Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of Frieze London in October 2023, Frieze returned with a bang, introducing a series of new initiatives, including the special sections Artist-to-Artist and Modern Women, and the debut of Fatos Üstek as curator of Frieze Sculpture. Frieze Masters, running concurrently with Frieze London in Regent’s Park, has long been a favourite for an autumnal Sunday stroll (and, for this edition, some delightful xiao long bao from Chinatown favourite Dumplings Legend!). But, for this piece, we wanted to look to the future, and highlight some of the most exciting contemporary and emerging artists we saw at the fair…we can’t wait to see what 2024 has in store for them!

Holly Stevenson 

British sculptor Holly Stevenson has slowly but surely been creeping into our notice and admiration this year, first as part of the show Body Poetics at Bournemouth’s GIANT Gallery, where she was curated into a fascinating dialogue with icon Louis Bourgeois, and more recently through her widely acclaimed Frieze Sculpture work, presented by Sid Motion. For Frieze Sculpture, Stevenson’s Freud-inspired work – titled The Debate – comprised two ceramic ducks guarding an egg which appears whole from one angle but which reveals itself as you move, as eerily sliced open and hard boiled. Stevenson is fascinated by the symbolism of eggs and references Freud’s ideas about substitution, where an object can stand in for something completely different. She explained in an interview how her own psychoanalytic sessions have a profound impact on her practice. “I understand the rigmarole, the wordplay. The fact my grandmother had a pet duck, and they ate it because they were so poor; that my mother rolled over in bed and squished a duckling; that I feel like I’m constantly being squished by my mother. These stories have crept into my personal psychology and I can play with them.”

Adham Faramawy

Recipient of the 2023 Artist Award at Frieze London, realised in partnership with Forma, Adham Faramawy is an artist of Egyptian descent based in London, whose work spans media including moving image, sculptural installation, photography, print and painting, engaging with concerns of materiality, touch, the body and toxicity to question ideas of the natural in relation to marginalised communities. For this new commission – And these deceitful waters – a video and sculptural assemblage was presented in the entrance to the fair, examining the history of the Thames, its underground tributaries and the plants along its banks, as a way of exploring the river as a colonial artery and a site of ecological collapse. Employing a three-person dance performance with music and spoken word, Faramawy’s work tells the migration stories of the river and its flora, surveying how they build national identity and can construct, reinforce and dissolve borders. The work weaves tales together, illustrating how land becomes co-opted into projects of nation building, colonisation, ecological collapse, toxicity and migration.

Jadé Fadojutimi

Ok, so Fadojutimi has already ticked off a pretty impressive bucket list, with paintings acquired by the Tate, representation by Gagosian and auction prices exceeding £1m – but she is still young, and her rapid upward trajectory seems not to be slowing down any time soon. Fadojutimi uses colour, space, line, and movement in the service of fluid emotion, interpreting everyday experience in ways that reflect a drive to understand more completely the perpetually intertwined ideas of identity and beauty. Her paintings are often monumental in scale, like the stunning, unavoidably eye-catching work shown by Galerie Gisela Capitain at Frieze London, Plums are not plums until you think about plums and realise there are no plums here to be seen – which mesmerises with its rich pinks and luscious green and yellows presenting her typically expressive and poetic style. After all, Fadojutimi finds writing key to her process, sometimes using it to help articulate the subtleties of her painting or else positioning it in parallel. Her roles as artist and writer are equally important aspects of her creative practice.

Gözde İlkin

Celebrating new galleries and voices at the forefront of the global art scene, Frieze’s Focus section for 2023 explored desire, memory, environment, power and colonial history. Gypsum, winner of the The Frieze Focus Stand Prize 2022, returned to the fair with a solo presentation of fabric works by Istanbul-based Gözde İlkin. Working with found cloth, plants and stones, İlkin explores how materials exist as repositories of memory and narrative. By juxtaposing manmade and natural forms, İlkin collapses the distance between them and challenges history’s anthropocentrism. This selection features hung two-dimensional fabric works alongside three-dimensional patchwork fabric sculptures. İlkin’s work is made out of repurposed domestic fabrics that she has been ‎collecting over time. Tablecloths, curtains and bed duvets act as memory objects that stage İlkin’s motifs and images. She deftly reworks the material with an arrangement of loose ‎threads and thin layers of paint. Her artworks which incorporate stitching, drawing, painting as well as video and sound installations, construct forms of confrontational interactions that tend to manipulate borders, gender dynamics and ferocious urban transformations. Her stories never quite unfold into their logical conclusion. They enact ‎political relationships, feelings and promises that are failing to reach a solution, remaining ‎abstract and in limbo. ‎

Jordan Strafer

Heidi and Hot Wheels shared a booth dedicated to the latest short film by Jordan Strafer, marking the first time her work is shown in the UK. The New York-based artist, whose primary medium is video, often presents part-autobiographical, part-fictitious work that reflects the complex nature of racial identity, gender, sexuality, class, and ‘Americanism.’ A key aspect of her practice is the thoughtful yet playful choreography of seemingly antagonistic emotions—both comical and tragic, intimate and factual, familiar and unfamiliar, repulsive and appealing situations appear in an unusually fluid manner. For Frieze, Strafer’s Loophole (2023) was showcased – an erotic thriller that mixes real extracts from William Kennedy Smith’s rape trial transcript with dark, fantastical love scenes. Depicting a loss of order, Loophole exposes themes of greed, corruption and abuse of power. The film references the genre of the erotic thriller, which was popular at the time, and juxtaposes the deeply ambivalent feelings of fear and desire.

Words by Tani Burns