Frieze Project – Thomas Bayle’s work covering the fair’s entire entrance corridor. Photo by Marie Roux
Text by Marie Roux
The 10th edition of Frieze art fair closed its doors on Sunday night, comprising this year of two tents on opposite side of Regent’s Park.
Frieze 2012 gathered 175 galleries from 35 countries surrounded by outside artworks selected this year by Yorkshire Sculpture Park director Clare Lilley. Frieze Masters showcased 79 galleries with works ranging from antiquity, Renaissance masters through to 20th century art. The veritable feast for the eyes offered an escape from the frenzy of the contemporary art tent across the park.
Anri Sala, Clocked Perspective, 2012 in the Sculpture Park. Photo by Marie Roux
Under typical English weather of intermittent rain and sunshine, Anri Sala’s Clocked Perspective (2012, Hauser & Writh Gallery) stood for four days in the middle of the Sculpture Park, spewing at any moment a distorted version of Time, wherever one was standing.
The Frieze Projects offerings were more discreet this year. Emdash Award winner Cecil B.Evans produced a slightly critical audio guide; Thomas Bayle designed a wallpaper to cover the entrance corridor, derived from a 1967 image of a pair of loafers, coloured in the palette of traffic lights and pastiched from The Laughing Cow brand. One could not help thinking about Warhol’s own cow wallpaper in this grandiose Pop entrance, and how this might have entertained him. However, Joanna Rajkowska’s incense stick installation standing just in front of the entrance, as if to “prepare” visitors entering a temple, unfortunately didn’t seem lit everyday.
Emdash Award winner Cecil B Evans, This is your Audio Guide, 2012. Photo by Marie Roux
Frieze projects, Grizdale Art Project, Colisseum of the Consumed, 2012. Installation view. Photo by Marie Roux
Frieze also invited Grizedale Art Project this year, a curatorial enterprise based in the Lake District, to build a wooden platform for events held in the middle of the fair that mainly looked at the relationship between food, art, and people. From there one could purchase a pint of milk for a pound or, if your features corresponded, you could take part in a dinner prepared by a high profile London chef entitled ‘A red meal for red haired curators’.
The highlight of Frame section was surely Characterdate by British artist Ed Fornieles (at Carlos/Ishikawa gallery). Fornicles caught our attention by setting up a dating agency, where one could sign up for a blind date within the fair premises, with the gallery assistants helping each participant to adopt a fake identity, improvised during the encounter.
Ed Fornieles, Characterdate, 2012. Installation view at Carlos/Ishikawa’s booth at the Frame. Photo by Marie Roux
First introduced at Frieze New York in May this year but new to the London edition was Focus, selecting a group of galleries established after 2001, each showing up to three artists. Focus proposed a rich mix of work that balanced out the more airy and minimalist booths of Frame. This included the ghostly sculpture of Michal Budny at Raster Gallery, and London’s MOT international screening a film by Turner prize contender Elizabeth Price, in a little cinema box tucked away from the fair’s main passageways.
In the Main section, Casey Kaplan showcased a solo presentation by Canadian artist Geoffrey Farmer. Farmer was strongly present at the recent Documenta exhibition in Kassel with his field of cut-out images from the entire issue run of Life magazine. Here, at Frieze, his works were presented in a way that retreated from the surrounding roar of the crowds.
Geoffrey Farmer at Casey Kaplan. Photo by Marie Roux
Frieze Masters stood in the middle of a sporting field, 15-minute’s walk away from the main Frieze tent. Inside, the décor appeared more formal and unified, all galleries diffusing similar atmospheres.
Numerous galleries took up spaces in both tents, such as Pace, Victoria Miro and Gagosian – probably reflecting an economic incentive to extend their franchise to more 20th century artist sales. Gagosian’s tame light and grey walls showed Richard Avedon’s photographic series The Americans, while both Pace and Nahmad Galleries made the buzz by showcasing large mobiles by Calder.
This year at Frieze one could take part in interactive art, book a blind date or cooking classes but also contemplate with art works such as Brueghel’s Winter’s Landscape (De Jonckheere Gallery), that one could imagine to have been resting on a museum wall for decades. Clearly this edition left no one indifferent.
Pieter Brueghel “Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap” (1565) at De Jonckheere Gallery. Photo by Marie Roux
Alexander Calder, Two Fish Tails, 1975 at Helly Nahmad Gallery
Marie Roux is a photographer and writer based in London, UK