Frieze London 2025 marked the truthful’s twenty second version, and beneath the white tents in Regent’s Park, this yr’s standouts share a typical technique: remodeling inherited types to show the infrastructures that form what (and who) will get seen. From Christelle Oyiri’s acid-green critique of tourism to Claudia Alarcón & Silät’s revival of ancestral Wichí weaving, the truthful’s most compelling voices have been those dismantling the methods they occupy.
Frieze London 2025 highlights
Michelle Uckotter at Kings Leap
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Michelle Uckotter at Kings Leap)
At Frieze London 2025, Michelle Uckotter’s ‘Sins of the Metropolis’ presentation at King’s Leap was a quiet knockout. Working in oil pastel throughout conjoined canvases, Uckotter conjures scenes of city desolation and psychic disarray with a hand each tender and ruthless. Her collapsing Midwestern streetscapes, drawn from the geography of her personal Ohio upbringing, possess the melancholy of midcentury pictures and the fractured lyricism of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land.
Flanking them on either side are two ladies, one jester-like with a violin, the opposite the blonde Duchess (Nova Sinclair) holding a guitar. Across the nook from the work, a digital camera peephole was put in within the wall, recalling Duchamp’s Étant donnés, which opens onto a flickering bed room with two dolls lounging on the mattress, studying and passing time: an eerie convergence of voyeurism and confession. Via these formal and conceptual apertures, Uckotter collapses time, fusing the allegorical with the documentary. What makes Uckotter singular is not only her radical formalism, however her conviction: her work insist that the medium nonetheless issues throughout the particles of the fashionable world.
Alex Margo Arden at Ginny on Frederick
(Picture credit score: Pictures by Choreo. Courtesy of the artist and Ginny on Frederick, London)
Alex Margo Arden’s presentation, ‘By All Accounts’, gathered a crowd of decommissioned male mannequins, all salvaged from the Nationwide Motor Museum earlier than being despatched to landfill, and certain collectively in a looping tug-of-war rope. ‘I used to be within the museum’s resolution to take away and get rid of the mannequins,’ Arden tells me. ‘These figures have been the conduits via which the museum’s model of the previous was transmitted and in that sense, they’ve change into historic objects in their very own proper. By recontextualising them, I wished to carry the establishment to account for its strategies of storytelling – to show how sure narratives are constructed, and to think about how these discarded our bodies may nonetheless maintain worth.’
The set up, Accounts (2025), reconfigures how we take into consideration historical past and show. As soon as used to animate scenes of business progress, the mannequins now huddle in uneasy congregation, their former authority collapsing into vulnerability. The rope encircling them reads as each connective and threatening. ‘The tug of battle is a collective contest of power which may carry a latent violence’, says the artist; she questions ‘what it means to drag collectively, what it means to be pulled aside, and the way the residue of effort is marked on the physique itself’.
Close by, Each day Departmental Accident Report hangs on the wall, a reconstructed Hollywood accident-report board that turns bureaucratic order right into a memorial. Speaking about London, Arden explains that ‘there’s a way of fixed restaging in London… It’s a metropolis the place layers of historical past are all the time on show. That sense of how histories are carried out and maintained feels central to my work.’ Caught between play and hazard, Arden’s mannequins change into a choreography of our bodies tugging in opposition to the narratives they have been constructed to uphold. The presentation was the recipient of two awards, granted by the Arts Council Assortment and the Nicoletta Fiorucci Basis.
Christelle Oyiri at Gathering
(Picture credit score: Christelle Oyiri at Gathering)
You couldn’t miss Christelle Oyiri’s ‘Venom Voyage’ at Frieze London – a grotesque, luminous-green eruption amid the truthful’s in any other case well mannered minimalism. The artist, producer, and DJ (aka CyrstallMess) remodeled Gathering’s debut stand right into a delirious anti–journey company: two workplace chairs stationed at its centre beneath a vibrant purple double-V brand, flanked by a water cooler and submitting cupboard.
