Welcome to Frieze London 2025
Frieze London marks one of the most exciting dates in the art calendar. From its vantage point in Regent's Park, art trends are set, art deals are made, and artists unite for a few days of art world gossip and big business. Over 130 galleries gather at Frieze London, with the focus very much on contemporary art and living artists. It's hectic, but thrilling; the ultimate fashion runway where you can spot everything from your next favourite artist to celebs gathering at the champagne tent. Over at Frieze Masters, the vibe is more grown-up - in the elegant tent, grab the chance to see special works which aren't usually exposed to the light of day.
Frieze is an event which very much ignores the parameters of the park, stretching around the city with a packed programme of exhibitions, talks, pop-ups and endless drinks. Expect a special Frieze nod from hotels, galleries, restaurants and shops who host discussion panels, special breakfasts or simply showcase some art. We're looking forward to seeing which artists the galleries around town will be choosing to spotlight, in the week when all eyes are on London. We are on the ground all week, sharing our look at what's on and spotlighting our favourite things to see in the tent - stay tuned.
Hannah Silver is the Art, Culture, Watches & Jewellery Editor of Wallpaper*. Since joining in 2019, she has overseen offbeat art trends and conducted in-depth profiles, as well as writing and commissioning extensively across the worlds of culture and luxury. She enjoys travelling, visiting artists' studios and viewing exhibitions around the world, and has interviewed artists and designers including Maggi Hambling, William Kentridge, Jonathan Anderson, Chantal Joffe, Lubaina Himid, Tilda Swinton and Mickalene Thomas.
Carolyn Quartermaine's photographs at Connolly are gorgeously dreamy
Clothing brand Connolly sets a great example as to how to offer a special experience away from the fair. Upstairs in the store and on show from 15th October until 5th January 2026, there is an exhibition of artist Carolyn Quartermaine's otherworldly works. In the 35 works on paper in the ‘Arcadia’ exhibition, the film has been repeatedly exposed, offering a surreal distortion of the English landscape. Mysterious and sublime, they are a much-needed pause from the chaos.
Drop by Frieze Sculpture
This year’s edition of Frieze Sculpture in Regent's Park, London, brings together works by 14 artists from around the globe. Curated by Fatos Üstek, it’s the first time the exhibition has followed a theme, and the result is a stronger sense of cohesion, where works seem to speak not only to their surroundings but to each other. Check out our favourites here
Millie Walton
Delve into the uncanny at The Shop at Sadie Coles
During Frieze in London, Irish-Australian artist Costelloe is bringing the kitchen, the essence of the home, to life in an exhibition at The Shop at Sadie Coles. With sculptural and photographic work, and in a collaboration with perfumer Fahad Mayet, Costelloe creates an immersive, uncanny environment.
Drop by Mount Street Neighbourhood Arts Festival
Taking place in the heart of Mayfair and coinciding with Frieze Art Fair and PAD London, the festival kicked off on Sunday and runs until 18 October 2025. The festival celebrates the area’s prestigious addresses with an array of fashion, food and art. This season, the theme is centred around art and books, which will be explored throughout the week - check what is going on here.
Tianna Williams
Where to eat around London during Frieze
With so much to see, finding time to pick a delicious restaurant en route, or post fair, can often make or break a day. To take away the stress of choosing, we have put together a guide of the best places to grab a bite after a day at the fair, and help get your fill on art and food. Looking for art-filled restaurants? We have those too.
Tianna Williams
Design has a moment during Frieze
Anchored by collectible design fair PAD, the design world is also putting on a spectacle, with exhibitions and pop-ups taking over galleries, shops and disused spaces across the city. Here, we round up the best design exhibitions to see in London during Frieze Week.
