ART WEEK IN EUROPE
OCTOBER 2023
Celebrating its 20th anniversary, Frieze London returned to Regent’s Park this past week with presentations from over 160 galleries spanning 46 countries. It was filled with lots and lots of paintings, with a smattering of other mediums, of course, including sculpture and photography. To jazz it up a bit, the fair also featured some new sections: a new “Artist-to-Artist” presentation as well as a section devoted to Modern Women, art by women between 1880–1980, from first-wave feminism to the beginnings of feminist art in the 1970s.
Truth be told, sales were a bit slow and the mood was solemn, given the horrors taking place in Israel. But below are some highlights from the fair, along with some sneak peeks of work being presented later this week at Paris + Art Basel.
CECE PHILIPS
London-based artist Cece Philips evokes a reflective essence in her paintings. Reminiscent of Edward Hopper, people are seen inside their homes, through the windows, going about mundane activities. Experimenting with spatial dimensions, Philips uses light as a way to move between spaces from the middle to the background.
Philips’s new series of ultramarine-centered paintings delves into the nocturnal world. Enigmatic in nature, they reimagine social dynamics and environments, examining how modernist interiors and urban surroundings are occupied by women, mainly women of color. Philips is currently pursuing her MA in painting at the Royal College of Art in London.
XIYAO WANG
Chinese-born, Berlin-based artist Xiyao Wang’s presentation, titled En l’air, comprised a collection of five large immersive canvases. As the French title implies, En l’air evokes a ballet step, literally translating to “in the air.” These artworks invoke a myriad of interpretations, conjuring abstract landscapes, fragments of elusive memories, dance steps frozen in time, and explorations of the human form. Yet, the theme of “in the air” draws its inspiration not only from Wang’s profound passion for classical ballet but also holds historical and artistic significance by paying homage to the rock paintings of the Mogao Caves.
Wang received a BA from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2014 and a BA and MFA from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg (2018, 2020). Her work has been featured in important international venues, including the Aurora Museum, Shanghai; Jiu Shi Art Museum, Shanghai; Beijing Biennale; Baumwollspinnerei, Leipzig; Cité international des arts, Paris; Sprink, Dusseldorf; and Chongqing Contemporary Art Center, among many others.
BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD
Barbara Chase-Riboud is an acclaimed sculptor, poet, and novelist who has worked across a variety of media throughout her long career. Chase-Riboud’s sculptural work is characterized by a perpetual interest in transnational histories and an emphasis on unacknowledged figures from the past that shape our understanding of the present. The Standing Black Women of Venice series epitomizes this through line in her oeuvre by invoking both ancient history and postwar art, which Chase-Riboud combines in a monolithic form influenced by her aluminum and fiber sculptures from the 1970s. The works are homages to two of Chase-Riboud’s greatest influences: the sculptor Alberto Giacometti (whom she met in Paris), whose landmark Woman of Venice series serves as the basis for these works’ titles, and the unsung female poets of ancient cultures. Rendered in luminous black bronze, the sculptures also monumentalize the origins of the ancient world in the great civilizations of the African continent, a reminder that history is comprised of layers of forgotten influences piled atop each other, waiting to be exhumed.
Works from this series have been previously shown in the 2021 exhibition 'Standing Woman of Venice/Standing Black Woman of Venice' at Fondation Giacometti in Paris, at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in 2022/23, and at MoMA New York.
DANIELLE MCKINNEY
Danielle Mckinney’s paintings for Frieze London make up a new chapter in the artist’s ongoing exploration of portraiture, color, and composition informed by an expansive dialogue with art history. Her figures emerge from deep, dark backgrounds reminiscent of Zurbarán’s haunting portraits of saints and martyrs. With gestural brushstrokes and flickers of brilliant pink and orange oil paint, Mckinney evokes the work of Matisse while the striking quality of light in her scenes—and its narrative implications—echo the paintings of Vermeer. Perhaps most notably, Mckinney draws on the intense, unsettling voyeurism of Hopper with her masterfully crafted interiors, occasionally borrowing his compositions directly, yet filling them with her own figures, her own details, her own vision. In these paintings, Mckinney ultimately enchants viewers with her expert handling of paint, the subtle emotional pull of her figures, and her radical commitment to beauty.