Drawing on Frantz Fanon and HE Sawyer’s I Am the Darkish Vacationer, Oyiri skewered the colonial creativeness embedded in leisure tradition, the place paradise and exploitation intertwine. Shiny souvenirs, militant slogans, with one defiantly studying ‘Jetlag is for amateurs’, and acid-toned partitions conjured an area pitched someplace between seduction and illness: a Brechtian funhouse that uncovered tourism as theatre. ‘Venom Voyage’ left guests complicit, queasy, and exhilarated; a uncommon second on the truthful the place aesthetics, politics, and pop collided in good, toxic concord.
Lucia di Luciano at Herald St
(Picture credit score: © Lucia Di Luciano. Courtesy of the artist and Herald St, London. Photograph by Jack Elliot Edwards.)
Born in 1933 in Syracuse, Lucia Di Luciano has spent six many years making summary work, and her newest works, proven with Herald St at Frieze London, really feel nearly punk of their chequered rhythms and one-toned palettes: grids that glitch, strains that pulse, colors that refuse to mix. She makes use of neon pinks in a single chequered canvas, and neon yellow in one other, the place the grid has fractured and dissolved barely. There’s one thing startlingly youthful about them, although they emerge from a lifetime of formal inventive rigour.
Di Luciano was a part of Italy’s postwar vanguard, aligned with Arte Programmata, the motion that sought to merge logic, arithmetic, and artwork. Alongside her husband and collaborator Giovanni Pizzo, she spent years exploring the algorithmic potential of portray, lengthy earlier than the thought of the digital as a metaphor. Her early black-and-white compositions on Masonite have been exact, their mathematically sequenced types creating optical vibrations that felt each mechanical and ecstatic. Now, in her Minimal and Senza Titolo collection, the grid stays, however loosens and her brush marks streak and flicker throughout the floor, the color uncooked and unblended. Her work appear to belong to each technology without delay: rooted within the cool rationalism of the Sixties, but with the immediacy of now.
Claudia Alarcón & Silät at Cecilia Brunson Initiatives
(Picture credit score: Pictures by Lucy Dawkins, courtesy of the artists and Cecilia Brunson Initiatives)
One of many quieter but most resonant cubicles at Frieze London got here from Claudia Alarcón & Silät, the Indigenous Wichí collective offered by Cecilia Brunson Initiatives, notably marking the primary Latin American illustration within the truthful’s principal part since 2013. Alongside the sales space’s partitions, their loosely woven chaguar textiles, framed in heat wooden, radiated the rhythmic intricacy of their making. Spun from the hand-twisted fibres of the chaguar plant, these abstractions emerged via the repetition of gesture, poised between the geometric and the religious, and carrying tales handed down via generations of Wichí ladies.
The collective’s newest works, together with a revival of an ancestral sew as soon as thought misplaced, deepen concepts of preservation and renewal and remodel historical method right into a residing, up to date physique of labor. Alarcón & Silät’s textiles stood aside for his or her materials humility and conceptual resonance: quiet, deliberate, and profoundly political. They reminded viewers that trendy abstraction was by no means completely Western, and {that a} woven thread can carry cosmology, resistance, and continuity unexpectedly. It was, in each sense, a milestone: for the artists, for Latin American illustration, and for Frieze itself.
Bogdan Ablozhnyy at a.SQUIRE
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of the artist and a. SQUIRE, London. Photograph: Evan Walsh.)
The Bloomsbury gallery, identified for its minimalist and conceptually exacting programme, offered six works by Bogdan Ablozhnyy in a meticulously staged set up that earned this yr’s Camden Artwork Centre Prize. A central pole swathed in animal print and imprinted leather-based was ringed by photographic apparatuses of flashes, shutters and lenses, all orbiting a psychological drama. The scene restaged a case examine from Freud’s 1915 essay A Case of Paranoia Working Counter to the Psycho-Analytical Idea of the Illness, through which a lady turns into satisfied her lover has photographed their intimacy in secret. Freud interpreted her worry as paranoia, and, by a predictably patriarchal leap, as a symptom of homosexuality.