Rosa Bertoli
Discover erotic surrealism at Richard Saltoun
Surrealism in the context of the erotic transforms desire into a language of liberation, says Maudji Mendel of RAW (Rediscovering Art by Women), who has been considering the subject in the context of overlooked women artists of the 20th century, for the exhibition ‘Unveiled Desires: Fetish & The Erotic in Surrealism, 1924–Today’, opening at Richard Saltoun gallery during London’s Frieze Week. Organised into two parts, the first running until November 2025 and the second until February 2026, it explores desire and fetish as a neglected part of the surrealist movement. See more here
Head to Artist-to-Artist in the tent to see emerging or overlooked talent
Discovering new artists to love is easily the best part of Frieze, something that can occasionally get lost in the chaos. For the last couple of years, Frieze has underscored its importance with the brilliant Artist-to-Artist initiative, which sees established artists highlight their emerging or overlooked peers at their own solo exhibitions at the fair.
Now in its third year, the section has for the first time announced a partnership, with Tiffany & Co working alongside the art fair to provide Artist-to-Artist with support and funding which will see the six participating galleries receive direct financial assistance. This year’s solo presentations - Ilana Harris-Babou (Dreamsong), selected by Camille Henrot; Katherine Hubbard (Company Gallery), selected by Nicole Eisenman; Ana Segovia (Kurimanzutto), selected by Abraham Cruzvillegas; Neal Tait (Lungley Gallery), selected by Chris Ofili; René Treviño (Erin Cluley Gallery), selected by Amy Sherald; and T. Venkanna (Gallery Maskara), selected by Bharti Kher - will benefit from the initiative’s new direction.
Don't miss 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair at Somerset House
The 13th consecutive edition of 1-54 London will be held at Somerset House, featuring about 100 established, rising and emerging artists, including Hassan Hajjaj, Seydou Keita, Arthur Timothy, Amina Agueznay, Roisin Jones, Vanessa Endeley, Ugonna Hosten, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Joël Bigaignon and Malick Sidibe. Established over a decade ago, the fair has grown to become the premier platform for showcasing work by artists from Africa and its diaspora, with iterations in New York and Marrakech each year, as well as pop-up exhibitions in cities such as Paris and Hong Kong. See more here
Gameli Hamelo
Stop by Sessions Art Club’s Frieze London 2025 pop-up
For 2025, Sessions Art Club (SAC) returns to Frieze London with a new mise-en-scène: a dining space that sits somewhere between confessional and stage set. Potter, McConkey and Gent reunite to create an environment shaped by cinematic light and tactile form inspired by the primal surfaces of France’s Lascaux caves (the site of prehistoric paintings), and the stylised tension of Paul Verhoeven’s 1992 movie Basic Instinct. The film’s singular blue-lit interrogation scene becomes a visual leitmotif, refracted through shifting shadows and glowing table surfaces that pulse between natural and artificial illumination. Read more here
Sofia de la Cruz
Alex Margo Arden at Ginny on Frederick Frieze
I love the powerful Accounts by Alex Margo Arden, a re-collection of male mannequin figures originally removed from the National Motor Museum. Crowded together, they become one bustling form, synonymous with the figures which once populated dioramas.
George Rouy at Hauser & Wirth Frieze
Hauser & Wirth’s booth is always the best place for both people watching and great art. This year, George Rouy’s work is amongst the highlights – his gorgeously painted, fluid figures need to be seen in real life.
Read our interview with George Rouy from earlier this year.
Christelle Oyiri at Gathering Frieze
After the pulsing, hypnotic world Oyiri created in a Brutalist Berlin shopping centre, we knew she was adept at creating totally immersive scenes. At the Gathering booth, step into a bygone travel agents, complete with sticky spilled drinks and a water cooler, a consideration of the commodified Otherness of travel.
Fashion + art = match made in heaven
While a number of the fashion and art pop-ups might seem opportunist grabs for the art world’s cultural heft, an equal number show the potential spoils of the partnership – whether Stone Island’s sponsorship of Frieze Focus (the scheme supports emerging galleries), Dunhill’s always-illuminating Frieze Masters talks, or the arrival of Prada Mode in London, the Italian fashion house’s roving programme of cultural events. For this edition, the house hands the reins to Berlin-based duo Elmgreen & Dragset, who have created a surreal cinema that will host a curated programme of talks, lectures and screenings over the coming days.
