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12 October 2010

Frieze Art Fair 2010: Highlights

We pick out the highlights on show in Regent’s Park this year.

By Agnieszka Gratza

Now in its eighth year, Frieze Art Fair 2010 features 173 contemporary art galleries showcasing over a thousand artists from 29 countries. Held in a giant tent in Regent’s Park, London, from 14 to 17 October, Frieze Art Fair brings together under one roof internationally renowned and emerging galleries.

Frieze is accompanied by a curated programme of talks, commissioned artist projects, films and concerts. Take a look at some of the highlights ahead of the opening this Thursday.

Galleries

Edinburgh’s Ingleby Gallery showcases elegant minimalist work by the Brazilian artist Iran do Espírito Santo, together with Callum Innes’s large abstract black-and-white canvases.

Galerija Gregor Podnar from Berlin juxtaposes minute and large-scale sculptural works deploying unusual materials such as spotlights in the drawings of Goran Petercol and cardboard in Tobias Putrih’s architectural containers.

Decks of cards make up the stunning Tower of Babel by Matt Johnson, one of two Los Angeles-based artists represented this year by Alison Jacques Gallery, London.

Warsaw’s Raster gallery pairs digital and colour photographs by the Polish artists Rafal Bujnowski and Oskar Dawicki, whose Tree of Knowledge subverts and reinvents the biblical myth of earthly paradise.

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David Zwirner, New York, contrasts Algerian-born Adel Abdessemed’s striking black-and-white Ice Skates, made of hand-blown glass, with the American James Welling’s inkjet prints, suffused with coloured light.

Frame

Inaugurated in 2009, this section of the fair is dedicated to galleries that have been around for less than six years.

Look out for the Indian gallery Experimenter, showing Live True Life or Die Trying (2009) by Naeem Mohaiemen (Bangladesh), an installation that juxtaposes text and photographs of Islamist and leftist demonstrations simultaneously taking place in Dhaka.

In a different vein, Simon Preston‘s New York gallery displays the delicate geometric forms of the Brazilian Carlos Bevilacqua’s wood-and-rubber sculptures.

The Cartier Award 2010

Frozen, a site-specific installation by this year’s winner, the British-Japanese artist Simon Fujiwara, imagines a lost city buried beneath Frieze Art Fair. Expect to stumble upon archaeological digs and artefacts scattered across the site.

Frieze Talks

Friday 15 October, 12pm – Frieze Projects: Jeffrey Vallance
This panel discussion will avail itself of five mediums to communicate with the spirits of famous artists. The audience will be offered a rare opportunity to ask the likes of Jackson Pollock, Leonardo da Vinci, Frida Kahlo, Vincent Van Gogh and Marcel Duchamp searching questions about the role of art in the afterworld.

Saturday 16 October, 2.30pm – Susan Hiller in conversation with John Welchman
A chance to see the American, London-based artist Susan Hiller discuss her work and the role of humour in contemporary art today, ahead of the upcoming retrospective of her work at Tate Britain.

Frieze Film

Commissioned video works by British artists will be shown free of charge in a specially built cinema by the entrance to the fair. These include Linder’s three-minute-long Forgetful Green, referencing Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, and a video by Stephen Sutcliffe inspired by an episode in Colin Wilson’s celebrated novel The Outsider, involving a meeting with the devil.

Frieze Music

Friday 15 October, 8pm-midnight – The American band Hercules and Love Affair, in a rare UK performance styled as a homage to the Nineties house scene, will be supported by avant-pop duo Telepathe at Debut, a new music venue beneath London Bridge Station.

Saturday 16 October, 8pm-11pm – A candlelit jazz concert starring Baby Dee, a classically trained harpist and pianist, and the experimental Elysian Quartet will be staged at Shoreditch Church.

 

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