Cultural Capital: London-based Artists at Frieze London 2024

Every October, Frieze London draws the international art world to the UK capital to celebrate its vibrant creative landscape. Across solo and curated shows, the fair introduces new voices from the city including Appau Jnr Yiadom-Boakye, Simone Kennedy Doig, Georgina Hill and Jaime Welsh.

Several renowned London-based artists who feature in major exhibitions across the city during Frieze Week are also showcased at the fair. Turner Prize nominees Claudette Johnson and Jasleen Kaur, on view at Tate Britain, show new works at Frieze London with Hollybush Gardens. Alvaro Barrington, presented by Sadie Coles HQ and Thaddaeus Ropac at the fair, transforms Tate Britain with his commission, ‘Grace’. Hew Locke, featuring in Almine Rech’s fair presentation and in a solo show at Hales’s London space (part of East End Day on 6 October), is the subject of the British Museum’s upcoming show ‘what have we here?’.

Claudette Johnson, Jasleen Kaur and Lubaina Himid with Hollybush Gardens (C6)

2024 Turner Prize nominees Claudette Johnson and Jasleen Kaur both debut new work at the fair with Hollybush Gardens. In a reflection on the complexities of family structures, Glasgow-born Kaur works with enlarged family photographs encased in an orange Irn-Bru-hued resin, on top of which she positions pieces of torn roti to obscure the individuals’ faces. Celebrated for her large-scale work, for Frieze London, Johnson takes her controlled approach to mark-making onto a much smaller scale, capturing intimate views of figures. 2017 Turner Prize winner Lubaina Himid continues to explore street theatre as a form of activism, and presents a group of overpainted sculptures composed of found and patterned carts, drawers, wooden planks and doors. 

Read More: London According to: Lisa Panting of Hollybush Gardens

Georgina Hill with South Parade (F4)

South Parade makes its Frieze fair debut in Focus with ‘City Lights’, a solo show by Georgina Hill, a multi-disciplinary artist based in London. Hill populates the space with a series of stained-glass light boxes, which are programmed to illuminate and dim in synchrony; dioramas of everyday objects; and wall-based metal works with glass inserts. Alluding to pub signs, windows and circuit boards, Hill creates an alternate cityscape. Flashing on and off, Hill’s installation is in constant flux, mapping London’s social constellations in colour and texture.

Appau Jnr Yiadom-Boakye with Champ Lacombe (AA1)

Appau Jnr Yiadom-Boakye approaches percussion as a universal language, finding a capacity for bodily connection in its mass of rhythms and beats. Selected by Glenn Ligon, Boakye-Yiadom presents his solo show ‘Before, During & After: Here Now, Before, During & After: Here Soon’ with Champ Lacombe in Artist-to-Artist. In a live display, audiences witness Boayke-Yiadom learning to play the drums. Positioned at the centre of the space, the drum kit is surrounded by fabric-covered sound panels and double-sided photographic prints, which, during Boakye-Yiadom’s performance, close to conceal him from view. Concurrent with Frieze London, Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom has further new works on view in the dual exhibition, ‘Dono’, at Somerset House.

Emily Kraus with The Sunday Painter (B11)

When Emily Kraus moved from New York to London to be a student at the Royal College of Art, she was assigned an eight-by-eight-foot studio. Seeking to expand the space’s potential, Kraus invented a metal cubic framework around which she stretched a loop of raw canvas. Kraus discovered that as she rotated the canvas, the paint smeared, gradually building patterns that repeat and evolve. Continuing this method to create new works for her solo show with The Sunday Painter, Kraus describes the process as ‘like painting with blinders on […] I layer linear time like ears do when composing a musical score.’ Unfurled from the structure and their loops unstitched, the canvases immerse the viewer in the rhythm of Kraus’s practice, tracing gestural echoes across and within works.

Simone Kennedy Doig and Matthew Krishanu with Tanya Leighton (B39)

Featuring two London-based artists, Tanya Leighton’s group show asks how identity is sustained and transformed through cultural memory. Simone Kennedy Doig lived in East London until the age of eight, when her family moved to Port of Spain, Trinidad. In her latest paintings, Kennedy Doig explores the visual cultures of both cities, portraying snatched reminiscences, moments in bars, on streets, in bathrooms and beside pools, often centring around connections between women. Matthew Krishanu also reflects on the formative experiences of his childhood, having grown up on a Christian mission in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Leaning into the intimacy of family photographs – portraying lived and imagined scenes – Krishanu’s softly worked paintings reference colonial legacies, the ramifications of imperialism and the church’s temporal conditioning of bodies.

Lucía Pizzani with Cecilia Brunson Projects (S4)

Lucía Pizzani discovered the medium of ceramics when she moved from Caracas to London in 2007 to study at Chelsea College of Arts. Pizzani’s freestanding ‘Flora Totems’, shown by Cecilia Brunson Projects in Smoke, are her largest ceramic works to date. Made from English clays and imprinted with plants such as corn and eucalyptus, Pizzani’s totems hold stories of migration past and present, human and botanical. Pizzani’s Venezuelan heritage remains a vital part of her practice, and she works closely with El Cercado, a pottery on the Isla de Margarita, using their pre-Hispanic ceramic traditions, including an open bonfire kiln, which marks the surface of the clay as the smoke rises. 

Jaime Welsh with Madragoa (F33)

Jaime Welsh interrogates the formal relationship between humans and architecture through photography. Meticulously composed, Welsh’s photographs often depict isolated bodies within clinical interior spaces, evoking intense psychological states of alienation, anxiety and desire. In Focus, Madragoa (winners of the Focus Stand Prize at Frieze New York 2024) presents Welsh’s latest project, ‘The Inheritors’, which sees him return to Portugal – where he was born – to photograph in the former headquarters of the Portuguese Imperial Bank. Welsh juxtaposes the imposing Portuguese fascist architecture with the seeming powerlessness of his young subjects: a small child curls in a doorway, just beyond the perimeter of the polished parquet floor; a toddler’s arm presses down on the join between two dark marble tiles.

Gabriella Boyd and Francesca Mollett with Grimm (B20)

Grimm’s group show includes new paintings by Gabriella Boyd and Francesca Mollett, neighbours at Thames-Side Studios in South London. For her latest series, Boyd worked on several canvases simultaneously, moving in and out of ‘inhabiting’ each painting’s ‘internal logic’. Holding human presence at the centre of every work, Boyd explores the emotive resonances of colours and the overlap of interior and exterior spaces. Mollett takes a similarly introspective approach to paint for her new large-scale canvas. Playing with light and surface, opacity and transparency, Mollett’s abstraction is porous, allowing fleeting moments of representation and detail to seep through.

Frieze Week Shows

Turner Prize 2024 is at Tate Britain, 25 September 2024 – 16 February 2025.

‘Alvaro Barrington: Grace’ is at Tate Britain until 26 January 2025.

‘Hew Locke: Family Album’ is at Hales until 2 November 2024.

‘Appau Jnr Yiadom-Boakye and Harun Morrisson: Dono’ is at Somerset House until 20 October 2024.

Further Information

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

Tickets to the fairs are on sale – don’t miss out, buy yours now. Alternatively, become a member to enjoy premier access, exclusive guided tours and more.

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^{Main Image: Georgina Hill, Maypole Procession, 2023. Kinetic sculpture, newspaper and pigment on cardboard, nail colour wheel, clock mechanism, circuit board, rotating motor, resin, flowers, bulb, 21 × 32 × 15 cm. Courtesy: the artist and South Parade}