Standout Booths at Frieze 2025
Hannah Levy, Installation View, Frieze, 2025, Booth B11, © Hannah Levy. Courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica Studio.
Frieze 2025—Hannah Levy and Citra Sasmita are the clear stars, both exhibiting solo booths at Casey Kaplan and Yeo Workshop, respectively. Most people were captured by the glitzy Jeff Koons booth; it certainly relies on the iconography of pop culture—in this case, the Hulk. In the main section of the fair, individual works stood out, but a clear conceptual thread was harder to find. It isn’t a dealbreaker, it’s just the kind of bonus that makes the experience more satisfying for the seasoned viewer. The Focus section remains Frieze’s most compelling terrain: alongside Sasmita, Tahir Karmali at Management and Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley at Public Gallery present work that surprises and provokes.
Hannah Levy, Untitled, 2025. Stainless steel, glass, 30 x 60 x 23.5 inches. © Hannah Levy. Courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica Studio.
Casey Kaplan: Hannah Levy
Levy’s booth at Casey Kaplan is conceptually tight; the craftsmanship is extraordinary, but the clarity of vision is what sets her work apart. Her sculptures function as “corporeal traps,” enticing viewers with hyper-reflective stainless steel that grips slumped or blown glass. You’re seduced and unsettled in equal measure. It’s Pan’s Labyrinth not in narrative, but in mood: you’re not sure if you want to be pierced by the long talon curling around a bulbous form or if you’d rather stand back and watch the implied juice seep out. The allure is grotesque, precise, and oddly intimate.
All dubbed Untitled, the five sculptures in Levy’s solo booth teeter on the edge of support and collapse, need and control. Drawing from Art Nouveau’s ornamental logic, her forms echo what Elizabeth Grosz describes as “the volatility of the body,” while also conjuring a posthuman unease— neither creature nor object. Each sculpture feels ready to scurry away on its insectile limbs, abandoning its post as décor and becoming something more animate: alien, exquisite, and alert.
Installation view, Frieze New York, Yeo Workshop, Focus Section, Booth F04. Citra Sasmita, Vortex in the Land of Liberation, 7–11 May 2025, © Citra Sasmita.
Yeo Workshop: Citra Sasmita
Over in the Focus section, Citra Sasmita’s installation at Yeo Workshop is equally commanding, but in a different register: softer, mythic, and rooted in ritual. A Balinese artist presenting in a Western context for the first time, Sasmita reconfigures Kamasan painting by centering women as the heroes. A cowhide embroidered with beads and hand-painted with divine figures hangs in the center, flanked by vertical columns of ceremonial fabric embellished with pearls. The form of the hanging device reads almost like a soft embrace.
What struck me most was the idea of the cut body. In European visual culture, the body is so often fragmented and overexposed: reduced to surfaces, fetishized zones, or isolated gestures that obscure rather than reveal. Sasmita reclaims that fragmentation as sacred, grounding it in her Balinese heritage. She highlights the feet, the womb, and the head not as anatomical curiosities, but as spiritually charged zones. These are not parts for the viewer to decode or possess, but portals into the unknowable. Her work doesn’t seek to explain; it offers presence, reverence, and complexity. After this presentation, I’m simply waiting for her first institutional show in the States.
Installation Image, Frieze New York 2025, Tahir Karmali, Management Gallery, Booth F3, Focus Section.
Management: Tahir Karmali
Tahir Karmali’s canvases are stretched with textile mesh used in construction. Beneath the surface, metal joists are adhered to the canvas, contained. Composed with the joists, Karmali paints with gypsum and gesso, subliminally recalling Saint Sebastian, alluding to devotion through wounding. Through this lens, Karmali’s work channels the logic of Alexander G. Weheliye’s habeas viscus: the body not as fully formed or free, but as constrained material, shaped by labor, migration, and structural force.
Installation View of Danielle Brathwait-Shirley, Frieze, 2025, Public Gallery, Booth F6. Courtesy the artist and Public Gallery, London.
Public: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley dismantles the increasingly dangerous myth amplified by Trump and other radical conservatives that trans people are threats to national or social order. Their solo booth offers something far more truthful: complexity and authorship. The space hums with game room nostalgia as colors bounce off vinyl walls, an enormous monitor flickers with a choose-your-own-adventure game, and viewers are pulled into a layered world built from drawing, text, and sound. It's playful, but not easy. You’re asked to participate, to notice what you choose and why. In conversation with artists like Jacolby Satterwhite, Brathwaite-Shirley moves away from full digital immersion and leans into the physical environment, embracing the tactility of being held and confronted at once. It feels urgent, honest, and emotionally precise. At a time when trans lives are being politicized and flattened, this booth doesn’t just resonate, it’s vitally important.
Southern Guild, Frieze, Booth A6. Roméo Mivekannin, Le Billet, after Armand Cambon (1851), 2025, Acrylic, elixir baths on canvas, 110.3 x 71.6 inches | 280 x 182 cm. Image courtesy of the artist/Southern Guild.
Southern Guild: Roméo Mivekannin
Roméo Mivekannin’s painting, Le Billet after Armand Cambon (1851) (2025), at Southern Guild quietly intrudes. The artist captures something quite unsettling in the character’s gaze, and you feel a particular wanting that haunts. The work is incredibly moving, it’s hard to truly describe its impact—a touching and felt experience. It’s already sold, and I am quite jealous of that collector.
Matthew Brown: Patricia Ayres
Patricia Ayres’s work continues to stand out; since her residencies at Sharpe-Walentas and Skowhegan in 2019, her practice catapulted to the top of many watchlists. At Matthew Brown, 6-1-21-19-20-9-14-1 (2025) holds its own with a kind of erotic tension. Poised between abstraction and something rawly corporeal, the imbalance of the form with its beefy top and thinner bottom robustly compels. US military parachute hardware pulls on either side of the work as cadaverous forms are stretched with elastic. The effect is both visceral and systemic. Ayres’s work resonates as a meditation on how bodies are stretched, numbered, and rendered disposable.
Berenice Olmedo, Cipriano, 2024. ThermoLyn orthoprosthetic, cortical screws, surgical steel traumatology instruments, KAFO (knee, ankle, foot orthosis), socket adapters for prosthesis, resin and lead, 175 × 33 × 50 cm. Courtesy: François Ghebaly.
François Ghebaly: Berenice Olmedo
Just across the hallway at François Ghebaly, Berenice Olmedo’s Cipriano (2024) also orbits questions of control, aid, and bodily fragmentation. Built from translucent resin, orthopedic prosthetics, and surgical hardware, the sculpture flickers between care and estrangement. The composition of the form creates movement, adding a ghostly dimension and exuding part rehabilitation device, part apparition. It puts forth the imminence of our inevitable death. Both artists deal with abjection, but from opposite ends: Ayres through saturated symbolism and ritual material; Olmedo through clinical coolness and ambiguity. Their booths are unrelated, but their proximity felt charged—a temporary rupture in the fair’s choreography. It’s one of those art-fair moments where works accidentally start talking to each other, and you wish someone would give them a room of their own.
Frieze New York runs from May 7 through May 11, 2025 at The Shed.
Edited by Jubilee Park
