Old mannequins of workers from outdated trades tied up with rope. A performance artist sitting inside a cello-shaped echo chamber. A tank full of exotic plants to sustain human life in outer space.
These artworks, on show at the 22nd annual edition of the Frieze London fair, whose preview opened on Wednesday, didn’t have the shock value that the works of the Young British Artists once had in their iconoclastic heyday. But they did at least show that London’s contemporary artists and gallerists are prepared to take some conceptual and commercial risks.
“Outside, the headlines about Britain are all gloom and doom. Yet Frieze is more energetic than it has been for several years,” said Lars Nittve, the head of the investment committee at Arte Collectum, a $60-million Swedish-based art fund, browsing the fair for potential purchases. Nittve was the founding director of Tate Modern when it opened in 2000, transforming London’s cultural life.
“The 1990s didn’t seem to be a great time either,” Nittve said. “Culture is a counterintuitive force. When things are really bad, culture happens.”
Frieze London, which takes place in a temporary structure in Regent’s Park and this year features 168 galleries from 43 countries, is the centerpiece of a busy week of fairs, auctions, dealer and museum shows that try to maintain the British capital’s long-held reputation as a global art hub. But nine years after Britain’s seismic vote to leave the European Union, London’s art scene and market have become a mess of contradictions.
The London branches of prestigious international dealerships have been badly hit by the recent global slowdown in art sales.
The Financial Times reported this month that annual turnover at Hauser & Wirth’s British galleries in 2024 had fallen to 68 million pounds, about $91 million, down 53 percent from the previous year. Many other high-end dealers — including the French gallerist Almine Rech, who is closing her London space — have said that the British government’s abolition in April of tax breaks for wealthy international residents has prompted rich art collectors to leave, dampening demand.
But thanks to the prestige of Britain’s art schools, young artists and emerging galleries are, for many, London’s main draw, rather than big-ticket works by established names. A wave of new, serious-minded dealerships have opened spaces across the city in recent years, and some are thriving, even as the British economy had stagnated.
“It is like the ’90s,” said Edward Gillman, the director of Chisenhale, a nonprofit London gallery that commissions new works by emerging British and international artists. “There’s a really remarkable grass-roots energy in the city. There are a lot of young galleries opening, a new generation of artists working, new artists’ project spaces opening,” he added. “There’s a young energy in the city.”
Young galleries including Ginny on Frederick, Rose Easton and Gathering are all now exhibitors in Frieze London’s Focus section of 35 recently founded dealerships. Unlike at France’s grander Art Basel Paris, which opens next week, London’s younger galleries are foregrounded toward the fair entrance. (In Paris, they tend to be scattered on the fair’s periphery.)
“Accounts,” by the London-based artist Alex Margo Arden, attracted a lot of attention on the booth of Ginny on Frederick. Arden had obtained a group of male mannequins representing traditional trades from a British auto museum and roped them together in a chaotic bundle that evoked the decline of industrial Britain and its certainties. It sold for £20,000 to £30,000, or about $27,000 to $40,000, according to the gallery.
In more than a dozen interviews at the fair, dealers and artists stressed the importance of London’s community of mutually supportive younger gallerists in the creation of a dynamic artist scene.
“There’s a sense of solidarity among the galleries that you don’t see in other cities,” said Camille Houzé, the director of the East London gallery Nicoletti. But he pointed out that, unlike the distinctly iconoclastic style of the Young British Artists, young London art today lacks a collective aesthetic.
“The galleries are promoting diversity. Compared to the 1990s, it’s much more international,” said Houzé, whose gallery was showing vases, sculpted in the form of assault-rifle gun grips, by the Dallas-born, London-based artist Gray Wielebinski. They were priced at as little as £2,500.
Another East London gallery, Public, showed “Insomnia,” a mixed-media installation by the London-based Chinese artist Xin Liu that featured a steel water tank growing duckweed that continued the artist’s exploration of “technological fantasies, extra-terrestrial exploration and cosmic metabolism,” according to a statement from the gallery. Public’s American director, Nicole Estilo Kaiser, said it cost $20,000 to $30,000.
The young Polish artist Rafal Zajko also lives and works in London, but exhibited at Frieze with the Stockholm dealer Coulisse. His multicolored sculptural presentation on how the siren had evolved from “mythical lure” to “industrial signal” included the fantastical sculpture containing a performance artist, “Amber Chamber III (Echo),” priced at £22,000. “I’m a Londoner,” said Zajko, who described the grass-roots efflorescence of the British capital’s contemporary art scene as “a movement against the current sterile environment” in the city.
Outside the fair, among the welter of satellite fairs, exhibitions and events that vie for attention with Frieze London, the standout presentation for many was Clarissa, a multigenerational group show of hard-edged contemporary works. Organized by the art magazine Émergent, together with the London dealership Soft Commodity, it featured pieces by Hilary Lloyd, Ser Serpas, and Jasmine Gregory and was held in a former sex shop near King’s Cross train station.
In tune with its atmospherically grungy London setting, an imposing “Syrinx” sculpture by the young British artist Joel Wycherley dominated the first gallery with its upright form made from an abandoned fiberglass canoe. This was available at £8,000, according to Soft Commodity.
Why had Émergent chosen this moment to hold the first in a planned series of international pop-up shows in London? “There’s something new happening here,” said Reuben Beren James, one of the magazine’s co-founders. “It’s exciting.”
Scott Reyburn is a London-based freelance journalist who writes about the art world, artists and their markets.
The post London’s Art Scene Is a Mess of Contradictions. That’s the Appeal. appeared first on New York Times.