BeAdvisors AD | Collectors Guide to Frieze London 2018 – Focus Section

BeAdvisors Art Department has been touring London for Frieze London 2018, selecting the most remarkable galleries and artists of Frieze Focus Section.

Frieze London is one of the few fairs to focus only on contemporary art and living artists. The fair’s exhibiting galleries represent some of the most exciting artists working today, from the emerging to the iconic ones; and a team of world-leading independent curators advises on feature sections, making possible performance-based work and ambitious presentations by emerging galleries.
Unlike most other fairs, Frieze takes place at the heart of its host city, forming part of London’s vibrant cultural fabric and international art scene.

Focus is a section for galleries younger than 12 years showing emerging artists, made up of solo and group stand proposals, specifically conceived for the fair. In 2018, the section has been curated by Andrew Bonacina and Laura McLean-Ferris.

 

 

 

URIEL ORLOW

Galleria Laveronica, Modica
Born in 1973 in Zurich
Lives and works in London

Uriel Orlow’s practice is research-based, process-oriented and multidisciplinary. He is known for single screen film works, lecture performances and modular, multimedia installations that focus on specific locations and micro histories and bring different image-regimes and narrative modes into correspondence. His work is concerned with
residues of colonialism, spatial manifestations of memory, blind spots of representation and forms of haunting.
His project “Teatrum Botanicum” considers plants as witnesses of human activity. The project foregrounds plants and dynamic agents linking nature and humans across different geography systems of knowledge, with a variety of curative, spiritual and economic powers.
Orlow’s works have been exhibited at the Biennale di Venezia (2011), Manifesta 9 and Manifesta 12, Moscow Biennial (2017) and many others. In 2017 he received a Sharjah Biennal Prize, the Prize of the city of Zurich, the Swiss Art Award at Art Basel (2008, 2009, 2012).

Price range: 3.500 (editions) – 25.000 euros

Uriel Orlow,
Botanical Dream (#1), 2017
dyptych archival pigment print on baryta paper
55 x 75 cm
ed.: 1/5 + 2 a.p

 

 

JOANNA PIOTROWSKA

Southard Reid, London
Born in 1985, Warsaw
Lives and works in London

Joanna Piotrowska’s practice is rooted in performance and is focused on the investigation on human body, which is the protagonist of all the exhibited works. Her photographs, as well as films, are based on an exploration of body language that does not express univocal, clear meanings, but constantly shifts to convey ambiguous perceptions, feelings of discomfort, of subtle violence, due to the tense poses and gestures that the portrayed people assume.
“Self Defence” is her ongoing series, where she captures a number of young women reenacting poses from self-defence manuals.
Caught in an aggressive or defensive attitude towards an invisible enemy, the young women in their wisely disarticulated poses show more than anything else their fragility. Works from this series have been exhibited at MoMa New York and at the Berlin Biennale

Price Range: 3000 – 7.000 euros (editions)

 

 

JULIE CURTISS

Various Small Fires, Los Angeles
Born 1982, Paris, France
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

Curtiss, whose painting and sculpture practice is informed by the playful yet radical figurations of the Chicago Imagists, the graphic precision of Japanese “Ukiyo-e” painting and the psychoanalytic symbology of Surrealism, investigates sexuality through the lens of the collective unconscious, indexing the collective memory of universal animalia, objects and food as they relate to evolving human behavior.
Depicting mostly female subjects in her works, Curtiss creates an undulating dreamscape where the depths of a woman’s psyche are as important and palpable as her body. Rife with swirling curvatures and oscillating lines that convey both physical movement as well as cognitive dissonance, Curtiss’ subjects are secretive and faceless, inhabiting uncanny narratives driven by the logic of dreams. Teetering between dichotomies of seduction and repulsion, feral and domestic, their countenances are strategically concealed with thick mounds of serpentine hair, clawed hands and razor-sharp nails that conjure the anatomy of cold-blooded beasts.

Julie Curtiss has had solo exhibitions at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA and 106 Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Her work is included in the permanent collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, MN and the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China.

Price range:  10.000-20.000 euros

 

GABRIEL LIMA

Nuno Centeno, Porto
Born in 1984 in São Paulo, Brazil
Lives and works in São Paulo

Gabriel Lima’s work addresses itself to the formal qualities of painting, accepting the constraints of the medium whilst engaging popular forms of aesthetic production beyond the realms of art with which its resonates in order to test its traditional boundaries from within and without. Whether utilizing devices of display messages in social spaces or embracing now supposedly banal genres such as the domestic-scaled landscape, Lima reaffirms the persistent vitality of painting as a medium precisely by working with and against the specificities of its limits.
Gabriel Lima was born in São Paulo, Brazil in 1984.  He has a BA in Fine Arts from The Cooper Union, USA, and MA in painting from The Royal College of Art, UK.  Recent solo shows include Autêntico at Union Pacific, London, UK, 2015; Hanoi, Hanoi at Múrias Centeno, Lisbon, Portugal, 2015; and Us and Them at Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo, Brazil, 2014.
He also works collaboratively with other artists, he is the co-creator of the independent platform Postcodes in São Paulo, and his writing has appeared in exhibitions in Brussels, Lisbon, and São Paulo.

Price range: 5.000 – 12.000€

 

 

SARA CWYNAR

Cooper Cole, Toronto
Born in Vancouver, Canada in 1985
Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Sara Cwynar is inspired by the aesthetics of antiquated studio photography and the unnatural cleanliness of contemporary commercial imagery. Her practice exists at the juncture of old and new, analog and digital, nostalgia and futurism. Cwynar creates assemblages from found objects and pictures; she then photographs the assemblages and reproduces the images as c-prints. In her own words, she takes these found elements “out of the shared image world and into a space for personal, often very obsessive intervention.”
Cwynar’s works can be found in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA Library, New York; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, USA; Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada; amongst others. Sara Cwynar currently lives and works in Brooklyn, USA.

This picture, Rotting Fruit, begins with a found photograph of rotting lemons on a black backdrop. I use the image as a catalyst to talk about “bad apples or rotting fruits” and to begin to write about the idea of a person or an idea being rotten, particularly in context of the news right now. The text on this piece opens up to a broader piece of writing on cultural value as it is connected to outward appearance, about ideas of truth and beauty, and the way that bodies are controlled and looked at.

Price range: 15.000 – 25.000 euros