The Best Gallery Shows to See in London During Frieze

Eli Coplan | a. SQUIRE | 05 October – 09 November 

Upon entering Eli Coplan’s solo exhibition, ‘US TV and Film’, viewers are greeted by an LCD screen which, at first glance, appears blank (Event Current, all works 2024). Approaching the gallery from a different angle, you might catch the polarizing film taped to the window, rendering the broadcast visible from the street. On the screen plays a live feed of seemingly randomized American television – content that will become increasingly sensationalized as the US presidential election nears, with the likely victor becoming clear towards the end of the exhibition’s run. In Bone Conductor, a discontinued model of a children’s toothbrush – originally designed to transmit Icona Pop’s ‘I Love It (feat. Charli XCX)’ (2012) through the jawbone and into the inner ear – plays instead through an 1890 Edison phonograph horn. For Coplan, undoing is a practice. Toothbrush and television are meticulously disassembled and reverse-engineered, but the artist’s intervention is only one of subtraction: these technologies are dystopian just as they are. ‘US TV and Film’ is pessimistic and droll in equal measure, and Coplan is screaming into the void to the tune of Charli XCX’s lyric ‘I DON’T CARE … I LOVE IT’.

Alexandra Bircken | Herald St and Maureen Paley | 19 September – 02 November 

Alexandra Bircken’s exhibition ‘Gebrochenes Pferd’ (Broken Horse), which takes place across two galleries, continues the artist’s practice of cross-examining the structural systems that form the basis of Western economic domination through the bisection of animals and machines. Seascape (2024) is a butcher’s cutting board left behind after a kebab factory closed beneath the artist’s studio. It’s the only object Bircken has left untouched in the exhibition – her intervention isn’t necessary here as the cutting board comes pre-sliced. Two works, both sharing the title of the exhibition, bookend Bircken’s offering. At Maureen Paley, Gebrochenes Pferd (2024) takes the form of a life-size toy horse that lies split and conceded on the gallery floor, its lost prowess serving as a nod to the machines that superseded horses in industry and war. At Herald Street, the iteration (2023) extends themes of relinquished might with an Audi V10 combustion engine dismembered into six symmetrical parts. 

‘Machine Painting’ | Modern Art, Helmet Row | 07 October – 14 December 

Featuring a roll call of painting greats – including Sigmar Polke, Rosemary Trockel and Christopher Wool – ‘Machine Painting’ opens with Exploding Cell (1983), Peter Halley’s only video. An early computer animation, Exploding Cell extends the chromatic experimentations which define his painting practice, only this time through pixels. Wolfgang Tillmans’s 1988 inkjet print Reims, pinned to the gallery’s back wall in classic Tillmans style, embodies an artist outsourcing control to the machine. A cluster of burning candles has been mutated by repeated photocopying until the image breaks, authored as much by the machine as by the artist. Christopher Kulendran Thomas’s work is constructed from an aggregate of European postwar abstract paintings: the source material comes from a neural network trained on art history brought by the colonizing British to his country of Sri Lanka. One might expect a 2024 exhibition titled ‘Machine Painting’ to be propelled by the recent influx of artists working with artificial intelligence. However, I was glad that Modern Art took a different approach, focusing on true collaboration instead of total outsourcing – a call and response between the machine and the artist’s own hand.

Olivia Erlanger | Soft Opening | 04 October – 23 November 

‘Fan Fiction’, Olivia Erlanger’s solo show at Soft Opening, inspects the closed system of the domestic space and the insatiable human desire to control the microcosms of our homes, all within a backdrop of middle-class American suburbia. In the past, Erlanger has utilized washing machines and picket fences to exemplify these themes. Here, the artist’s medium is the humble ceiling fan, offering a cooling illusion but, in truth, only moving air around. Oversized butterfly wings replace the blades of four utilitarian fans, spread symmetrically throughout the gallery as if to map the architecture of the space itself. The winged fans spin – slow enough to disappoint – only hinting at functionality. The short film Appliance (2024) re-contextualizes the sculptures as possible killers: household appliances are the protagonists in this short film, where an unexplained technological uprising haunts the home of a poor suburbanite. The Hollywood production value of Appliance feels out of place in a gallery setting, but I suspect that’s the point. Erlanger is the puppet master, luring us in with a promised harmony that melts to absurdity in front of our eyes.