Ablozhnyy revisits this textual content to not illustrate it, however to unpack its rhetorics of picture, need, and management. His sales space turns into a diagram of projection, the place every digital camera half, musical fragment, blue topazes, and leatherette floor hover between fetish and performance, staging the psychic theatre the place wanting, wanting, and realizing blur. Want right here shouldn’t be absent however current inside its structure. Ablozhnyy’s work rewards shut wanting, and what made this sales space so thrilling was its precision: minimal, disciplined, and charged in a complete atmosphere that dramatised concept into an environment.
Alina Rentsch at Petrine
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of Alina Rentsch at Petrine)
In a good outlined by spectacle and commerce, Alina Rentsch’s Sales space (2025) turned its personal structure inside out. The Berlin-based artist remodeled the sales space right into a spatial phantasm: a printed carpet stretched to the sales space’s actual dimensions, warping the ground into an imagined sub-level seen solely from one exact vantage level. Above, a single lamp recited an excerpt from her truthful proposal, bringing language again into the infrastructure of show.
Rentsch’s set up functioned as each art work and a meditation on how the artwork truthful itself produces pictures, worth, and need. Enjoying with Seventeenth-century perspective bins and up to date economies of consideration, she recast the sales space as a stage for distortion, translation, and use. Her reference to the kitchen supplied a metaphor for the way materials, language, and labour are processed into consumable kind, whether or not home or financial. Refined but conceptually exacting, Sales space provoked an surprising response from guests, lots of whom hesitated to step onto the carpeted ground, uncertain whether or not they have been meant to enter in any respect. In a panorama of objects on the market, Rentsch’s work stood out exactly as a result of it refused to carry out as one.
Daiga Grantina at Emalin
(Picture credit score: Courtesy the artists and Emalin, London. Photograph: Reinis Lismanis)
This yr’s Fluxus–CPGA Prize at Frieze London went to Daiga Grantina. The Latvian-born sculptor distilled her follow right into a single, delicate wall work with Untitled (August #15) (2025) at Emalin. Composed of plywood, ink, cloth, wax, and staples, the piece felt nearly weightless, in a delicate compression of kind and feeling. The Fluxus–CPGA Prize, awarded collectively by the Fluxus Artwork Initiatives and the Comité Professionnel des Galeries d’Artwork, helps artists increasing cross-European dialogue and experimentation.
Grantina’s sculptures examine what occurs when supplies meet, and when stress, stress, and fragility change into their very own form of syntax. Her types appear to oscillate between the microscopic and the monumental, between organism and structure, reconfiguring hierarchies of notion. Grantina is at the moment exhibiting her first UK institutional exhibition on the Nicoletta Fiorucci Basis, till January 2026. Her work reveals abstraction as an ecosystem, and at Frieze, her sculpture felt like a quiet, tensile second between louder works all through the truthful.
Lauren Halsey at Gagosian
(Picture credit score: © Lauren Halsey. Photograph: Jeff McLane. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian)
Lauren Halsey’s set up at Gagosian centred on a 6ft plaza signal stacked with blazing slogans, together with: ‘Bling Tax & Issues’, ‘Grace & Reality’, and ‘2-Getha’, topped with ‘Inexpensive Black Artwork’ and edged with ‘Extremely Favored’. The luminous vertical assemblage, titled LODA PLAZA (2025), channelled the consumerist exuberance of South Central Los Angeles’ hand-painted vernacular signage. Surrounding the signal, engraved panels of polymer-modified gypsum on wooden mapped fragments of Black historical past and on a regular basis fable.
Halsey’s set up sits on the intersection of language and structure, extending her ongoing try to reconstitute the visible lexicon of South Central throughout the economies of the worldwide artwork world. Her engraved surfaces function as each doc and translation, melding the syntax of city life, together with rendering of graffiti, business typography and folks into sculpture. The work’s brilliance lies in its refusal to flatten or sentimentalise: Halsey doesn’t flip neighborhood signage into ornament, however as an alternative turns it right into a type of monumental inscription. Throughout the truthful setting, LODA PLAZA engaged the market’s rhythms whereas redirecting them towards a politics of visibility, and what emerged was a type of world-building: a plaza throughout the white dice, exhibiting that language itself can form house and notions of belonging.
TOPICS
Supply: Wallpaper
