Fracture Aesthetic at Frieze Week
OMR booth at Frieze London, October 15–19, The Regent’s Park. Photo by the author.
Assemblage, collage, and the interplay of things—images, materials, forms—pulling apart and coming back together: these were the hallmarks of this year’s Frieze London, hailed as a comeback for a beleaguered art market. And yes, attendance and talk of big purchases at the marquee fair (as well as Frieze Masters) and attendant smaller fairs (such as Minor Attractions and Echo Sho) prove that rumors of commercial demise are greatly exaggerated. Nevertheless, the fractured aesthetic, demonstrably on view throughout London this Frieze week, also reveals an ambivalence, an uncertainty about the future, in that the present seems so fraught and splintered by wars, genocide, nationalism, fascism, shutdowns, and more. As my colleague Jennifer Carvalho of CARVALHO mentioned to me over dinner during the week, such aesthetics are always prevalent in times of great distress and uncertainty, recalling for me the 2008 New Museum exhibition Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, which considered “the present as an age of crumbling symbols and broken icons.” Eighteen years later, it seems we are still in that present, as my selections from last week's Frieze week imply.
At the main fair, Mexico City's OMR presented works by Pia Camil, Claudia Comte, Alicja Kwade, José Dávila, and others within an “immersive environment” featuring custom red and white toile-like wallpaper by Alberto Perera. Far away, the wallpaper resembled the eighteenth-century decorative pattern popular in England and France; up close, it dissolves into an intricately detailed fantastical composition of vignettes depicting animal-like figures in various activities: driving, podcasting, resting. Ensconcing the booth, it both distinguished the booth from others seeking to imitate a white cube and knit together the disparate works within it. These included sumptuous marble works by Comte as well as an enigmatic, almost minimalistic painting by Camil from her BRAGUETA XL series (2022) in which she paints pure color directly onto denim (a frequent material of her sculptures). At the center of this small, bright-red work is a vertical incision with a zipper at the middle, creating a yonic void at its center. What can be born out of a tear or fissure? What is separated, this work seems to suggest, can be sutured.
Pia Camil, from the BRAGUETA XL series, against Alberto Perera wallpaper at OMR’s booth, Frieze London, October 15–19, The Regent’s Park. Photo by the author.
Perhaps networks, or thinking ecosystemically, posit the possibility of rejuvenation, in that discrete parts of a system can be unified by creating new systems. East London’s Public presented London-based Chinese artist Xin Liu’s monumentally networked Insomnia (2025) alongside a series of enigmatic, ethereal encaustic (beeswax and tree resin) paintings of blues, greens, and tawny yellow-brown. According to the press release, Liu “reimagines he female body as a biological Noah’s Ark in her sculpture and installation-based practice,” as implicated in the ecosystem of Insomnia, composed of a horizontally-oriented rectangular steel tank in between two towers. In the tank are lacy flotillas of green duckweed, skimming the surface of the water, while the two towers “rain” fine and precise droplets of thick liquid into the tank, which is alit by clear fluorescent light, as if the tank were in an interrogation room. Found in ponds and waterways, but often blocking sunlight for other organisms, duckweed is nevertheless a potential source of organic fuel production. The perpetually in motion Insomina, against the stillness of Liu’s paintings, evokes the paradox of technological and bio-engineered futures, which offer both promise and peril.
To everything spurn, spurn, spurn, Artwin Gallery, on view at Frieze No.9 Cork Street, October 10–25, 2025. Photo by author.
Meanwhile, at Frieze’s rotating space, No.9 Cork Street, Artwin Gallery presented eight artists from Central Asia and the Caucasus in To everything spurn, spurn, spurn, curated by Slavs & Tatars and Asya Yaghmurian. Exploring “disdain and contempt,” the exhibition purported to consider what it means to “kick back,” though it seemed more an exploration of materiality and process. For instance, Slavs & Tatars’ exquisitely-crafted blown glass orbs light the show's first gallery, while Nuriia Nurgalieva’s Come into My Bedroom (2024), a watercolor on canvas in sparkling blue shades depicting a close-up of a ribcage or skeletal structure, commands a hypnotic presence in the back gallery. In the act of “spurning,” or rejecting, these artists seem to embrace the beauty or coziness of home, as if retreat is an act of resistance and a place of repair.