Jasper Marsalis | Emalin, Holywell Lane | 26 September – 16 November 

A camera captures visitors’ faces ascending the gallery stairs in Jasper Marsalis’s solo exhibition ‘\m/’’. These images are then beamed, stretched and lifeless, to a human-sized LED wall (Face 8, all works 2024). Punctuating the exhibition, these non-consensual portraits force us to consider our own position as spectators. In sculptural works such as Mother, Marsalis presents bowling balls as eyeballs pierced by miscellaneous wooden spikes, as if the light hitting the retina took physical form. This fractured gaze continues in Face 6 and Face 7, in which a flattened mince-pie wrapper or a blob of solder interrupts the viewer’s reflection in panels of reconstituted disco balls. The artist’s personal experience of performing on stage as musician Slauson Malone 1, no doubt, informs this static output: seeing and being seen coalesce and attention wars with distraction. The not knowing where to look or what to look at makes for an exhibition that is incongruous, distracting, intrusive and one of Marsalis’s best yet. 

Tarek Lakhrissi | Nicoletti | 19 September – 02 October 

The genesis for Tarek Lakhrissi’s exhibition ‘Spit’ is a hate crime the artist experienced at Paris Pride while carrying a Palestinian flag. For the perpetrator, who spat at the artist, Lakhrissi’s queerness and support of Palestine were irreconcilable. In ‘Spit’, the artist subverts an outwardly aggressive gesture into something erotic, with the sheen and transparency of saliva a recurrent motif. AN IMPOSSIBLE DESIRE (all works 2024) consists of two glass tongues, alien in colour and scale, extending from the wall, teasing each other, too far apart to ever touch. Dominating the space is THAT EVIL PART INSIDE OF ME IS LAUGHING, a sculpture of the purple devil emoji reimagined life-size and with drag queen-like eyelashes. Here, the artist appropriates and reworks this pop-cultural symbol to blur the lines between evil and desire. The audience witnesses Lakhrissi powerfully processing his emotions and trauma through humour and eroticism, allowing us to consider the possibility that poison can become its own antidote.

Jack Whitten | Hauser and Wirth | 07 October – 21 December 

Jack Whitten wrote in unpublished notes from 2016: ‘Speed was the essence of AB/EX [abstract expressionism] and my intention was to run faster than [Willem] de Kooning!’ Whitten’s pace feels front and centre in ‘Speedchaser’, an exhibition of paintings, works on paper and sculpture from the 1970s. The artist produced the ‘Greek Alphabet’ series (1975–78) using his ‘developer’, a three and a half metre wooden rake, to pull paint across the canvas in a single motion. The gestures employed to make these works, including Gamma Group #1 (1976), took mere seconds. Whitten harshly judged his own output, and the largely monotone canvases here are part of the small fraction the artist deemed worthy of exhibition. Whitten’s lesser-known sculptural works exemplify his affection for the Greek island of Crete, where he spent his summers. Carved wood converges masterfully with bones, nails or fishing lines to address themes of place, memory and migration.

Yorgos Prinos | Hot Wheels | 04 October – 09 November 

Heads bowed and shoulders slumped, the nine portraits of men populating the main wall of Hot Wheels gallery in Yorgos Prinos’s solo show could be asleep or lost in prayer (‘Prologue To A Prayer I – IX’, 2024). In these images, the anonymous men’s phones are their idols and the artist has captured them immersed in their unseen digital worlds. Prinos’s subjects – photographed in metropolises around the globe – represent contemporary masculinity; their facial expressions and body language a corporeal archive of the conditions of our cities. Confrontation (image by John Roca) (2003) is a photograph I recognize from internet lore: a tiger paws at the window of its Harlem apartment, eye to eye with a gun-toting New York cop abseiling outside. Here, Prinos deploys this found image to contextualize the other works in the exhibition, suggesting that city dwellers are wild animals trapped in confined spaces; he is dangling from a precarious rope, attempting to capture this condition.

^{Main image: Tarek Lakhrissi, Spit! (detail), 2024, charcoal and graphite pencil on paper, metal frame, 29 × 42 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Nicoletti, London}