Nine Artists Defining Frieze New York 2025

Spanning Antigua to Vietnam, rural Poland to queer LA, this year’s fair draws together a world of artistic positions. Matthew McLean takes a whirlwind tour.

Frank Walter | Bailey’s Hill, Antigua, Antigua and Barbuda | Andrew Edlin Gallery (D1)

Along a dirt road overlooking Rendezvous Bay on Antigua’s southern coast, visionary artist Frank Walter chose to build his studio in 1993. Born on the island in 1929, Walter travelled around Europe as a young man   – a lonely experience shaped by the racist reception he received. In his art, he rebuilt a sense of belonging through expansive semi-imagined genealogies (including tracing the British royal family as distant relatives) and, primarily, through the prolific production of paintings and sculpture. With exhibitions at the Venice Biennale (2019) and The Drawing Center in New York (2024), Walter’s pensive meditations on nature and place have won many admirers, the artist Josh Smith among them. The writer and curator Hilton Als once remarked that this often heartbreaking body of work ‘gives more glory and truth than we think we can bear. And then gives some more as we rush to meet it’. Paired with works by self-taught Illinois painter Abraham Lincoln Walker, this presentation should do exactly that.

Denilson Baniwa | Barcelos, Amazonas, Brazil | A Gentil Carioca (A5)

Though he lives and works today in Niterói, across the bay from Rio de Janeiro, Denilson Baniwa’s work is redolent of the place of his birth: Dari, a remote village in Barcelos, deep in the Amazonas state. Baniwa once told an interviewer that he tries ‘to think as an Indigenous person in a non-Indigenous world’. In his collages, he layers elements from colonial archives, popular culture and Baniwa mythology with his own fierce fictions. On view at the fair is Tatá (2023), an epic work displayed at the 35th Bienal de São Paulo (2023), made in collaboration with fellow Baniwa artist Aparecida Baniwa. Painted panels incorporating feather embroidery present imagined episodes of the first contact between Indigenous peoples and Catholic missionaries along the Rio Negro. Against undertones of violence and tragedy, the piece is full of wonder and strangeness –  in one section, an angel’s trumpet faces down a bemused parrot.

Wanda Koop | Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada | Night Gallery (D6)

In the serene waters of a moonlit lake, reflections are cast smudgily: a cooling tower, pylons and grain silos. In the paint­ings of celebrated Canadian artist Wanda Koop, the natural and the technological inhabit the same world  –  one that’s all the more beautiful and mysterious for it. This sensitivity to the deep ecological context of human industry seems fitting for an artist based in Winnipeg, which is among the coldest cities in the world. From a series painted on plywood shown at the fair, No Words (Stonehenge) (1990) pairs one of the epic triliths from the titular monument with the outline of a pylon, as if to remind us that, one day, our industrial structures will appear as mysterious and ‘natural’ a part of the landscape as an ancient megalith.

Citra Sasmita | Batubulan, Bali, Indonesia  | Yeo Workshop (F4)

Sometimes known as ‘the island of the gods’, Bali also holds a rich artistic heritage. On the southeastern side, where the Telaga Waja flows from the sacred Mount Abang into the sea, is the village of Kamasan, where the local painting tradition, born out of shadow-puppet theatre, stretches back to at least the 17th century. Telling tales from folklore, Kamasan paintings are typically deeply patterned and radically flat –  and only painted by men. Citra Sasmita, a Balinese physics student-turned-newspaper illustrator-turned-fine artist has been engaging with this tradition for a decade, working with priestess Mangku Muriati  – one of the few women permitted to practise the art. Populating her scenes with powerful women and knowing references to Balinese modern history, Sasmita wrests Kamasan into self-consciously new territory. Recognition of her achievements includes participation in this year’s Sharjah Biennial and Hawai’i Triennial.

Kishio Suga | Itō, Shizuoka, Japan | Tomio Koyama Gallery (D13) and Mendes Wood DM (B7)

If ever proof were needed that sometimes less is more, it can be found in the work of Kishio Suga. Take Law of Situation (1971): in a lake in Ube, Japan, ten flat stones placed on a sheet of plastic board float on the surface of the water. Suga is a member of the Japanese art movement which came of age around the student protests of the late 1960s and was even­tually known as Mono-ha, or ‘the school of things’. He employs unexpected, unrefined materials in arrangements evoking both tension and harmony. An eagerly anticipated exhibition opening at Dia Beacon this summer offers a chance to consider 30 years of Suga’s practice; at the fair, a work like Sliced Stones (2018) provides a chance to encounter an artist whose command of their formal language is absolute.

Kim Bohie | Seogwipo, Jeju Island, Korea | The Modern Institute (A4)

Though it constitutes less than two percent of the country’s territory, Jeju Island occupies a large place in the Korean imagination. It’s easy to see why, with its subtropical climate, volcanic peaks, untouched ancient forests and beaches of black sand, as well as several art spaces like the Tadao Ando-designed Yumin Collection. It was here that, in the early 2000s, the artist Kim Bohie established a studio. After years in Seoul, where ‘only a small portion of the sky was visible’, the island’s verdant, open landscape was a revelation. Over the last two decades, Bohie has been absorbed by her immediate surround­ings: plants, the ocean, her garden, her dog. Painting on bare canvas, she combines disparate cultural inheritances, channeling the sansuhwa tradition in which the dom­inant Chinese painting style was applied to Korean landscape, balancing full and empty space. A brand-new work at the fair demonstrates her quiet but masterly ability to combine moments of insistent mark-making with serene, gauzy abstraction.

