Art
Frieze Art Fair round up
October 2007: in review
With over 150 galleries showing work by over 1,000 artists from 28 countries around the world, the Frieze Art Fair has in just five years grown into a bona fide behemoth of an event on the art calendar. The combination of a healthy selection of emerging galleries from developing countries alongside the big guns is one of the best things about Frieze, and each year we’ve come away with a clutch of new names to follow up and look out for. This year’s fair promised to be the biggest yet, so it was with keen anticipation (and a bigger notebook) that we looked forward to it.
Click here to see some stand out pieces from the fair.
It was certainly as impressive as ever. And you’d very much hope that amongst the 150 galleries housed within just one tent that it would be. Indeed, what really struck us was the sheer vast wealth of work on display, which though clearly we’d been primed for, was still overwhelming. It might sound puerile to point out that much contemporary art requires a hefty amount of attention and digestion, and at times we felt there was simply too much on offer at Frieze to allow any room to really look, let alone think about what was there.
Every inch of wall and floor space was occupied with a work that could have merited a good few minutes more than we felt able to spend on it, simply for fear of not making it round the whole fair in the four short days it was open. Of course this made for a frenetic and very invigorating energy, but perhaps there’s a case, when it comes to displaying contemporary art, for less being more.
Having said this, there was heaps on show that we were very excited from both new and established galleries. Hauser & Wirth, The Gagosian, Konrad Fischer Galerie, White Cube, Luhring Augustine and Salon 94 struck us as particularly impressive, with a balance of show-stopping and subtle work on display. Of the newer crowd, Sao Paulo’s Casa Triangulo, Antwerp’s Zeno X Gallery and L’appartement 22, a non-profit gallery from Rabat are all places we’ll be keeping a close eye on.
If there was one particular piece that stood out for us, it was The Lake, by Russian group Bluesoup at XL Gallery XL Gallery. The Lake was a ten-minute animation in a booth, which started with a black screen and gradually brightened to reveal a lake landscape, before dimming again and fading into black. The sheer simplicity of concept was incredibly pleasing. And perhaps the fact that the gradual revelation of the image was mesmerising to the point where we gladly spent ten minutes (in fact twenty – we watched it twice) away from the rest of the fair lent the piece a certain reverential status. We’re very much looking forward to seeing what Bluesoup produce for Chanel’s Mobile Art Project.
