Aindrea Emelife's Highlights of Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2022

Emma Amos

Waves

2000

Presented by RYAN LEE Gallery

Frieze London, Stand G22 

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American artist and activist Emma Amos (1937-2020) was a beautiful colourist. Dynamic and masterful, she was the only woman to join the radical African American art collective, Spiral, which was co-founded by Romare Bearden in 1963. The more you see Amos’ work, the more the rhythmic, figurative and deeply intellectual nuances come out. Born in the segregated South, she looked often to reflect on the experience of Black womanhood, and the work at Frieze Masters examples many instances of her technique – photo transfer for example. Her work was largely ignored until the middle to late 90s, when she showed at Art In General in New York. Her varied experiments in painting and textiles are explosions of colour that wrestle with issues of race and gender. Painting is a political act, and it is poetic with Amos' hand.

Nike Davies-Okundaye

Untitled

1989

Batik with natural dyes

Presented by kó

Frieze Masters, Spotlight, Stand S25

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Chief Oyenike Monica Davies-Okundaye, affectionately known as Mama Nike, is one of the most famous artists in Nigeria. Her practice is revitalized by her use of traditional art methods - reviving techniques and mediums such as batik and adire, a Yoruba indigo-died cloth, with great profundity. Textile, and many other mediums formerly attributed as craft, have experienced a great renaissance as perspectives shift. When looking on Mama Nike's embroideries, there is depth and sophistication in the scenes that recall at once a legacy of culture, community, history and tradition. A vibrant rainbow embroidery of the river goddess Osun stands out, as animal heads and masks pervade around the figure. Nike is an activist. Arrested for "inciting feminist tendencies", Nike seeks to uplift women by running workshops to pass on the technique, despite patriarchal pushback. Undoubtedly a landmark figure for Nigerian female artists, Nike boldly trailblazes against all odds (kó Gallery, Lagos, Frieze Masters, Stand S25)

Tyler Mitchell

New Horizons II

2022

Archival Pigment Print 

A Frieze Masters Commission

presented in collaboration with Gagosian

Tyler Mitchell's presentation at Frieze Masters confronts historical motifs, whilst traversing familiar themes for Mitchell - Black beauty, desire and the relationship between Black men and landscape. Creating, rather than restaging the canon, Mitchell imagines a legacy that could have happened in photography, through a contemporary lens. They could have been, always have been and at once recall a collective history of landscapes in art that are deeply nostalgic despite the distinct newness of his approach. They are seductive; staged - as in Cage II - where a young black man is trapped by the ideals of White middle classness, a picket fence with tufts of colourful flowers. Is there a touch of Lolita? How do we confront our misconceptions and beliefs about Black maleness and how embedded it is in visual culture and our ways of seeing. Mitchell brings fantasy to us. In looking, we question how much or how little we have looked at his subjects before (Frieze Masters, Stand P1 P2).

Sahara Longe

February 14th

2022

Oil on linen

Presented by Timothy Taylor 

Frieze London, Stand A12

British-Sierre Leonian artist Sahara Longe’s party scenes have the solidity of Old Master, perhaps also due to the composition. Bright flat panes of colour abstract the figures, as brightly coloured boots have a sculptural quality. Longe’s black subjects re-enter the canon with her hand. At leisure; they mingle, they brood, they have discussions, and the interior lives and quiet dramas of these characters plays out with a minimalist maturity. Soft greens and reds and terracottas give us a sense of a different time, though Longe’s practice is incredibly utopic at its core. Often large in scale, the ambiguity of emotion reaches a complexity that becomes signature. Longe's practice is fascinating and timely, because the elegant politics of her work enforces an artistic legacy that could have always been. Just being becomes a multifaceted and complex responsibility. They are joyful pleasures, but they are resilient and sure (Timothy Taylor, Frieze London, Stand A12).

Joy Labinjo

FRANCIS AND ELIZABETH BARBER

2022

Oil on canvas

Presented by Tiwani Contemporary

Frieze London, Focus, Stand H22

Joy Labinjo's large scale figuration resonates on many levels; testament to the multi-layered connections of the diasporic experience. Nigerian British, the artist's works are intimate compositions of contemporary life with historic references embedded. They speak to the connectivity of collective cultural history, and so at once become symbols or allegories for experiences and moments in history, shared by many. Labinjo shatters the façade of fixed history or perspective, quite literally represented in her signature fragmented style, as she composes scenes based on personal and archival imagery, referencing family photographs, found images as well as historic material. There is a shared affinity and a shared humanity when looking on Labinjo's work. In this powerful series, Labinjo has sourced the earliest portraiture of unknown and better known Black figures in mid-19th and 20th century collections and imagined the stories history forgot and largely obscured. In reclaiming their personal lives, Labinjo reasserts African and Black presence in England, and questions to canon - who gets remembered, why, and reminds us that art is our emotional memory.

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