Global Conversations in ‘Focus’ at Frieze London 2025

Every year, the Focus section at Frieze London offers a snapshot of what young artists across the world are thinking about and making work around, and how young galleries are defining and representing their local emerging art scenes. In 2025 there are, of course, many artists who are addressing global issues: war, displacement, the climate crisis. But there are others who are exploring how those issues can affect self-identity, memory and individual creative authorship. Form the micro to the macro, here are five themes to look out for in Focus this year.  

Authorship, Authenticity and Illusion

Several presentations across Focus look at how the inheritance of ideas and viewpoints can undermine concepts of authenticity. 

Chicago-based Mika Horibuchi (56 Henry) uses the traditionally polite medium of watercolour to examine influence and Western art history. She repeats images at different scales or in various styles to question how the subject and object of a painting relate to one another, and how that might distort the inherent ‘value’ of a work. 

Born in Nashville, painter Emma Rose Schwartz (Brunette Coleman) is also heavily influenced by the past, especially the cultural place of US folk art, with particular reference to the troubled histories of the American South. Her works, human-scaled and hung low on the wall, suggest a child’s-eye view of history – partial and only partially informed. 

Alina Rentsch, showing with Petrine, takes a different approach, considering the art fair itself as an authored construct. Working with materials typically associated with the commercial sphere, Rentsch explores how the setting of the fair conditions the way we look at art.

Ecology, Landscape and Crisis

The global climate crisis hangs over Focus like a pall. Several artists consider the destructive legacy of human interference within ecosystems; others look at specific aspects of the way that man, animal and plant might interact.

Ariamna Contino and Alex Hernández (El Apartamento) from Cuba map the human consumption of energy and natural resources such as water and trees, not just in agriculture but in the production of their own artworks. Korea’s Rim Park (Cylinder) also questions materiality in her paintings and sculptures, incorporating foraged elements such as moss and tree roots to question where the landscape might end and the artist begin. 

Other artists are less literal. In ‘Venom Voyage’, Christelle Oyiri (Gathering) tackles the poisoning of the ecosystem of her native Martinique and Guadeloupe with chlordecone, an insecticide widely used on banana plantations. Her installation juxtaposes environmental disaster with an acid-bright tourist fantasy, teasing out different kinds of colonial toxicity.

Painter, sculptor and musician Luís Lázaro Matos (Madragoa) also takes a left-field approach to environmental issues. His site-specific installation ‘Benny the Beluga’ uses cartoonish humour to explore how humanity’s self-serving and needy anthropomorphism shields us from confronting the reality of the climate crisis.

Similarly reducing disturbing global realities to a human scale, Chinese artist Xin Liu (Public Gallery) is showing a steel tank filled with duckweed-covered water. A mechanical net periodically skims the weed off the water, only for it to return in a meditative cycle of denuding and regrowth.

Korea’s Eunjo Lee (Niru Ratnam) also taps into the spiritual dimension of living things. Her films The Lullaby of the Ruins, When Forgiving the Sunlight and Before the Shadow Taught the Sun consider that animals, natural objects, machines, viruses and DNA might all have consciousness. It’s not us and them: it’s just ‘us’.

Creation amid Conflict

Man-made destruction as a theme is not restricted to the environment in Focus this year. Wars and conflicts also feature prominently, along with questions of how you might continue to create in a world intent on destruction.

Born 'in the ruins of the Soviet Union', Ana Gzirishvili, showing with Georgia’s Gallery Artbeat, creates assemblages that seem pulled from scenes of destruction. Wood, metal struts, bits of clothing and moulded leather hint at both the violent and sudden juxtaposition of materials by explosions and plane crashes, and the priapic impulse of nationalism. 

Gray Wielebinski (Nicoletti) also investigates the aestheticization of violence and its links to both nation- and manhood. His wood sculptures based on found gun grips are presented in a fairground booth, suggesting the overlap of childhood games and high-school shootings. 

Egypt’s Yasmine El Meleegy and Marianne Fahmy, showing with Gypsum, both look at industrial dehumanization and how it can overwrite personal and national histories. El Meleegy crafts wall pieces from shattered domestic dinnerware, while Fahmy’s tapestries combine mechanization and hand embroidery.

Memory, Psychology and Self-Portraits

Next to those who look at the workings of history, many artists in this year’s Focus address memory and aspects of human psychology. 

Warsaw’s Galeria Wschód is showing Japan’s Kenji Ide and Danish artist Anton Munar. Through different media, both artists look at how place invokes memory, how memory creates a sense of place and how travel can be both a universal human experience and a deeply personal individual one.

The recent works by Poland’s Rafał Zajko (Coulisse) ‘combine folklore, pop culture and science fiction to explore the late-capitalist drive to “foreverize” – a term coined by US author Grafton Tanner in 2023 to describe a cultural movement that seeks to endlessly prolong the past.’ His pieces often conflate the illusory permanence promoted by governments with personal gestures of existence, like sticking chewing gum on monuments. 

‘Deadtime’ by Cally Spooner at palace enterprise explores ‘performance culture’ – how we define ourselves through productivity, ‘metric sociality’ and digital visibility. Central to the installation is a wall, the colour of raw muscle, which is symbolically erased by the artist using white emulsion.

Also using paint symbolically – though in a very different way – Chinese Brooklyn-based Xingzi Gu (Gallery Vacancy) employs traditional Chinese brush painting technique, with its balance of method – wet/dry; thin/thick – to consider dualities of the self within relationships and across cultural boundaries.

Another artist who uses the idea of self and the other to look at themes of change and anxiety is Mexico’s Enrique López Llamas (Llano). El otro protagonista de la noche (The other protagonist of the night) is a series of 16 video vignettes that work as an allegorical coming-of-age narrative.

Home, the Domestic and Childhood

Informed by personal psychology, individual history, memory and cultural identity, home is a recurring there across this year’s Focus.

Anne Low (Franz Kaka) uses textiles in wall works and sculpture. Deeply aware of the diasporic histories inherent in textiles, and the way that they define the domestic space, her wall works pieces are based on a bed curtain, a drawer lining and a fitted sheet, made of hand-dyed and -woven silk.

Another artist who uses the micro environment of the domestic space to invoke cultural histories, Toby CATO Grant is presenting ‘the home of an imagined Caribbean family’ on Harlesden High Street’s stand. It includes wallpaper, a textured carpet and collaged family portraits from CATO’s own collection of old Polaroids. 

Lebanon’s Omar Fakhoury (Marfa’) also looks back to childhood, but via the myths, anecdotes and superstitions that he heard growing up. He presents these as culturally specific, while acknowledging that they simultaneously appear almost universally across the globe in different forms.

Further Information

Frieze London and Frieze Masters, The Regent’s Park, 15 – 19 October 2025.   

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^{Main Image: Emma Rose Schwartz, TV Sunrise, 2024. Courtesy: the artist and Brunette Coleman. Photo: Jack Elliot Edwards}