Solo Exhibitions of Radical Painters at Frieze Masters 2024

Frieze Masters returns The Regent’s Park, 9 – 14 October 2024 with painting to the fore. Across the Galleries and Spotlight sections, solo presentations focus on artists who have taken painting into new territories. Highlights include Barkley L. Hendricks and Manuel Felguérez, who broke with the aesthetic traditions of their era; Alice Baber and Frank Auerbach, who pioneered new techniques; and Pauline Boty, Tess Jaray and Aubrey Williams, whose careers defied societal expectations.

Aubrey Williams (October Gallery, London)

Aubrey Williams (1926–90) played a key part in the explosion of creativity among writers, artists and intellectuals of the diaspora in London in the 1950s and 1960s. Arriving in the UK from Guyana in 1952 to study painting, Williams’s unique style combined abstraction with his interest in ecology, music and pre-colonial civilizations. Williams spent years with the Warrau people in the Guyanese rainforest, working as an agronomist specializing in soil and crop management, which had a profound influence on his painting. Warrau customs, rituals and stories migrated into his visual language, and the topic of ecological and environmental instability became central in his work.

 Frank Auerbach (Frankie Rossi Art Projects, London)

Frankie Rossi Art Projects showcases a selection of rare landscape and interior paintings by one of the keenest observers of people and places in recent art history: Frank Auerbach (1931–). The German-born artist took over his Camden Town studio from Leon Kossoff in 1954 and has since intensely guarded it as a private space. While London scenes recur throughout Auerbach’s career, glimpses of his actual studio are rare. In 1977, perceiving ‘something about the pile-up of the buildings which seemed challenging and worth recording’, he turned his distinctive mark-making to capture the exterior of his building, beginning his series ‘To the Studios’. It was not until 2002 that Auerbach first painted the interior of his studio. Frankie Rossi’s presentation covers four decades of Auerbach’s studio paintings and culminates in a major unseen interior view from 2021.

Barkley L. Hendricks (Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

Barkley L. Hendricks’s (1945–2017) portraits of Black Americans broke new ground in late 1960s New York. While the art scene had turned its back on figurative work, Hendricks was determined not to be ‘part of any “school”’ and set out to deploy the painterly mastery of European portraiture to depict the reality and individuality of his subjects. Jack Shainman Gallery looks back to one of the artist’s earliest series: the ‘Basketball Paintings’. These works were formative in Hendricks’s study of light, colour, line and geometry, and developed his interest in portraying social community. Interspersed photographic self-portraits reveal how Hendricks’s transferred his playful approach to composition from one medium to another, using his camera as his ‘mechanical sketchbook’. 

Tess Jaray (Offer Waterman and Ben Hunter, London)

In 1938, when she was one, Tess Jaray’s family fled Vienna for England, settling in rural Worcestershire. In 1968, Jaray became the Slade School of Art’s first female lecturer. Over more than six decades, she has developed her distinctive soft palette, rendering bold, illusory paintings, inspired by her encounters with Middle Eastern and Italian renaissance architecture. Despite this constancy, Jaray’s practice is constantly evolving, a process she describes as ‘the unravelling of an invisible structure, with each painting holding implicitly in it the history of all the previous ones’. Ben Hunter and Offer Waterman’s selection of works from 1975–88 explores how motifs such as the ceiling vault develop across Jaray’s paintings, contextualizing her approach with drawings and gouaches. 

‘Tess Jaray: Paintings and Drawings Across 60 Years’ is on view at the Millennium Gallery, Sheffield, until 13 October 2024.

Víctor Magariños D. (MC Galería, Buenos Aires)

The relationship between art and science is at the core of the work of Víctor Magariños D. (1924–93). The Argentinian artist saw the advances in physics and astronomy in the mid-20th century as a sign that mankind was on the cusp of a new social order and sought to reflect this in his work. MC Galería explores the development of Magariños’s playful and experimental visual language across the 1950s–80s. Fascinated by the theory of relativity, Magariños crafted paintings that evoke an unbridled sense of energy, with colours, symbols, atoms, and fractured and flowing lines traversing his canvases.

Alice Baber (Luxembourg + Co, London, New York)

‘When I first conceive of a painting, I must feel it, I hear it, I taste it and I want to eat it.’ The American artist Alice Baber (1928–82) developed a synaesthetic approach to colour, pushing painting beyond a purely visual experience. Embracing organic, ovoid forms, Baber devoted her practice to exploring the intensities of hue, light, saturation and opacity. Luxembourg + Co selects experimental works spanning 1964 to 1981 – just a year before Baber’s untimely death – and showcases the artist’s unique ‘sinking’ and ‘lifting’ of watercolour-dipped tissue papers on to her canvas, a technique that is now regarded as her signature style. 

Pauline Boty (Gazelli Art House, London)

For its Frieze Masters debut, Gazelli Art House celebrates the lasting influence of Pauline Boty (1938–66) with works from her short but prolific career. Often overshadowed by her male peers during her lifetime, Boty is now recognized for her defining contribution to British pop art in the 1960s. Approaching her work as a ‘nostalgia for now’, Boty’s paintings offer a fearlessly subversive take on themes of gender, politics and power.

Manuel Felguérez (Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City)

Manuel Felguérez was a driving force against postwar Mexican muralism, forging his own language of geometric abstraction. Proyectos Monclova celebrates his pivotal role in La Generación de la Ruptura (The Breakaway Generation). The artist’s transgressive approach is epitomized by his project La máquina estética (The aesthetic machine), which he developed in collaboration with systems engineer Mayer Sasson at Harvard University between 1975 and 1977. Together they crafted a computer that absorbed 25 years’ worth of Felguérez’s painting, encoding his geometric evolution to enable endless new compositions to be generated at random.

Further Information 

Frieze London and Frieze Masters, 9 – 13 October 2024, The Regent’s Park.

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^{Main Image: Michael Ward, Untitled (Pauline Boty with Painting Tom’s Dream), 1963/2023. Coloured C-print, 61 × 51 cm. Courtesy: Elizabeth Seal-Ward for the Michael Ward Archive, Iconic Images and Gazelli Art House}