Mckinney's work is in numerous museum collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. Mckinney earned a BFA at Atlanta College of Arts in 2005 and an MFA at Parsons School of Design in 2013. The artist lives and works in Jersey City, NJ.
LISA JO
Lisa Jo’s practice focuses on the processes of visual dematerialization and the subsequent translation that re-materializes her images as oil paintings. Her paintings are not about seduction and often not about beauty. Instead they are about opening up an ongoing exchange, nudging a more complex intercommunication with the viewer and the artist. Images that are flirting with both figuration and abstraction are held in a suspended state against categorization. Jo's paintings are rendered from digital iPad drawings. This reverse approach (from the digital to the traditional) creates a tension, as technology is set against itself; by rendering a digital image in oil paint, she is attempting the erasure of the technology that was used to create it.
Jo was born in Los Angeles in 1983 and attended New York University, receiving her BFA in 2005 and continued to live and work in the city until her move to Berlin in 2018. Jo’s work has been shown globally, at such notable institutions as The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Swiss Institute, New York, NY; White Columns, New York, NY; and MOMA PS1, New York, NY.
JUNG KANGJA
One of the artists featured in the Modern Women section at Frieze was Jung Kanja. Jung was born in Daegu in 1942 and made her debut in the Korean art scene in 1967 with the Korean Young Artists Association Exhibition after graduating from Hongik University. Active as a member of the 'New Exhibition' and 'The Fourth Group' during the 1960-1970s, a time of strong military dictatorship and ideological confrontations, she attempted to make social statements through various artistic experiments and garnered significant attention.
The work To Repress (1968), featured here, was originally exhibited at Hankook Ilbo in 1968. This installation work, featuring a steel pipe placed on large pieces of cotton, symbolizes the oppressed existence of women, as the light cotton is weighed down by the heavy steel.
Due to government surveillance and sanctions after her 1970 solo exhibition "Incorporeality" was forcibly removed, she migrated to Singapore with her family, and as a consequence, for over a decade Jung had to halt her artistic endeavors. Her social consciousness and sense of identity continued through experimental paintings after returning to Korea in 1982. Despite being diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer, she devoted herself to her work until the very end. Although Jung never referred to herself as a 'feminist', her works projected an awareness of feminism as well as the dynamics of gender ideologies and politics of those times.
AYOUNG KIM
As part of Frieze's new “Artist-to-Artist” presentation, Haegue Yang nominated Ayoung Kim’s fascinating video titled Delivery Dancer’s Sphere. Ayoung Kim is a visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice traverses across video, moving image, sound installation, VR (Virtual Reality), game engine simulations, and performance, along with fiction and text. Kim’s work creates multidimensional and fluid narratives, using methods such as speculative fiction/fiction-making, worldbuilding, and mythmaking.
Kim has described this video as a work of “pandemic fiction,” as it was inspired by her personal experience of being an enthusiastic consumer of on-demand services and the gig economy that increasingly dominated life in South Korea during the COVID-19 pandemic. The single-channel video depicts a top-tier female delivery rider named Ernst Mo (an anagram of “monster”) who works for the delivery platform Delivery Dancer, which is prompted by a master algorithm called Dancemaster. Foregrounding the importance of worldbuilding in the artist’s practice, the endless delivery requests and shortest-distance routes calculated by Dancemaster form an endlessly regenerating labyrinth of fractals in a fictitious, techno-futuristic Seoul.
Delivery Dancer’s Sphere reflects Kim’s recent explorations in syntactic/material reimagination of image production methods using game engine and CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) techniques with live-action shooting. Together with live-action shots of Ernst Mo speeding through the streets of an ominous, rainy city, Kim actively uses post-optical image creation methods such as 3D scanning, LiDAR scanning, game engines, and digital avatar creation software.
LI SONGSONG
Li Songsong is renowned for his thickly layered paintings that animate the fragmentary nature of images and memory, paying particular attention to the people, events, and themes of modern and contemporary Chinese history. Li graduated from the Subsidiary School of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1992 and received a B.F.A in oil painting from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1996.
