Frieze Stand Prize Awarded to Stephen Friedman Gallery

Frieze announces Stephen Friedman Gallery (London) as the winner of the 2019 Frieze Stand Prize, which is awarded to an outstanding gallery presentation in the main or Woven sections at Frieze London.

Stephen Friedman Gallery’s presentation at Frieze London 2019 includes two solo projects by Swedish artist Mamma Andersson and Brazilian artist Tonico Lemos Auad, both new bodies of work created especially for the fair, united in capturing a distinct sense of place in their work. 

This year’s jury of institutional curators and directors included Courtney J. Martin (Director, Yale Center for British Art); Moritz Wesseler (Director, Fridericianum, Kassel); and Kitty Scott (Carol and Morton Rapp Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Ontario). 

Inspired by filmic imagery, theatre sets and period interiors, Mamma Andersson’s body of work created for Frieze London comprises a number of melancholic landscapes, an enduring subject matter in the artist’s practice that ties both solo presentations together. ‘Cuckoo Hill’ depicts a desolate patch of Nordic countryside with little sign of modern life, and the equally mysterious ‘The Mare Reminds of the Night’ features a group of black horses grazing amidst an ominous, blood-red landscape strewn with large boulders. These works are accompanied by four paintings of classical cupids. Stripped of their mythological value and rendered in brooding colours, they are instead presented as ghostly apparitions of a former time in history.

The design of Auad’s new textiles are loosely inspired by Derek Jarman’s iconic coastal garden at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness. Evoking a psychedelic, cinematic state of mind, Jarman’s borderless and roughhewn garden spreads all the way to the distant horizon where sky, sea and shingle meet as one. Such limitless vistas and desert-like colours feature in Auad’s work, with architectural forms and distinct borderlines demarcating open areas of woven textile. A new series of totemic wooden sculptures by the artist also take inspiration from Jarman’s own sculptures made from driftwood that punctuate his garden with strong vertical striations. In a similar vein, Auad has reclaimed pieces of wood from historic buildings in London and given them new life by playing with traditional modes of carpentry and joinery.

Jurors commented that Stephen Friedman Gallery accomplished ‘the pairing of two distinct artists—Mamma Andersson, a representational painter, and Tonico Lemos Auad, an abstract object maker—through the innovative design of the booth with a muted colour palette and in an intimate, domestic scale, resulting in a precise and content-driven presentation.’

Special commendations also awarded to Maisterravalbuena (Madrid) for their two artist presentation of photographs by Maria Loboda and painted wood sculptures by Maria Luisa Fernández, Galerie Buchholz (Cologne, Berlin, New York) for their group presentation featuring artists including Mayo Thompson, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Anne Imhof, Matthew Marks Gallery (New York, Los Angeles) for their group presentation featuring artists including Lucien Freud, Robert Gober, and Anne Truitt, and Jhaveri Contemporary (Mumbai) for their solo presentation in the Woven special section of textile works by Monika Correa that challenge the methodology of weaving itself.