Michael Diaz-Griffith’s Top Picks from Frieze Viewing Room
The art historian highlights an ancient pottery fragment, a snuffbox decorated with sea creatures and an ‘insecure sculpture’ by Ryan Preciado
The art historian highlights an ancient pottery fragment, a snuffbox decorated with sea creatures and an ‘insecure sculpture’ by Ryan Preciado
Eretria Painter, Greek Red-figure Fragment, 440–430 BCE
Terracotta, 5 × 5 cm. Presented by Charles Ede
In the realm of historical art, an object’s quality is judged according to its authenticity, date, condition, rarity and provenance. Antiquities, however, play by their own set of rules. An 18th- or 19th-century porcelain sherd might not be worth very much, but an ancient red-figure fragment, like this one, is a precious – you might even say priceless – survivor of time. Indeed, this is a particularly lucky survivor, as time conspired with chance to produce a breakage revealing a perfect scene: a youth cradling a vividly rendered hare that symbolizes gay love. While the object is fragmentary, its story is perfectly whole. There is no object in the fair I covet more.
Ryan Preciado, Little Oceano 2, 2024
Hard maple, plywood, maple veneer and automotive paint, 37 × 17 × 14 cm. Presented by Karma
Preciado calls his works ‘insecure sculptures’ because they skirt the line between art and functional objects, but as a decorative arts historian, I find Little Oceano 2 to be very secure indeed: a perfect little temple for storing a red-figure fragment with its own insecure traces – and its own unlikely perfection.
Mexican School, De Español e India, Mestiso (no. 1), 18th century
Oil on canvas, 96 x 52 cm. Presented by Colnaghi
To understand Mexican casta paintings, we must peer through the glass darkly to a time before the scientific racism of the 19th century. When this panel was produced, it would have been a tool of imperial self-understanding, imposing an enlightenment taxonomy on the degrees of whiteness and indigeneity to be found in the Spanish population of Mexico. While whiteness undoubtedly sat at the top of the Spanish-Mexican racial hierarchy, the inherent hybridity and lush, ethnographically vivid details of paintings like this one belie a different reality on the ground in the New World: one in which an emerging mestizo identity was steadily overtaking any ‘pure’ conception of race, leading to the condition of mestizaje – or racial and cultural mixing – that has proudly defined Mexican identity since the early 20th century.
Hellenistic Gold Earrings with Carnelian Dolphins, c.300–100 BCE
Gold and carnelian, 2 × 3 cm. Presented by Rupert Wace
If nascent collectors understood how buyable medieval posy rings and ancient Egyptian bracelets were, I am convinced the supply would dwindle to nothing. At this year’s edition of Frieze Masters, these earrings are my favourite example in the category – and, Reader, I would wear them. The best thing I did during my somewhat premature midlife crisis was pierce my ears. Sporting a pair of carnelian dolphins would be the next best thing.
Meissen Manufactory, Snuffbox with Rocaille Relief, c.1760
Porcelain, 5 × 9 × 7 cm. Presented by Trias Art Experts
Inside this Meissen snuffbox are the most wonderful sea monsters, and to these charming creatures’ company I would add the Hellenistic dolphins above. Can you imagine a better home for them? Cradle them, if you are feeling cautious, in a strip of Fortuny silk velvet.
Ernesto Burgos, Plume, 2025
Fibreglass, resin, wood, cardboard, charcoal and oil paint, 142 × 168 × 13 cm. Presented by The Sunday Painter
For those who, like me, adore historical art, it can be tempting to focus on contemporary material that overtly references history. There is something inherently steadying about a transhistorical dialogue that synthesizes past and present. As my tastes mature, however, I find myself increasingly drawn to works that embody the qualities I most admire in art history, rather than symbolizing them. This is one of those works. Burgos manipulates materials in space like a sculptor, even as he engages in gestural mark-making like a painter. The result is something beyond painting and sculpture as we typically think of them today: a mannerist altarpiece for the modern age, bending and pulling against both itself and our perception of it.
The Platten Hall Mirror, Ireland, c.1765
182 × 102 × 18 cm. Presented by Ronald Phillips
If you hung this mirror in a bone-white bedroom with only a mattress on the floor, it would be the most decadent sleeping chamber in the world. Likewise, your reflection would be the most handsome or beautiful (depending on your preferred term).
Ben Nicholson, July 14 - 1954 (Viper), 1954
Oil, gouache, watercolour, pencil, crayon and oil wash on paper, 59 × 41 cm. Presented by Osborne Samuel Gallery
By the mid-1950s, Nicholson was well past his iconic ‘white relief’ phase, working once again on still lifes in his white-walled, top-lit studio in St Ives. Whether large or small, the best of these paintings bear evidence of a struggle between abstraction and observation, a tension English painters of the past century seem constitutionally unable – and perhaps wisely unwilling – to abandon. And why should they? In the shimmering polyphony of Viper, we can make out Nicholson’s familiar companions (mugs, bottles, vases) as well as a carefully balanced structure of pale washes, passages of opaque colour and firm pencilled line. While struggles often yield disorder, the opposite is true here in a work of exquisite resolution that is all the more sophisticated for its intimacy of scale: a quiet quartet, not a loud symphony.
Neri di Bicci, Tobias and Archangel Raphael with Saints, 1475
Tempera with gold and silver foil on panel, 206 × 200 × 20 cm. Presented by Robilant+Voena
A masterpiece, pure and simple. We are lucky to cast our eyes upon it.
About Michael Diaz-Griffith
Michael Diaz-Griffith is an art historian, curatorial consultant and CEO of the Design Leadership Network. Previously, he served as executive director of Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation and as associate executive director of The Winter Show. Diaz-Griffith published The New Antiquarians: At Home with Young Collectors in 2023. A second volume – a connoisseurship guide for the 21st century – is in the works.
About Frieze Viewing Room
Open to all from 8 – 24 October, Frieze Viewing Room is the online catalogue for Frieze London and Frieze Masters, giving global audiences access to gallery presentations coming to the fairs. Visitors can search artworks by artist, price, date and medium, save favourite artworks and presentations, chat with galleries and much more.
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Main Image: Neri di Bicci, Tobias and Archangel Raphael with Saints, 1475. Tempera with gold and silver foil on panel, 206 × 200 × 20 cm. Courtesy: Robilant+Voena