For the 2023 edition of Paris+, Pace Gallery is showing a presentation of works by its artists that coincides with the opening of a major retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, dedicated to the legacy of Mark Rothko. This piece by Songsong is one of those works inspired by Rothko's timeless spirit.
LONNIE HOLLEY
For the 2023 edition of Paris+ par Art Basel, a solo booth of paintings and sculptures by Atlanta-based multimedia artist and celebrated musician Lonnie Holley will be featured. Expanding his visual practice of memorialization, Lonnie Holley has composed new abstract paintings on canvas, paper, or quilt that uses his signature layered facial profiles. Holley often uses the quilt as a picture plane to pay homage to women’s work and to harness the charged aura of Black American ancestral history and culture. Alongside his wall-based works are intricate readymade sculptures forged from refuse that the artist has recategorized as domestically scaled monuments to loved ones or to important moments in the Civil Rights movement.
Born in 1950 in Jim Crow-era Birmingham, Alabama as the seventh of twenty-seven children, Holley had a difficult childhood, working from the age of five in various jobs—picking up trash at a drive-in movie theater, washing dishes, picking cotton, digging graves, serving as a short order cook at Disney World. His itinerant childhood, living across the South in various precarious circumstances, was chaotic, leaving a deep imprint on his work. Holley made his first sculptures when he carved tombstones for nieces who perished in a house fire in 1979. Over the following years, he devoted himself to making sculptures that populated his property near Birmingham, eventually bringing some of his sandstone works to the director of the Birmingham Museum of Art.
The artist currently lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; among many others. A survey of his work will be published in a comprehensive monograph by Rizzoli Electa in 2024.
NATE LOWMAN
Nate Lowman makes paintings about the power of images, collecting and translating them from propaganda films, advertisements, art history, and other forms of mass media. In this work, which will be featured at the Paris + art fair, Lowman analyzes and deciphers the experience of seeing. Lowman uses alkyd in his work, a dense, shiny paint that he applies in thick dots into the surface of the canvas, mimicking the process of creating a tattoo.
Lowman was born in Las Vegas and grew up in Idyllwild, California. He went on to receive his BS from New York University in 2001. His works are in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Moderna Museet in Malmö, among others.
JADE FADOJUTIMI
In her paintings, which are often monumental, Jade Fadojutimi orchestrates color, space and line in the quest for self-knowledge. Making use of key visual elements from 20th-century painting such as grids, layers, and disparate marks, she explores the intertwined ideas of identity and beauty. Fadojutimi's canvases embody a continual transformation, suggesting familiar organic forms while edging toward abstraction. Referring to her compositions as "environments", the artist draws inspiration from various locations, cultures, objects, and sounds, including Japanese anime, clothing, and soundtracks.
In her glimmering, dark-hued painting, The unitch PT1, featured here and at Paris + Art Basel, Fadojutimi builds up an image with layers of oil paint, occasionally interrupted by lines of oil pastel, to suggest a cluster of plants in bloom illuminated by flickering, variegated light.
Fadojutimi was born in 1993 in London, where she lives and works. She graduated with a BA from the Slade School of Art, London, in 2015, and an MA from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2017.
RICK LOWE
Rick Lowe is known for works of "social sculpture" in which he exercises skills in civic organization, political agitation, real estate development and architectural criticism. Among those initiatives is the Victoria Square Project in Athens, an ongoing collaborative intervention designed to foster interactions between Greek natives with immigrants and refugees.
Lowe's painting, Victoria Square Project: One to One, which will be presented at Paris + Art Basel, echoes the shifting of urban communities in an Athens neighborhood. The artist collages rectangular sheets of painted paper into flowing, maplike configurations based on the games of dominoes he plays with community members, developing a compositional approach that suggests the dense structures of a city plan. This layered arrangement of linear connections and circular nodes incorporates archival materials from the project at large, chronicling its progress and extending the work's interplay between actual and potential places.
In addition to his work in public and community spaces, Lowe has exhibited in institutions worldwide including the Phoenix Art Museum; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York. In 2013, President Barack Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Arts, and in 2014 he was named a MacArthur Fellow.