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.
BeAdvisors Art Department has been touring Frieze London 2019 with a view to carefully select the most remarkable artists from the fair.
CAROLINE WALKER
Ingleby Gallery (Edinburgh)
Born in 1982 in Edinburgh, lives and works in London
In recent years Caroline Walker has become known for her striking canvases of women, specifically of women at work. These fragmented narratives, glimpses of women going about their lives in both public and private environments, begin as photographic snaps (often taken covertly) which are later worked up into lustrous, luminous oil paintings. They are sometimes playful, but can also be challenging, documenting the myriad social, cultural, economic, racial and political factors that affect women’s lives today. As Marco Livingstone puts it ‘much of the effectiveness of Walker’s paintings arises from the fact that as a spectator one is simultaneously looking into other people’s lives and putting oneself in their place’. In exploring this hinterland of human experience Walker offers both an intimate insight and a voyeuristic vantage point and takes her place in a lineage that stretches from the Dutch Golden Age to the incidental realism of Manet and Degas, and the intimism of Vuillard and Bonnard. For the Edinburgh Art Festival in the summer of 2020 Walker will turn her attention to a subject closer to home. Gallery Ingleby, which presented a work on paper by the artist during Frieze London 2019, will present an exhibition of paintings where the focus is the artist’s own mother, cooking, cleaning, tidying and tending the garden of the house in the Scottish town where Caroline spent her childhood.
Scottish artist Caroline Walker has a BA in painting from the Glasgow School of Art (2004) and an MA from the Royal College of Art (2009) in London, where she currently lives and works. Recent solo exhibitions include Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; GRIMM, Amsterdam and New York; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles; ProjectB, Milan and Space K, Seoul.
JEAN CLARACQ
Sultana (Paris)
Born in 1991 Bayonne, lives and works in Paris
Jean Claracq uses his work to deal with issues of loneliness in the social media era, depicting scenes of everyday life featuring isolated individuals against broad infrastructures as an evocation of alienation. His subjects are pulled from social network accounts and portrayed motionless in front of a digital device. These individuals are often straddling the departure from adolescence and entering adulthood, filled with both melancholy and an openness to the future that awaits them. Architecture and its mathematical, atmospheric, and photographic qualities also play a central role in his work. Inspired by Gerhard Richter, he explores the relationship between painting and digital art, using colors and textures that disassociate from photo paper or screen brightness. His realistic, neat compositions are painted with oil onto wood. They are born from a meticulous process that mixes found images from the Internet and historical references. He enjoys playing with layers of interpretation, incorporating hundreds of references, allowing him to represent an accumulation of perspectives through fragmented images that give way to an imagined reality, aesthetically reminiscent of video games.
In 2017 he received his MFA from Ecole Nationale Superieur des Beaux Arts de Paris. In 2018 he won the 2eme prix Antoine Marin and the Prix de peinture Roger Bataille. Recent group exhbitions include: Umbilicus, Sultana, Paris (2019), “Les fleurs de l’été sont les rêves de l’hiver racontés le matin à la table des anges”, Praz-Delavallade, Paris (2019), “Futures of Love”, Magasins Généraux, Pantin (2019), « Mais pas du tout, c’est platement figuratif ! Toi tu es spirituelle mon amour! », Jousse Entreprise, Paris, FR.
BRONWYN KATZ
Blank Projects (Cape Town)
Born in 1993 in Kimberley (South Africa) lives and works in Johannesburg
Incorporating sculpture, installation, video and performance, Katz’s practice engages with the concept of land as a repository of memory, reflecting on the notion of place or space as lived experience, and the ability of the land to remember and communicate the memory of its occupation. Using found materials as the departure point for her works, Katz’s approach to making is driven foremost by formal concerns such as composition and line, expressed in an abstract minimalist language. Conceptually, her sculptures refer to the political context of their making, embodying subtle acts of resistance that draw attention to the social constructions and boundaries that continue to define those spaces.
Katz has held four solo exhibitions to date, most recently at blank projects in Cape Town (2019) and A Silent Line, Lives Here at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Là où les eaux se mêlent (Where the water mingles) (Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, 2019); The Empathy Lab (Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, 2019); Material Insanity (Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden, Marrakech, 2019); Road to the Unconscious (Peres Projects, Berlin, 2019); Sculpture (Institute of Contemporary Art Indian Ocean, Port Louis, Mauritius, 2018); Tell Freedom (Kunsthal KAdE, Amersvoort, 2018); Le jour qui vient (Galerie des Galeries, Paris, 2017); and the 12th Dak’Art Biennale (Senegal, 2016). Katz was recently awarded the prestigious FNB Art Prize for 2019. She is a founding member of iQhiya, an 11-women artist collective which has performed across various spaces, including Documenta (in Kassel and Athens), Greatmore Studios, and Iziko South African National Gallery.
JOY LABINJO
Tiwani Contemporary (London)
Born in 1994 in Dagenham, lives and works in London
Joy Labinjo’s recent large-scale paintings depict intimate scenes of contemporary family life: a group of people casually lying down on a sofa and chatting after a family gathering, a child and his grand-mother posing together in front of the camera, or stolen moments before the official wedding portrait. Taking inspiration from family photographs, Labinjo transcribes her personal imagery into a bright and vibrant composition of colour and patterns. Having grown up in the UK with British-Nigerian heritage, Labinjo questions our idea of belonging and notion of identity. She invites us to rethink it as more fluid constructions taking into consideration both past and present, personal and collective subjectivities.
Labinjo was awarded the Woon Art Prize in 2017. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include: Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2019); Bloc Projects, Sheffield, UK (2019); Tiwani Contemporary, London, UK, (2018); Gallery North, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK (2018); Cafe Gallery Projects, London, UK (2018); Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, UK (2018); Goldtapped, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK (2018); Morley Gallery, London, UK (2018); Baltic 39, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK (2017); Hoxton Arches, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK (2017); The Holy Biscuit, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK (2017); FishBowl space, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK (2015); XL Gallery, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK (2013).
MEGAN ROONEY
Drei (Cologne)
Born in 1987 in Canada, lives and works in London
Megan’s work includes painting, performance, written and spoken word, sculpture and installation. Her work is often populated by soft-grotesque figures all limbs, hair and eyes that navigate a slippy space, one that appears playful and romantic yet also strange and repulsive. These figures lurk on the periphery of written and performed narratives. The faceless figures are the latest members to the cast of recurring characters within Rooney’s work that expand and contract, shapeshift across ephemeral incarnations: the self is not solid, nor are its narratives. Rooney’s references engage with materiality and the human subject, but they are also deeply invested in the present moment: the pervasive dread fostered by political ideologies that casually discard the human, the humane; and the laden violence of our society, so resident in the home, in the female, in the body.
She completed her MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2012. Her installations bring together paintings, murals and sculpture, held together by a certain language of soft pinks, peach and flesh. She works with clay, birdseed, lipstick and papier-mache, and her works are populated by nearly human figures: mushy faces, anthropomorphic pillows and stuffed snakes. These figures lurk on the periphery of a narrative, one that is implied through texts that Rooney writes and then performs, but one that she never chooses to resolve. Recent solo shows include Animals on the bed at Seventeen, London (2016) and Piggy Piggy at Croy Nielsen, Berlin (2016).
