Frieze Sculpture 2021: 'Colour, Playfulness, and Vibrancy'
Curator Clare Lilley gives us a tour of the free outdoor exhibition in London's Regent's Park
Curator Clare Lilley gives us a tour of the free outdoor exhibition in London's Regent's Park
Frieze Sculpture is open in the English Gardens of The Regent's Park until 31 October 2021. Admission is free.
Listen to Clare Lilley's Audio Guide here
Transcript:
Frieze Sculpture is a collection of incredible sculpture from all around the world. It’s free, and it's here in the English Gardens in Regent’s Park until October 31.
I think what’s really special about this year is that after the last 18 months which have been so difficult for everybody around the world, galleries and artists have responded so brilliantly, so this is a very, very global exhibition.
We have artists from South America, from South Africa, from Bulgaria, Indonesia, Pakistan, India.
It's really fantastic how people have responded.
There are a number of concerns that artists are addressing in this year’s Frieze Sculpture and one of those is the environment; and we have a beautiful piece by Tatiana Wolska which is made entirely from Badoit red plastic bottles.
We consume one and a half billion bottles world-wide every single day and so she has created these incredible biomorphic forms which sort of float inside the crown of a tree; turning something very banal and difficult into something, I think, that’s very, very beautiful.
We have a sculpture by Gisela Colón, it has come from Los Angeles, and it's over 7.6 metres high, She’s harnessing aerospace technology, in this case carbon fibre, to make a monolith, which is absolutely and completely seamless.
We have a number of works which address diasporic communities. One of these is a fragment of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion by Counterspace and Sumayya Vally, who is a South African architect. The team has gone into particular communities and buildings in London, for example the first mosques, hair-salons, Notting Hill Carnival and they have taken pieces of architecture and combined them and spliced them, and here they’ve created a gathering space. And in a way, it’s a kind of a microcosm of Frieze Sculpture because every year when we make this exhibition in the English Gardens of Regent’s Park, we see people who wouldn’t normally come here, and have conversations that they wouldn't normally have and enjoy this communal space in a very very safe way.
This year I hope people really engage with the issues that the artists are considering in their works, but also enjoy the colour, the playfulness and the vibrancy of the exhibition.