Seven Highlights from the World of Frieze in 2024

1. Frieze Partnered with the British Council at the Venice Biennale

In an art world first, Frieze supported John Akomfrah’s British Pavilion in partnership with the British Council at the 60th Venice Biennale this year. Akomfrah’s new commission, ‘Listening All Night to the Rain’, a mix of video work and installation, was a stand-out of the 2024 event, which was led this year by Adriano Pedrosa (a former Frieze curator). The Guardian’s Adrian Searle called it ‘a magnificent and awful journey, a nightmare of endless returns, not least to his decades-long themes and preoccupations’. Akomfrah himself called his representation of his country at Venice ‘the ultimate accolade in an artist’s life’, in a powerful video made by Frieze.

2. The Tate Acquired Naminapu Maymuru-White at Frieze London

Following its announcement at Venice this year of a new fund to acquire more Samí and Inuit art, Tate added to its Indigenous collection, buying work at Frieze London by Australian artist Naminapu Maymuru-White. The artist, one of the only Yolŋu women to learn to paint miny’tji, sacred designs documenting the Maŋgalili clan’s connection to the cosmos, creates intense bark paintings of immense rivers of stars, and had previously featured in the show ‘Story, Place’ at Frieze’s No.9 Cork Street gallery. Celebrated for Frieze London’s radically revised layout which brought new artists and perspectives to the centre of the fair, and a new artist-centred approach at Frieze Masters, both fairs saw major museum acquisitions and significant sales at all levels. Highlights included Arshile Gorky’s 1947 painting The Opaque for $8.5 million and a Lisa Yuskavage painting for $2.2 million. Lehmann Maupin sold their entire booth of 14 new paintings by Billy Childish, including some created live onsite, and Focus gallery Ginny on Frederick sold out its booth of work by Charlotte Edey by noon on the opening day.

3. Gary Tyler won the Frieze Impact Prize

Acquisitions were also on the cards at Frieze Los Angeles in February 2024. In its third year, the Frieze Impact Prize was awarded to formerly incarcerated Black LA artist Gary Tyler. Tyler was imprisoned for a murder he did not commit aged 16, and spent 42 years behind bars until his sentence was commuted and he was finally released in 2016. His striking quilted pieces tell his personal histories of ancestry, loss and imprisonment, and his story began a new chapter as his work was acquired following the award by the City of Santa Monica Art Bank for its permanent collection.

4. Frieze Masters was more vital than ever

In 2024, Frieze Masters continued to reinvent itself with an exceptionally strong representation of living artists. The returning Studio section, again curated by Sheena Wagstaff, included Doris Salcedo, Thaddeus Mosley, Adriana Varejão and Nathalie Du Pasquier, who created a new work as a cover for Frieze Masters magazine and at the entrance to the fair. Frieze’s video of Varejão at work in her (admittedly very gorgeous) Rio studio was the most-watched video on Frieze’s Instagram channel for the whole year. In another Frieze film, Hew Locke gave a personal tour of Frieze Masters, as his own display opened at the British Museum. More artists, including Nairy Baghramian, Jeremy Deller, Shirazeh Houshiary, Mark Leckey, Glenn Ligon and Ming Smith took part in the Frieze Masters Talks programme, recorded for the Frieze Masters Podcast.

5. Performance made its mark

From Matty Davis stunning passers-by at Frieze New York to the launch of the new LIVE programme at Frieze Seoul, performance was a visible addition to Frieze’s fairs this year. Davis’s work, Die No Die (The High Line) was an intense existential meditation on the physical limitations and possibilities of the human body. Literally in-your-face and balletically charged, it took over the High Line for a series of five performances during Frieze New York 2024, an experience anyone who saw it would be unlikely to forget. ‘This one is trying!’ was Davis’s battle cry as he singled out onlookers for special attention.

Less confrontational, but no less powerful, the LIVE programme debuted at Frieze Seoul, with a series of explorations of poetry and movement, with works invoking the traditional calligraphy and a wheelchair interpretation of Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A. It was a clear manifesto point that performance – as much as film or music – can be a vital part of an art fair. This idea was also at the heart of a lyrical short film by photographer Tess Ayano, commissioned by Frieze Week New York, of some of the starriest stars of New York’s performance scene. 

6. Hollywood, fashion and music came to No.9 Cork Street

In a year of remarkable shows at Frieze’s West End gallery No.9 Cork Street, there were appearances from creative powerhouses beyond the world of art. Hollywood A-lister Josh Brolin and Dune cinematographer Grieg Fraser starred in Meet Me at Reception, discussing the uncanny power of the desert and why listening to Hans Zimmer is ‘like taking emotional LSD’. Designer Marco Capaldo met Serpentine director Hand Ulrich Obrist to talk about the former’s curation of the Almine Rech show ‘Memories of the Future’; and Thom Yorke of Radiohead and The Smile fame showed work with longtime visual collaborator Stanley Donwood.

7. Frieze filmed encounters with underground New York icons

New York has an art identity uniquely unto itself, and it served it up bigtime in 2024. Two Frieze films captured the essence of the subcultural city in their encounters with legendary New Yorkers. In a poignant and life-affirming video, photographer Stanley Stellar talked about the background to a series of colour photographs from the 1970s and ’80s he showed at Frieze New York 2024. Set among the wharfs and piers of the naval yards close to the fair’s site at The Shed, these images freeze a singular moment in the city’s queer history – when freedom of sexual expression was not yet overshadowed by AIDS. ‘I am sooo New York,’ he says. ‘I am such a product of New York City.’

Also very much a ‘product of New York City’, punk princess Kembra Pfahler took Frieze on a hilarious tour of her neighbourhood to talk ‘anti-naturalism’ and her on-off relationship to ‘urban beauty’. The sight of the 63-year-old Pfahler taking an axe to the blood-coloured walls of her tiny New York apartment might just be the most memorable moment from a year of memorable moments.

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^{Main image: Still from ‘Meet Me in New York: Kembra Pfahler’. Courtesy of Frieze.}