Emerging Artists in Focus at Frieze London 2023

Focus returns for the 20th edition of Frieze London, from 11 to 15 October in The Regent’s Park. Dedicated to galleries founded within the last 12 years, Focus 2023 has been advised by Angelina Volk (Emalin, London), Piotr Drewko (Wschód, Warsaw) and Cédric Fauq (Chief Curator at CAPC Musée d’art contemporain Bordeaux). 

This year’s edition comprises 34 galleries from 18 countries and features several spaces participating in a Frieze for the first time: Crisis, Franz Kaka, Ginny on Frederick, Harlesden High Street, Heidi, HOA, Llano and Vardaxoglou. Focus creates a platform for emerging artists across generations, cultures and continents. For many, this will be their art fair debut, for some, their first solo exhibition. Here are ten highlights from the 2023 section.

Gypsum, winner of the The Frieze Focus Stand Prize 2022, returns to Focus with a solo presentation of fabric works by Gözde İlkin. Working with found cloth, plants and stones, İlkin explores how materials exist as repositories of memory and narrative. By juxtaposing manmade and natural forms, İlkin collapses the distance between them and challenges history’s anthropocentrism. This selection features hung two-dimensional fabric works alongside three-dimensional patchwork fabric sculptures.

Copperfield presents a new series of paintings by Larry Achiampong. In these vibrant panel works, Achiampong interrogates whitewashing and racial bias in computer game programming and imagery. He responds by making appropriations of his own, drawing from the visual language of game advertisements to select particularly loaded characters and recognisable fonts. Games have long been the inspiration for Achiampong’s work, but at Frieze London, he brings play directly into the booth, creating a home style gaming room.

Nicoletti exhibits new works by Josèfa Ntjam. Stretching across sculpture, photomontage, film and performance, Ntjam’s practice revisits colonial history in light of natural history, mythology and science fiction. ‘Deep Sea Teller’ features five photomontages that conflate factual and fictional narratives of the Middle Passage, the forced voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean. African deities, portraits of political dissidents and microscopic details of aquatic plants collide and bleed together.

For its first ever art fair presentation, Vardaxoglou presents a solo booth by Tanoa Sasraku. Working in Devon, Sasraku explores a new way of engaging with geology and topography, informed by her British-Ghanian perspective, in her latest series of ‘terratypes’. These unique sculptural hybrids combine painting, drawing, collage, printmaking and textiles for which Sasraku forages million-year-old earth pigments across Dartmoor, the Jurassic Coast, the Scottish Highlands and Ghana.

Sweetwater presents a series of new works by Hanna Stiegeler, whose practice examines consumerism and commercialism through photography and mixed-media printing. For this latest project, Stiegeler takes the 19th-century practice of painting fans with impressionist scenes as her departure point: she replaces Edgar Degas and Camille Pisarro’s idyllic vignettes of nature and leisure with printed photographs of merchandise and branding in shopping malls.

Heidi and Hot Wheels share a booth dedicated to the latest short film by Jordan Strafer, marking the first time her work is shown in the UK. Loophole (2023) is an erotic thriller that mixes real extracts from William Kennedy Smith’s rape trial transcript with dark, fantastical love scenes. Depicting a loss of order, Loophole exposes themes of greed, corruption and abuse of power.

Jack O’Brien has created a new sculptural installation especially for Frieze London, presented by Ginny on Frederick. The exhibition centres around a freestanding 19th century-style English horse-racing carriage cocooned in a ‘skin’ of industrial polythene, accompanied by a series of wall-based plastic sculptures. O’Brien combines industrial, fashion-design and architectural techniques to consider the production of desire and histories of consumption. Exploring queer and eroticized aesthetics, O’Brien’s works veer between delicate and violent.

HOA’s dual exhibition sets the practices of Rio de Janeiro-based Mariana Rocha and Laís Amaral in dialogue. Rocha’s work intersects issues of the body, memory and femininity and takes inspiration from the form of marine molluscs. Amaral shares this focus on nature, using painting to interrogate environmental collapse. She draws comparisons between contemporary environmental desertification and the whitening of society. 

Carlos Reyes’s wall-based work and freestanding sculptures are showcased by Soft Opening. Reyes liberates everyday objects, such as treadmills and turnstiles, from their original functions to consider how they bear the imprint of human activity. Detaching treadmill belts from their perpetual, pounding loop in city gyms, Reyes explores how individual human experience, force and sweat accumulate on their surface. Their texture is inscribed with the residues of everyday American life, its repetition and constraint.

In Lieu presents five new paintings by Christian Franzen in his first solo exhibition. Franzen’s South Californian seascapes are ensconced in a haze of longing, with the horizon line searing across each image. In his process, Franzen plays with depth: working predominantly in acrylic, he uses airbrush techniques to give the paintings a pristine surface, before gauging into them with razors, pins and keys to reveal lighter hues beneath and create a visual paradox between these two forms of gesture.

Participating Galleries

80M2 Livia Benavides, Lima

Addis Fine Art, London, Addis Ababa

Nir Altman, Munich

And Now, Dallas

Helena Anrather, New York

Clima, Milan

Copperfield, London

Crisis, Lima

Damien & The Love Guru, Brussels, Zurich

Drei, Cologne

Franz Kaka, Toronto

Gianni Manhattan, Vienna

Ginny on Frederick, London

Gypsum, Cairo

Harlesden High Street, London

Heidi, Berlin

HOA, São Paulo

Hot Wheels, Athens

In Lieu, Los Angeles

Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles

Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin

Llano, Mexico City

Marfa', Beirut

Nicoletti, London

PM8 / Francisco Salas, Vigo

Public Gallery, London

Dawid Radziszewski, Warsaw

Soft Opening, London

Sweetwater, Berlin

Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna Gallery

Vacancy, Shanghai

Vardaxoglou, London

Vitrine, London, Basel

Wschód, Warsaw, Cologne, New York

Frieze London and Frieze Masters take place concurrently from 11–15 October, 2023 in The Regent’s Park, London.

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_{Main Image: Mariana Rocha, Untitled, 2022 Mixed media on canvas, 156 x 98 cm. Courtesy the artist and HOA/Wallace Domingues}