The APAA's Top Works Under £25,000 at Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2021

The members of the APAA (Association of Professional Art Advisors) have chosen their favourite works priced under £25,000 ($30,000) from Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2021.

GINA BEAVERS (Marianne Boesky Gallery)

Check Out That Double Burger Grip, 2021

Acrylic on linen on panel

24 ¼ x 22 x 4 in.

American artist Gina Beavers has brought our social media zeitgeist to life through captivating three dimensional paintings made of layered acrylic. Beavers brings new meaning to impasto as she explores popular Instagram motifs from "food porn" to make-up tutorials, like the work here. 

MELVIN EDWARDS (Alexander Gray Associates)

Variações de correntes em cor (Chain Variations in Color), 2019

mixed media on paper

Melvin Edwards was the first African American sculptor to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. I had always loved his sculptures but fell in love with his watercolour and ink on paper works that he began creating in 1974.  Edward’s works on paper were abstract and reflected themes of the African diaspora, chains, and barbed wire -- some of the materials he used in his sculpture. 



AWOL ERIZKU (Ben Brown Fine Arts)

Last Tears of the Deceased, 2021

Digital C-print

42 x 30 in.

Edition of 3 + 2 AP (#2/3)

The striking compositions of Erizku's staged photographs have layered meanings referring to his identity, African history, Islam and Hip Hop. In this work, Last Tears of the Deceased an Egyptian sculpture is plunged into water, making us reconsider how we understand these objects and histories.

NAOTAKA HIRO (Herald St)

Untitled (Groundwater), 2021

Acrylic, graphite, grease pencil and crayon on wood

42 x 58 x 2 in.

Japanese-born Naotaka Hiro is a fascinating artist whose mixed media practice is influenced by his experiences as a filmmaker in Los Angeles and the West Coast performance scene he discovered there. Hiro creates his works on thick plywood, encased in a frame with removable legs to raise them a foot from the floor. Lying with half his body underneath the canvas, Hiro attacks the board with graphite, grease pencils, and carving knives to map his body onto the surface. 

BIN WOO HYUK (Gallery Baton)

Sanctuary 109, 2021

oil on linen

160 x 190 cm

Lushly painted and large in scale, this immersive painting by Korean artist Bin Woo Hyuk appears to envelop the viewer. The dense composition of broad fields of colour and patterned forms hover between landscape and pure abstraction—the lack of any horizon line seems to reference both traditional Japanese, Korean and Chinese landscape painting and the Impressionism of Monet. 

HANS STOLTENBERG LERCHE (Stuart Lochhead Sculpture)

Un Pas en Avant (One Step Forward, a caricature of Rodin's Balzac as a Seal), ca. 1898-1900

Plaster

23 x 8 x 9 cm

I would be hard pressed to find a more enchanting artwork at Frieze Masters than Lerche’s plaster caricature of Auguste Rodin’s imposing monument to Honoré de Balzac. Commissioned in 1891 and presented at the Salon des Beaux-Arts in 1898, Rodin’s Balzac caused great furor among critics and public alike, especially due to its amorphous shape and questionable likeness to the author. Un Pas en Avant, rendered with great wit and humour, was conceived in response to the controversy in which the original sculpture was compared to everything from a homely pig to a seal. Here, Lerche, an admirer of Rodin’s inventive hand, is mocking the elder artist’s detractors. Originally sold in a shop of artistic editions in Montmartre, only five are known to have survived, with this version the only one in private hands.

DONNA KUKAMA (blank)

To be Announced, 2017

Copper, nails

Installation dimensions variable

Edition 3/3 + 1AP

In To be Announced, contemporary artist Donna Kukama’s wall mounted copper formations are marvellously ambiguous, with just enough legibility to provide the viewer with a point of entry. Certain words can be deciphered, bringing to mind the vocabulary of protest and the hyperpoliticized 24h news cycle. To be Announced is a holistic example of Kukama’s interdisciplinary practice that spans performance, video, sounds, texts and “non-monuments,” all of which serve to question the way histories are narrated.

PAUL P. (Maureen Paley)

Untitled, 2021

Oil on linen

10 63/100 x 7 24/50 inches

Paul P. brings the viewer back to the intimacy of our experience of looking. The artist's delicate brushwork, mastery of atmospheric colour, and elegant glazing, not only hold formal and technical mastery – but also push the viewer into an experience suspended in pigment. The figure in this work holds jointly innocence and experience.

Pair of Lions (Tomasso)

Verona, 15th century

Verona marble

L: 26 x 11 cm (10¾ x 6¼ in.) The base: 11 x 16 cm (4¼ x 6¼ in.)

R: 25 x 11.5 cm (9¾ x 4½ in.) .The base: 11 x 16 cm (4¼ x 6¼ in.)

It’s hard to resist the impulse of touching this pair of lions, with delightful surfaces and crevices rendered in the mottled red and pink marble of Verona. The symbolism of the lion persists to this day—connoting loyalty, fierceness and maintaining its role as a guardian. Possessing a certain modernity and immediacy, these forms present an opportunity for a collector not used to dipping into the art of 600 years ago to give it a try.

KRISTIN WALSH (Helena Anrather)

Engine no. 3, 2021

Welded aluminum, extension cord

29 x 31.5 x 21 in.

Kristin Walsh’s aluminium constructs preform in their space, both as visual objects but also as forms that produce aural experience. Walsh brings intimacy to the mechanical production and materials that are often hidden or rendered mute from our everyday experience.

NICOLE WERMERS (Herald St)

Untitled stack (upholstered DSC chairs/pink coat), 2019

Balenciaga coat, stacking chairs, hardward, thread

64.9 x 35.4 x 29.5

This work by Nicole Wermers from her project ‘Infrastruktur’, which garnered attention in her presentation at the Turner Prize, is a material exploration of both commodity and the body. This work plays between the intimately personal and consumer driven material production. The coat, the chair – the materials that hold are body, become a being in and of themselves.

ISSY WOOD (Carlos/Ishikawa)

 

The precision with which she renders surfaces––from leather coats and fur to porcelain soup tureens––has a fetishistic quality, winking at surrealism. But just beneath the surface, Wood suggests the interiority of these objects, becoming an extension of the self. Her car interiors are particularly compelling: a recurring trope in her work, their rich, upholstered surfaces capture the car not only as a possession, but as a deeply personal, sanctuary-like space. In examining remnants of consumer culture, from the mundane to the peculiar, Wood’s paintings are a vivid examination of materialism through her own uncanny lens. 

With thanks to Cromwell Art Advisory; Corrie Jackson, Senior Curator, RBC; Megan Fox Kelly Art Advisory; Christine Minas Fine Art; Laura Smith Sweeney Art Advisory.

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