Frieze Week Introduces New Format For 2020
Facing a second Covid-19 wave, Frieze’s 2020 physical editions were modified into a hybrid online and offline gallery presentation
In Eva Langret’s first year as Frieze’s Artistic Director, more than 250 participating galleries, exhibitions and events are spread out across London’s parks, streets and screens, for both virtual and physical encounters with works from almost every era and medium.
Going live from October 9-16, 2020 app and web-based platform Frieze Viewing Room, unveiled in May for the fair’s New York iteration, launches major new developments, including live chats and social media sharing, alongside the ‘sign the book’ and augmented reality features.
Encompassing the Frieze Masters section, it thereby becomes the first online fair for art from all ages, seeing antiquity and old master dealers embrace technology. Concurrently, Frieze Week offers a series of in-person programming across the city’s cultural institutes from October 5 onwards, with the fair’s beloved outdoor exhibition Frieze Sculpture returning to Regent’s Park. As perhaps one of the safest ways to view art, Frieze Sculpture is set to become more popular than ever, on view from October 5-18, 2020.
A work by Wang Zhibo
Using its own virtual reality software for its Frieze presentation, gallery Hauser & Wirth is showing a diverse array of works from a variety of artists digitally, while dedicating its London spaces to present new works by American artist Rashid Johnson.
Alternatively, White Cube is presenting a solo exhibition of the multidisciplinary artist Theaster Gates with a public installation at White Cube Bermondsey, on October 10, 11 and 16. Malaysiaborn, Chinese Palestinian artist Mandy El-Sayegh, based in the UK, is the star of Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac’s A Focus on Painting: Mandy El-Sayegh.
Transforming the gallery’s interior space with an immersive installation, monumental paintings and newspaper-latex assemblages, El-Sayegh brings together found fragments layered with handpainted gestures, advertisements and calligraphy to explore meaning and signifiers in her larger practice, which centres on displacement.
Curated by Clare Lilley, the 2020 edition of Frieze Sculpture sees new works by Patrick Goddard, Kalliopi Lemos and Arne Quinze and a recent commission by Lubaina Himid, exhibited for the first time in the UK, among others. The works explore civil rights, our relationship to the natural world and the role of the artist as disruptor.
A work by Prafulla Mohanti
Also of note is Rebecca Warren’s remarkable Aurelius, a three-metre painted bronze sculpture that is pale, twisting and thin. Resembling a crumbling stele, the work playfully subverts a visually coherent relationship between form and material.
In Frieze’s new section Possessions, Curator Dr. Zoé Whitley charts the resurgence of spirituality in contemporary art with artists such as Vera Frenkel, Veronica Ryan and Jitish Kallat. Chief Curator of Beijing’s M WOODS museum, Victor Wang establishes an, “Institute of Melodic Healing” in the fair’s LIVE section, showcasing sound and performance art.
Taking references from Stuart Hall’s notion of sonic culture, the theoretical institute, “Supports artistic experimental development without a defined outcome, to develop the community by thinking through sound and body,” states Wang. The aforementioned Mandy El-Sayegh, alongside Cécile B. Evans, Denzil Forrester, Anthea Hamilton, Haroon Mirza, Zadie Xa and Benito Mayor Vallejo are presenting live and online performances.
The app and web-based platform for Frieze will be live from October 9-16, 2020. For more information visit frieze.com
Image courtesy of respective artists and galleries at Frieze
From the Autumn 2020 Issue of Harper’s Bazaar Art