Nuriia Nurgalieva, Come into My Bedroom, 2024. Watercolor on stretched canvas, 100 × 150 cm. Copyright the Artist.
Paintings, and images of home or portraits of the body or interority thereof, were plentiful at Frieze. Alexander Gray anchored their booth with the beguiling, heavily impastoed Self Portrait on the Couch (1983) by Joan Semmel, in which she portrays herself thoughtfully at both rest and work, gazing piercingly out at the viewer. At Ingelby’s booth, Aubrey Levinthal’s enigmatic, cobalt-colored Beveled Bathroom Mirror (2025) features the top of a woman’s head, the eyes and nose mirrored, and framed by a series of rectangles within rectangles. Next door at Frieze Masters, Galeria Francisco Fino spotlit Helena Almeida’s poetic and experimental drawings and photographs from the 1970s, all of which play with gesture and the body as a place of resistance. Like artists today working across all media, Almeida engaged her senses in fragmentary glimpses of a personal experience that is inherently political.
Largely dedicated to more emerging galleries or experimental practices, satellite fairs Echo Soho and Minor Attractions showcased an eclectic mix of commercial, artist-run, and nonprofit spaces. The former, founded by and for women-led galleries, evaded easy categorization, with packed presentations of all media across two compact floors of Artists House in Soho. There, Lizzie Glendinning’s showcase of Eleanor May Watson, Cat Roissetter, and Natasha Michaels explored notions of body and experience through painting and drawing. At Minor Attractions, Paris’s Cabanon presents works by Flora Aussant and Eilert Asmervik, including a textural, patchworked painting by the latter. Los Angeles’s Public Notice showcased five artists in Mise-en-Scene, all of whom employed a rhythmic or collaged aesthetic. For instance, Nick Rose’s oil and ink image transfer creates ethereal scenes filmically spliced together, while Jake Vanden Berge deploys a softly cinematic juxtaposition of images and objects. Both Echo Soho and Minor Attractions offered works that rewarded long looks, harnessing a stillness and meditativeness not often extended at fairs. Walking distance from Minor Attraction’s location at The Mandrake hotel is the intimately majestic Fitzrovia Chapel, a jewelbox of a space that hosted Brooklyn-based artist Maria Kreyn’s Hyperobject, a suite of high-drama, Turner-esque earth-toned paintings that nevertheless evoked contemplation inside the compressed, Byzantine-inspired chapel.
Detail of Jodie Carey, Earthen, on view at Artist’s Garden. Photo by the author.
Finally, atop Temple Station is theCOLAB’s Artist’s Garden, a sculpture park to rival Frieze Sculpture. The all-women showcase here includes Jodie Carey’s twined vessels, which comprise Earthen (2025), made from casts in the ground using a hand-built form wrapped in cloth and thread buried underground, and then removed when Carey entered the void to retrieve the casts. The complicated process reveals an engrossing texture, registering the layers of dirt and detritus always present yet invisible below us. Shards of terra cotta, tangles of roots, and the remnants of the cloth and threads used in the casts are visible in the resulting vessels, which stand stoically erect in the busy urban environment and offer a contrast to its predominantly steel-and-glass architecture. On view until next spring, Earthen is a monument to women “weeders” recorded in the ledgers of nearby Arundel House since the 1500s. These women, now anonymous to history, tended to the gardens that beautified the grounds, removing what was deemed unsightly. The carefully handwrought surfaces of Earthen seem to harken to the tender safekeeping that generations of these women performed, now hidden in historical records. A monument to these women, the work also testifies to their resilience as well as the cyclical nature of “women’s work.” It also offers a transcendence across the present and the deep geological past: Earthen reminds us that we are all connected across time and place, even if we feel fractured by the moment.
