Arts Council Collection Acquires Work by Nour Jaouda, Nicole Wermers and Shaqúelle Whyte
Three very different pieces by UK-based artists at Frieze London 2024 will join the UK national collection
Three very different pieces by UK-based artists at Frieze London 2024 will join the UK national collection
The Arts Council Acquisition Fund has bought works from galleries Herald St, Pippy Houldsworth and Union Pacific at Frieze London 2024.
The works joining the Arts Council Collection are: Nour Jaouda, The Light in Between (2024); Nicole Wermers, Reclining Female #3 (2022); and Shaqúelle Whyte, Form i: Under the lonely sky (2024).
Launched at Frieze London in 2023, the fund is an opportunity for the selected artists’ work to join one of the most widely circulated national collections of modern and contemporary British art. In its first year, work by Julianknxx, Mark Corfield-Moore, Anne Tallentire and Tanoa Sasraku was acquired at Frieze.
Alona Pardo, director of Arts Council Collection said, ‘The acquisition of [this] work reflects the Arts Council Collection’s enduring commitment to acquiring work by some of the most exciting contemporary artists working in the UK today. We are delighted to build on last year’s fund and look forward to seeing these significant works travel the length and breadth of the UK in the coming years.’
About the artists
Nicole Wermers’s practice explores the relationship between functionality and aesthetics in the design of everyday objects, as well as the act of navigating domestic and urban spaces, particularly from the point of view of a woman. In her work, household items, furnishings, and structures become ornaments of a sociopolitical and historical engagement with our immediate surroundings, based on the formal language of modernism. The artist is fascinated with contemporary consumer culture, emphasising the seductive surfaces, colours, and forms of her starting material. In her practice, Wermers often revisits a long-standing interest in the connection between twentieth-century art and café culture. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2015 for her solo exhibition ‘Infrastruktur’ at Herald St.
Nour Jaouda was born in Libya and lives and works in Cairo and London. Her large-scale dyed tapestries mirror the shape of prayer mats from her immediate surroundings in Cairo, incorporating steel elements both crafted by the artist and found in her environment. In this way, her work straddles personal narrative and social history; past and present.
In his latest series, Shaqúelle Whyte presents landscapes and bodies in a blur of toppling, freefall motion. These works move away from the autobiographical, with a playful and affected application of paint. He deploys a range of brushwork, from wide expanses of softly blended colour to suggest woodland or red-earth cliffs, to a final application of sketchy, scraping strokes with a wide, coarse brush.
Further Information
Frieze London and Frieze Masters, 9 – 13 October 2024, The Regent’s Park.
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Main image: Nicole Wermers, Shaqúelle Whyte and Nour Jaouda at Frieze London. Photo: Belinda Lawley
