7 Highlights of Frieze Art week: New Commissions, Exhibitions and unmissable Auction Lots before you even hit the fair

Frieze week launches London’s autumn art calendar in full fanfare. Beyond Frieze Art Fair, the city unveils heavy hitting institutional exhibitions whilst commercial galleries and auction houses bring out their big arty guns. Below are my highlights for the week ahead. Stay tuned to my Instagram account for daily updates on these and other exhibitions and, of course, for the fair highlights later in the week!

Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall annual commission by Tania Bruguera (b.1968, Havana) 2 Oct 2018 to 24 Feb 2019

The artist lives and works between New York and Havana and she has established a unique concept for her political approach to art – Arte Util (useful art). Over the past 20 years, Bruguera has become renowned for creating art that addresses major political concerns. Her work questions the nature of power structures, behaviours and values. She has consistently argued for art’s role as a useful agent of real change in the world, while using the museum as an active forum for public debate.

For full disclosure, I don’t believe art can effect change and I am certainly the first to roll my eyes when someones talks about political art because, in its majority, I believe it’s disingenuous, predictable, preemptive, simplistic or hypocritical. However, and this is a major however, Bruguera’s work reflects on empowerment as a questioning of government structures and she talks about immigration as a high view concept and not as an opposition of national vs the foreigner. She rethinks concepts and opens them up for debate in a simple and disarming way. She calls for a revolution with a smile and does not prescribe the result of that revolution. I can’t stress enough how important her work is within the current art environment.

The Serpentine Gallery exhibition by Pierre Huyghe (b. 1962, Paris) 3 Oct 2018 to 10 Feb 2019

Huyghe is one of the world’s leading conceptual artists, known for creating complex immersive ecosystems. His exhibitions are complex live environments in which interdependent agents, live and inert, real and symbolic, are self-organising and co-evolving in a dynamic and unstable mesh. I have experienced two of his major art installations of the last years: After ALife Ahead for Skulptur Project Münster, 2017; and Untilled at dOCUMENTA(13), 2012 both in Germany. London is in for a mind-blowing treat.

The Serpentine Gallery building will be subtly altered, affecting the conditions of the exhibition’s environment. Sanding the walls, dust from the paint of previous exhibitions will lie on the floor. The central gallery, transformed into an incubator, will birth thousands of flies that migrate towards the centre of the dome. Throughout the gallery, large LED screens will present images which began in the mind of a human. The brain activity is captured as a person imagines a specific situation that the subject has been prompted to think of. One by one, each thought is reconstructed by a deep neural network and the images created are exhibited in the gallery, where they will be in a constant process of reconstruction, endlessly modified by external factors – light, temperature, humidity levels, insects, and visitors’ gaze.

Kerry James Marshall: History of Painting at David Zwirner 3 Oct to 10 Nov, 2018

Through a new body of work, Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955, Alabama) questions the social constructs of beauty, taste, and power. The artist has declared his admiration for master painters like Veronese and Rembrandt and the importance for his work to hang in museum walls alongside them. His aspiration acknowledges both, his appreciation and understanding of art history but also the Western-centric ways in which the history of art is told. Marshall questions the place of black bodies within the established art historical narrative by depicting vibrant and unequivocally-black figures in scenes that have been typically associated with a Western tradition.

Earlier this year Marshall broke auction records when his 1997 painting Past Times sold for $21.1M, making Marshall the highest-paid African American artist at auction alive today. Marshall has been a major artist for decades, but his career trajectory came into the spotlight following retrospectives in 2004 and 2016 and it hit a high with the auction record. The opening night will be packed, no doubt.

I am in love with two artworks by Marisa Merz (b. 1926, Turin) up for auction on Friday 5th at Christie’s and on view throughout this week. Merz rose to international prominence in connection with Arte Povera, an Italian art movement from the late 1960s to 1970s whose artists explored a range of unconventional processes and non traditional ‘everyday’ materials. Her subsequent practice was marked by a bodily and gendered investment filtered through her experience as the sole woman protagonist of the movement.

Don’t miss the delicacy of Merz’s drawing lines and the fingers running through the hair (or maybe doubling as hair strands?) of the head sculpture because it’s a rare occurrence that this type of work is on show. More importantly for well-informed and savvy collectors is that the bronze sculpture has been included in relevant academic literature and the exhibition pedigree of this work is immaculate, having exhibited at the prestigious dOCUMENTA 9 in 1992.

Hannah Wilke at Alison Jacques Gallery 27 Sept to 21 Dec 2018

“Since 1960 I have been concerned with the creation of a formal imagery that is specifically female… Human gestures, multi-layered metaphysical symbols below the gut level translated into an art close to laughter, making love, shaking hands… Eating fortune cookies instead of signing them, chewing gum into androgynous objects… Delicate definitions… Rearranging the touch of sensuality with a residual magic made from laundry lint, or latex loosely laid out like love vulnerably exposed… continually exposing myself to whatever situation occurs….”

The exhibition spans three decades of the American painter, sculptor, photographer, video and performance artist Hannah Wilke (b. 1940, New York, NY; d. 1993, Houston, TX). Wilke’s firm legacy as a pioneering, often controversial, feminist and conceptual artist is evident not only in her early use of vaginal imagery as a feminist intervention but also in her radical choice of materials. The use of terracotta and ceramic, latex, chewing gum and erasers was unusual for this time period and their characteristics of malleability and fragility reflect the sense of vulnerability that is consistent throughout Wilke’s practice.

In The Company Of at TJ Boulting 05 Oct to 17 Nov 2018

In The Company Of showcases three historic artists, Barbara Hepworth, Lee Miller, and Alice Neel, alongside twelve dynamic contemporary artists, a few of them already featured on the blog in the past when highlighting female young artists to watch and the female gaze : Juno Calypso, Juliana Cerqueira Leite, Maisie Cousins, Charlotte Edey, Barbara Hepworth, Jessie Makinson, Lee Miller, Alice Neel, HelenA Pritchard, Stephanie Quayle, Anne Ryan, Boo Saville, Hrafnhildur Arnardottir aka Shoplifter, Antonia Showering and Caroline Walker. The exhibition highlights an important shared artistic language between these artists past and present – be it a fascination in the surreal, a sensitivity to surroundings, to materials, form or human relationships. The actions of the historic artists paved the way with their bold untethered actions to create art, that the contemporary artists continue to thrive in today.

If you would like to discuss how IñigoArt can assist you in your art acquisitions or to understand the art market further, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Marina Ribera Iñigo

marina@inigoart.com