Which Artists are on Alvaro Barrington’s and Simone Leigh’s Radars?

It’s collectors and dealers that traditionally power art fairs. Since Frieze’s earliest days, though, it’s been a rare commercial arena where the artists get a say, too. The curated programme of specially commissioned works has long played the role of precocious, questioning child to its progenitor, from stand-out past projects like Mike Nelson’s sinister take on art-fair voyeurism, a secret photographic darkroom, to Christian Jankowski’s arch commentary on art and commerce, the yacht-as-swanky-sculpture.

With new section Artist-to-Artist, the fair’s 20th anniversary sees this artist-first approach taken one step further. In place of a single curatorial vision, eight leading practitioners have brought their unique perspectives, each proposing an upcoming artist to create a solo presentation.

Some of the selectors have followed their nominee’s practice since its earliest days. Wolfgang Tillmans first encountered the work of Mark Barker (Shahin Zarinbal) when the Berlin-based British artist was a student at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2007. Tillmans describes Barker’s work as ‘sensitive, at times unnerving and peculiar in the best sense of the word’. Across photographs of crisply minimalist toilet air vents, drawings in pencil and cigarette ash, and amorphous figurative sculpture, Barker’s presentation explores porous corporeality and the architectural structures that house our bodily processes. ‘At the heart of it I always sense a profound humanism,’ says Tillmans. ‘It’s work for our times.’

Like Tillmans, Alvaro Barrington’s relationship with his nominated artist, Simonette Quamina (Praxis), is longstanding: Barrington actually credits them with his original decision to study art. Caribbean symbolism, ancestral stories and experiences of migration fuel the monochrome collages and prints by Quamina, who grew up between Guyana, Canada, the US and Saint Vincent. Within them, they conjure a multi-layered, lush and shadowed place where fragmented figures half-disappear like apparitions. One thing that strikes Barrington about his schoolfriend’s work is how it ‘can give us a sense of time and space [...] Simonette’s work is nostalgia for a Caribbean that probably no longer exists. Those from The Windrush, Bob Marley [or] my mother would have known [it] as much as they knew their own bodies.’

While each presentation reflects its selector’s expertise, certain concerns recur. Nature is a prominent focus, as is labour and identity. Thai art giant Rirkrit Tiravanija says he chose Wantanee Siripattananuntakul (Gallery VER) for her questioning of ‘social conditions, opportunity and power’, which she’s doing at Frieze with the help of an African grey parrot named Beuys. Like the Western art legend and eco-activist that the bird is named after, Siripattananuntakul probes the divide between human and animal consciousness. Tiravanija says he also wanted to address the ‘discrepancy of representation’ at Western art fairs.

In a similar spirit, the Turner Prize-winning Anthea Hamilton has chosen Carlos Villa (Silverlens) – an artist who highlighted the overlooked achievements of indigenous communities outside Western art hierarchies. Being told that there was no such thing as an art history in his native Philippines inspired the late artist and educator to create work from the vestiges of global culture, notably using feathers. Silverlens gallery is presenting Villa’s newly appraised body-print works from the 1980s: visually hectic canvases in gorgeous contrasting hues, with marks made with his face, fingers and body to leave a visual impression of his Filipino presence.

Given that Simone Leigh became the first Black woman to represent the US at the Venice Biennale last year, it’s no small thing for the sculptor to say she cannot think of a more important artist right now than her nominee, Deborah Anzinger (Nicola Vassell Gallery). The self-taught multi-disciplinary artist has arrived via an unusual path, having originally studied carnivorous plants and HIV neuropathogenesis. Anzinger’s new paintings, Untitled Transmutations (2023), continue her concern with the exploitation of bodies and land and have been created with pigments made from local cookshop charcoal in her native Jamaica. ‘Her bold paintings and sculpture are saturated with metaphor and questioning,’ says Leigh.

The work of Fabian Knecht (alexander levy) as an artist and activist engages with the struggle against oppression in a strikingly direct way: his presentation Lachen ist verdächtig (Laughing Is Suspicious, 2023) was created with members of the Ukrainian resistance with whom he has worked on the ground since the Russian invasion. These hanging textile works resemble giant cobwebs, frosted autumnal boughs or bomb-blasted trees; woven from people’s clothing, their original purpose was to camouflage Russian targets in Ukraine. He was selected by Olafur Eliasson, who commends him for ‘[art with] a conceptual clarity that simultaneously has the poetic weight of a feather and is as heavy as the earth’.

The liberating possibilities of queer love is another strand. In her lushly hedonistic paintings, Vanessa Raw (Carl Freedman Gallery) fashions a hallucinatory women-only world. Within her absinthe-green landscapes, lovers throb for one another and vegetation turns electric beneath yellow moons reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s neurotic nightscapes. But there is little sexual anxiety here, rather a sense of bodily and psychic union between human and non-human. ‘Her paintings shock me,’ says her nominator, Tracey Emin. ‘I’ve never seen anything like them before. They are beautiful and she can really paint.’

The video at the centre of the presentation by Ayoung Kim (Gallery Hyundai), Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (2022), doesn’t initially promise much human connection, inspired as it was by the mushrooming delivery-driver economy in South Korea during the pandemic. Nominated by Haegue Yang, Kim conjures a dreamlike futuristic dystopia in which female couriers on badass bikes follow invisible delivery routes to convey endless streams of goods. Yet Kim punctures these very bleak modern conditions with timeless desires: her couriers form a very human (if brief ) romantic bond. Yang might be speaking for all the presentations when she commends Kim for ‘articulat[ing] a possible resilience even in our precarious contemporary world, establishing her significant and inspiring artistic position among the upcoming generation’. High praise indeed.

Artist-to-Artist is on view at Frieze London, 11–15 October in The Regent’s Park.

This article first appeared in Frieze Week, London 2023 under the headline ‘Standing Together’.

^{Main Image: Vanessa Raw and Tracey Emin in Raw’s studio, Margate, August 2023; photograph: Elissa Cray}