the market. As Piper explained, everyone in the market right now seems to want reassurance. “Collectors are being very selective. They want to feel confident in what they’re buying, not take a punt on something untested,” she said.
Frieze Masters may receive the biggest boost, then. Under new director Emanuela Tarizzo, the fair brings together 137 galleries from 27 countries with the usual array of rediscoveries and classic bangers: a Rubens panel, a Ptolemaic relief, manuscripts for the devout, and modernist outliers for the restless.
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts curator Valerie Cassel Oliver’s “Spotlight” gives overdue attention to figures from the 1950s to the 1970s like Novera Ahmed, Iria Leino, and Mona Saudi, while Sheena Wagstaff and Margrethe Troensegaard’s Studio section brings contemporary artists into conversation with historical material. It includes new and early works shown alongside studio ephemera, tracing how the past lingers in the tools and habits of making. The section promises a quieter kind of spectacle: process over polish, with artists like R. H. Quaytman, Glenn Brown, and Dorothy Cross.
Abby Bangser’s new section, Reflections, folds decorative art into the mix: Roman busts, Mexican tapestries, ceramics from Kettle’s Yard. It’s a reminder that even connoisseurship has trends.