Dr Esther Mahlangu  | Mthambothini, Mpumalanga, South Africa | Jenkins Johnson Gallery (B18)

The Southern Ndebele people began their inhabitation of the northeastern stretches of present-day South Africa in the 17th century: today, Dr Esther Mahlangu is one of their most beloved cultural figureheads. Fast approaching her tenth decade, Mahlangu began painting at ten years old, when her grandmother first taught her the Ndebele mural tradition. Informed by collective memory, though infused with her own vision, her boldly graphic works painted with a chicken-feather brush feature geometric patterns, in which sensitively coloured tiles alternate with bands of white and black. She was included in Jean-Hubert Martin’s landmark Centre Pompidou exhibition ‘Magiciens de la terre’ in 1989; last year, her retrospective opened at the Iziko National Gallery in Cape Town before touring the US under the title ‘Then I Knew I Was Good at Painting’. A solo presentation of Mahlangu’s painting at the fair is a chance to see just how good she is.

Karol Palczak | Krzywcza, Subcarpathia, Poland | Emalin (C5)

Two geese hang in a loft, seemingly suspended midair; smoke billows from a cleft in a tree; a lone pig, in a damp cellar, its skin as white as milk, is roused by a shaft of light. The moments captured in the paintings of Karol Palczak have the rough and unsettling poetry of folktales, and the surreal cinematic beauty of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975). The precise paintwork of Palczak, who is based in a village in the rural southeastern-most part of Poland, captures the hardscrabble traditions of country life and its contemporary pressures (depopulation, militarization) with a sense of the awesome strangeness of living amid nature.

Nikita Kadan | Kyiv, Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine | Voloshyn Gallery (F9)

In ‘Kyiv Siren’, Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan utilises the motifs of statuary and ruins to convey –  and complicate –  the idea of cultural conflicts and continuities. The title refers to both the daily air-raid warnings in Kyiv during the current war and the bird-women of ancient Greek myth, whose songs lured sailors to their doom. Charcoal drawings of broken classical sculptures evoke the looting of heritage common to war zones, suggest­ing civilisations under threat, and invoking the fluid patterns of history; Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, now occupied by Russia, was also once the site of ancient Greek settlements. Featuring almost entirely new works, including a sculpture made in part from material recovered from a Ukrainian battlefield, this will surely be one of the most charged presen­tations at the fair.

Joey Terrill | Los Angeles, California, USA | Ortuzar Projects (B16)

A second-generation Angeleno, Joey Terrill studied at the city’s Immaculate Heart College after meeting its former staffer, Sister Mary Corita Kent. Kent’s socially progressive approach to pop art was influential on his practice, as were the guerrilla theatrics of Chicano collective Asco. He infused the pop legacy of Richard Hamilton and Tom Wesselmann with signifiers of queer and Chicano identity. An interest in photorealism and the construction of the flat picture space is deepened in the ‘Still Life’ series (1997–2024), which he began after his HIV treatment reduced his viral load to an undetectable level. The presence of antiretroviral medications, alongside everyday consumer products, questions how the mass-marketing of life-saving treatments reshapes our attitude to illness and health. But the collage-like layering of domestic details in the paint­ings also points to local social identities and personal histories, giving their cool style a dose of tenderness.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen | Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam | James Cohan Gallery (B4)

Caught between the Annamese Mountains and the East Vietnam Sea, the province of Quang Tri was the site of intense fighting during the 1955–75 Vietnam War. Today, it is the part Vietnam most contaminated with unexploded ordnances (UXO) – munitions that have not yet been detonated –  with more than 200 square miles still posing a danger to inhabitants. Tuan Andrew Nguyen moved from Ho Chi Minh City to the US at five years old as a refugee, but has since returned to live and work in the city of his birth. By transforming salvaged UXO into sculptures, he creates works that ‘help us translate death to life, destruction to healing’, as he told Frieze’s Livia Russell in a recent interview. At the fair, Nguyen presents three freestanding mobiles that have been ‘tuned’ with the aid of a sound healer to create vibrations on a ‘healing frequency’ as they gently whirr and spin.

This article first appeared in Frieze Week New York magazine with the title ‘Frieze New York, From A to V’. 

Further Information

Frieze New York, The Shed, 7 – 11 May, 2025. Tickets 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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A dedicated online Frieze Viewing Room will open the week before the fair, offering audiences a first look at the presentations and the opportunity to engage with the fair remotely. 

Frieze New York is supported by global lead partner Deutsche Bank, continuing its legacy of celebrating artistic excellence on an international scale.

^{Main image: Karol Palczak, Hey little bird, fly away home / Your house is on fire, your children all alone, 2024. Courtesy: the artist and Emalin, London; photograph: Błażej Pindor}