Between the Ticks of the Watch: ‘Studio’ at Frieze Masters 2024
Curator Sheena Wagstaff discusses Studio, which spotlights the practices of ten living artists, as a space for ‘thinking historically in the present’
Curator Sheena Wagstaff discusses Studio, which spotlights the practices of ten living artists, as a space for ‘thinking historically in the present’
On a recent visit to an artist’s studio, my eye was caught by a text she’d written directly on the wall: ‘Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is the instant between the ticks of the watch: the rupture between past and future.’ A quote from George Kubler’s book The Shape of Time (1962), it describes the author’s proposal of human history as a vast continuum in which the creativity of an artist leaves an imprint on time itself.
Now in its second year, Studio is a constellation of projects set within the cornucopia of millennia-old objects at Frieze Masters, each selected for its excellence. Ten international contemporary artists – all of whom dig deep into older cultures to trigger their creative imaginations and invigorate their practice – feature at the core of the fair. Each artist’s presentation includes works that range from the beginning of their artistic journeys to now. Beyond their vigour and material intelligence, what unites them is the creative maturity with which they embrace paradox, reaching deeper levels of complexity in their practice.
Just as each artist’s studio is witness to the evolution of their oeuvre, it also offers an intriguing still point. Walls and corners are filled with a curious accretion of time-worn things – images, objects, photos, books – accumulated over the years and imbued with personal meaning. Integral to each Studio booth at Frieze Masters is a small display of this inspirational archive, specially selected by the artist, which offers a tantalizing glimpse into the sanctum of their workplace and provides clues to the artist’s rough drafts of creation. It is from this mix of artefacts that the studio as a living, ever-changing space can be seen as a metaphor for the flux and fire of creative existence itself, as ‘the image of potentiality’.1
The idea of Studio is to articulate a new kind of display space for thinking historically in the present. It is in the studio where the creative connection between present and past is at its highest pitch, when the spark of invention becomes manifest as an object in the world. The internalization of time’s cadence in the resultant artworks attests to the depth of each artist’s enquiry and to their facility to create pieces of aesthetic quality that authoritatively expand the story of art.
Unlike a contemporary art fair, Frieze Masters poses the longer view in which recent art finds its natural domain. The Studio project stems from a belief in the idea of an historical present: it can be likened to a two-way telescope, through which a succession of pasts is exposed simultaneously. While Frieze Masters presents a world view, Studio proffers a particular perspective, looking deep into that world through the eyes of living artists.
As humans, we have come to learn that in experiencing or witnessing catastrophic events in other parts of the earth in real time, we can utilize that knowledge to address other such global issues. To respond to our ongoing sense of urgency, it is ever more important also to have a vivid sense of the past and how we translate this for the future. As the artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen told Sky News in February: ‘They say people don’t learn from history, but what else are we going to learn from?’ Artists help to shape that view, in which the gift of life – its wonder, joy and precarity – is found in discovering new possibilities within the long arc of cultural history.
Studio features ten solo presentations by Beatrice Caracciolo (Paula Cooper Gallery), Isabella Ducrot (Sadie Coles HQ, Galerie Gisela Capitain and Standard [Oslo]), Nathalie Du Pasquier (Pace Gallery), Shirazeh Houshiary (Lisson Gallery), Kim Yun Shin (Lehmann Maupin), Mernet Larsen (James Cohan), Thaddeus Mosley (Karma), Doris Salcedo (White Cube), Nilima Sheikh (Chemould Prescott Road) and Adriana Varejão (Victoria Miro).
Further Information
Frieze London and Frieze Masters, 9 – 13 October 2024, The Regent’s Park.
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Main Image: Mernet Larsen, Sunblinded, 2023. Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 1.2 × 1.4 m. © Mernet Larsen 2024. Courtesy: the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo: Phoebe D’Heurle
1 Giorgio Agamben, ‘Self-Portrait in the Studio’, The Paris Review, 20 August 2024
