Local Talent: London-based Artists at Frieze 2023

This year, Frieze London celebrates its 20th Anniversary, marking two decades of championing London as a crossroads for artists, ideas and stories. Here we highlight the diverse practices of artists, both past and present, who have made the capital their home. For this vibrant selection of artists, presented by galleries across Frieze London and Frieze Masters, the city signifies freedom, return, reckoning and defiance.

Marlborough Gallery’s Frieze Masters presentation ‘The Laughing Torso’, curated by Anke Kempkes, foregrounds the work of women artists who changed their feminine birth names in favour of masculine or gender-ambiguous titles. Among this selection are three artists who worked in London and presented a radical challenge to the narrow parameters imposed on their lives and work. Gluck’s (1895-1978, born Hannah Gluckstein) daring portraits of the London demi-monde have become iconic representations of queer experience. Both Marlow Moss (1889–1958, born Marjorie Jewel) and Paule Vézelay (1892–1984, born Marjorie Watson-Williams) subverted expectations of genre: while Moss unsettled the seemingly “gender-neutral” language of abstraction, Paule introduced organic, sexually suggestive shapes into her Constructivist work.

Paula Rego is celebrated on Offer Waterman’s booth at Frieze Masters with a key work from her ‘Family Series’. Rego painted The Bullfighter’s Godmother (1990–91) in the aftermath of her husband’s early death and in the same year that she was appointed the first Associate Artist at London’s National Gallery. With its richly layered narrative and latent violence, this was one of Rego’s last paintings on paper before she moved to working predominantly in pastel from 1994.

Peres Projects dedicates a section of their booth at Frieze London to new work by London-born Cece Philips. Suffused with a bright blue shade, Philips’s twilight paintings reimagine social environments and dynamics to explore how urban settings and modernist interiors are inhabited by women, particularly women of colour.

Thomas Wyck’s A View of the Thames at Westminster on Lord Mayor's Day, presented by Rafael Valls Ltd at Frieze Masters, offers a sweeping view of London in c.1660 and evokes the spectacular atmosphere of the procession. This is one of several landscapes, now recognised as significant historical documents, that Wyck painted when he travelled to London after Charles II took the throne, capturing the city both before and after the Great Fire of 1666. 

London-born Sophie Hellermann constructs a wholly different atmosphere of celebration in her solo exhibition at Pilar Corrias, Frieze London. Inspired by Dreamland, Margate’s iconic pleasure garden, a magnet for Londoners in the 19th century, von Hellerman’s painting installation plunges viewers into a carnival for the senses. Under a provocative guise, the artist reclaims pejorative cliches of frivolity and nonchalance often attached to femininity.

Arcadia Missa’s group exhibition at Frieze London features six London-based artists working across diverse media, each interrogating what representation can mean. Rene Matic directly captures the self in photographs; Lewis Hammond and Reina Sugihara’s paintings draw their innerworlds to the surface; Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings use fresco to highlight the power dynamics at play in notions of visibility; and Phoebe Collings-James explores gesture and embodied knowledge in ceramic. 

Edel Assanti introduces Sierra Leone-born, London-based Julianknxx in an art fair context for the first time at Frieze London. In his immersive video presentation, which coincides with his Barbican Curve commission Chorus in Rememory of Flight, Julianknxx draws on West African oral traditions to challenge fixed ideas of identity and unravel linear Western historical and socio-political narratives.

Several galleries at Frieze Masters offer glimpses of rare works by artists who worked in the capital. Osborne Samuel presents exceptional works by two Modern British legends living in London in the 1930s: Ben Nicholson’s Still Life (Winter Landscape) (1946) and Lynn Chadwick’s life-size Dancing Figures (Two Dancing Figures) (1956) will be exhibited for the first time since 1956 and 1957 respectively. Simon C. Dickinson spotlights one of Lucian Freud’s celebrated late career portraits, Profile Donegal Man (2008). The result of over 100 sittings with Pat Doherty in Freud’s Kensington studio, this work will be offered on the market for the first time in October.

At Frieze London, GRIMM highlights new works from London-based artists, setting their approaches to paint in dialogue. Francesca Mollett and Gabriella Boyd both explore processes of layering: Mollett's canvasses plot a deep sense of time, emerging from an extended exchange between addition and subtraction, while Boyd overlaps fugitive and structural motifs, governed by a dreamlike logic. Caroline Walker and Rosalind Nashashibi capture the everyday in paint, both eluding directness: Walker reveals her subjects through the spaces they inhabit and in Nashashibi's portraits, a softness seeps into their immediacy.

Tiwani Contemporary curates a selection of artists responding to the idiom ‘taking up space’, including two London-based 2019 graduates. At Frieze London, Miranda Forrester presents her latest work in which she reflects on her experience of becoming a queer mother. Using PVC to recreate the touch of the skin, Forrester takes the language and history of life drawing and rearticulates it in queer Black feminist and desiring terms. In her new mixed media works, Emma Prempeh grasps at familiarity and nostalgia, collapsing internal and external spaces and colliding elements of her personal history.

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

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_{Main Image: Julianknxx, Black Room, 2023, single channel video, 8 mins 39 secs, edition of 5 plus 5 artist's proofs. Copyright the artist. Courtesy Edel Assanti}