From Kairos to Chronos and Back Again: ‘Studio’ at Frieze Masters 2025

‘The work we do as artists does not end in the studio … it extends into the world.’ Dorothy Cross  

So Dorothy Cross conveys the breadth of vision she shares with the other artists chosen for the Studio project at Frieze Masters. Anne Rothenstein adds that the studio and world are irrevocably connected: ‘the language of my images has absorbed our overtly dangerous and increasingly worrying world’.

Now in its third year, and having represented 21 remarkable contemporary artists to date, Studio is a simple recipe with three potent ingredients: a robust group of new works, some early works from the beginning of the artist’s career and a small core of ephemeral material from their place of making.

The invitation to participate in Studio is extended selectively, in recognition of a rare moment in the seasoned careers of certain artists: a radical period of renewed experiment and risk-taking, when an artist expands their already mature practice into unusual, often provocative new realms. What transpires from this blend of maturity and freedom is an exhilarating new body of work, enlivened by a sense of jeopardy, and leavened by the creative confidence and material intelligence honed over years of working day after day in the studio.

Placing contemporary artworks in the historically charged space of Frieze Masters provides the Studio projects with an enriched field of reference, building on the artists’ syncretic approaches to art making, which are already informed by deep excavation of older, global histories of art.

Large watercolour and charcoal works by Anju Dodiya are triggered by her keen perception of abrupt ruptures within the ‘polite structure’ of ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Japanese masters such as Utagawa Kuniyoshi or Kitagawa Utamaro. ‘Suddenly, you find this great energy – it could be the twist of posture or the knot of a kimono – it breaks the picture.’

Reflecting his preoccupation with drawings and engravings by artists such as Hendrick Goltzius, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Abraham Bloemaert or Mauro Gandolfi, Glenn Brown speaks of the DNA of image making: ‘The line represents one of the most basic means of communication, one that that we’ve been using for 75,000 years, and probably for as long as we have had words.’

The pertinence of historical artworks to contemporary artistic practices, and indeed society at large, ‘points towards the implication that time is circular or doubles back on itself’ as R. H. Quaytman observes. Similarly considering the momentum of time in art, Samia Halaby remarks that the intent of the artist is ‘to grow the formal language of pictures in ways that will allow it to hold new, contemporary content’.  A pioneer in digital technology (she taught herself to code in the 1980s), Halaby has a profound belief that ‘the task of pictures [is] to hold the content of their time’, in the understanding that the notion of time adds a new dimension to contemporary art.

Looking intently into the past from the present, Studio artists thus blend into their work different notions of time that are embedded within the historical objects of their fascination. Time has multiple registers and many cultural meanings. The ancient Greek concept of chronos refers to time as linear, sequential and quantifiable, while many other ancient and living religious and cultural traditions across the world articulate a cyclical theory of time. Another Greek concept, kairos, evokes a watershed moment or significant turning point in a life. Exceptional works of art, of any era, are endowed with the power to hold different sorts of time and competing realities in tension, serving as conduits to both past and present simultaneously.

In her 2021 novel Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck aptly describes the ignition of innovation: ‘Time pours into life, is braided into it, grows into it, entwines itself with it … always taut, strung between a beginning of which one is not aware … and an ending which is in the future.’ It is in the artist’s studio that this creative connection between present and past is at its strongest, where the spark of invention becomes manifested as an object in the world. In this same place of making, within a corner or attached to a wall, is also a kind of personal time machine. Accumulated over the years, these time-worn, treasured images and objects – postcards, odd scraps of text, exploratory maquettes, old newspaper cuttings, books, esoteric objects, other artists’ works – are personal touchstones, placed as triggers for imagination, or aide memoires for the stories they tell. Each Studio presentation includes a small selection of these memory markers, offering us keys to unlock a portion of the expansive world of the artist’s interests and inspirations.  

Analogous to the palimpsest of memory-making, this rich pile of ephemera is also a metaphor for the vivid flux of an artist’s studio as a living, changing space in which the vast terrain of time is studded by small historical events brought into brief focus: a boy in a tree looking down at Jesus entering Jerusalem on a donkey from Giotto’s epic 14th-century fresco in Padua; a bronze cast of the fragile stem of a foxglove, remade annually, whose lurid folkloric history (and vivid reference to its genus digitalis) is evoked by small human fingers; a virtuosic portrayal of compassion in a pietà by mannerist master engraver Henrick Goltzius; the 12th-century Japanese novel The Tale of Genji by noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu; a small drawing by autodidact American artist James Castle; the widely distributed official profile of Queen Elizabeth I as determined by royal decree.

The artist’s studio may be a space for quietude, for an art historical hunt, for battle – Dodiya feels that ‘it’s a do-or-die situation every day in the studio’ – or an ongoing quest to reduce complex form or motion to simple linear gesture. For Quaytman, it is a unique place of making, in which to reflect on ‘how art history is constructed, finding ways to reenvision the genealogy of the canon and make interventions into that history’.

Studio creates an aesthetic pause within the visual cacophony of an art fair. It invites us to see great works of art by contemporary artists who think historically in the present, who have a genuine understanding of past cultures. Every Studio artist embodies a radical spirit, dedicated to the thrill of discovery during their lifetime, with the wisdom and creative freedom to do things differently. Visitors are invited to slow down, to understand how time is woven into objects, to delve more deeply to find different truths, and to see that the remarkable work of the artists in Studio – alongside equally significant historical art and artefacts at Frieze Masters – will stand the test of time. 

Further Information

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_{Main image: Rebecca Quaytman, The Hieroglyphic, Chapter 0.4, 2025. Silkscreen ink, distemper, and gesso on wood, 20 x 20 inches (50.8 x 50.8 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York}