Here, Wallpaper* selects the best fashion happenings to add to your Frieze London 2025 schedule.
Jack Moss
Penny Goring at Arcadia Missa Frieze
Penny Goring's distinctive mix of humour, anger and shame, presented on large-scale Microsoft Paint collages, is completely irresistible to me. Goring has said in the past using MS Paint forces her to be creative when it comes to its limitations, something in no short supply here.
Kaari Upson at Spruth Magers Grafton Street
In the early 2000s, growing up, Kaari Upson was fascinated with her parents’ neighbour, an older man she never spoke to. Over at Sprüth Magers on Grafton Street, her early works from the resulting ‘The Larry Project’ are on show with works which rethink objects from his home in California. The results are seductive and creepy - in this work, items from her neighbour’s house are reimagined in skin like latex.
F.N. Souza at DAG Frieze Masters
F. N. Souza defined his distinctive style through the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group. It’s a treat to see his work at Frieze Masters.
Step outside for Sloane Street's art trail
Need a breather from the tent? Artists including Marc Quinn, Maya Rose Edwards, William Farr, James Jessiman and Ro Robertson have created outdoor works which are dotted along Sloane Street, for an art trail curated by Frieze Studios. 'Modern Nature' sees works from oversized flowers, to magpies and casts of coastal erosion, sinking mischievously into the environment. On until 19th Ocrober.
Alex da Corte at Sadie Coles Frieze
Alex da Corte nails the cultural climate with works which consider our contemporary landscape by drawing on varied sources. Is there anything more nostalgic and evocative than a TV guide (here in plexiglass)?
Walther Koenig Books at Frieze Masters
I'm drawn like a magnet to bookshops, and Walther Koenig's curation at their booth in Frieze Masters is especially appealing. Stop by for an eclectic selection of art books spanning mediums and genres - finally something in the Masters tent I can buy.
Step into surreal cinema with Elmgreen & Dragset at Prada Mode
Opening to coincide with Frieze Week, the immersive installation by the Scandinavian duo in London’s Town Hall, a recently inaugurated cultural space close to King’s Cross in the former Camden Council Town Hall, sees the Town Hall’s vast main room transformed into a 104-seat cinema, occupied by a series of hyper-realistic human figures posed in ‘various states of attention’ – from an embracing couple to a woman consuming popcorn on the front row (another potent visual trick, it takes a moment for your eyes to adjust and work out which of the seated figures are real). Their glassy eyes, all rendered from silicone, are fixed on the cinema screen: on it, a distorted film plays on loop, as if watching a scene from a movie through a perpetually blurry lens. It forms the centrepiece of Prada Mode, the house’s roving private members’ club. Read more here
Jack Moss
Tai Shani at Gathering
It has been a big year for Turner Prize winning artist Tai Shani, who caps off a year which has seen installations on New York’s High Line and at London’s Somerset House with a solo exhibition across town at Gathering, London. Shani, who works across mediums in film, performance, photography and installation, draws on historical and mythical references in work which considers the role of desire in society today. They are themes very much prescient in the exhibition, Cardinal, where Shani presents paintings and installations across the two gallery floors. Upstairs, a room rich in regal crimsons and deep purples makes a sumptuous background for a series of opulent paintings, while downstairs, visitors are invited to peer through a peep hole to discover work, Encounters. An animated landscape installation, set to music by Maxwell Sterling, draws from Marcel Duchamp’s surreal universe in its depiction of an unknowable landscape. Throughout, the viewer is cast in the role of voyeur, caught between the tension of the pomp and stripped-back.
Look up
Take a moment to look around you. For the architecture enthusiast, the Frieze entrance pavilions are just as interesting to admire as the exhibits that lie within the popular global fair.
This year, design practice A Studio Between and Norwegian aluminium manufacturer Hydro are behind Frieze's elegant architectural spaces. Set against the green backdrop of Regent's Park, the event's architecture shows off a modular new system that promotes reuse and environmental responsibility. The structure is built from 75 per cent recycled aluminium, not only bringing sustainable architecture practice to the fore, but also opening up discussions around circularity and eco-sensitivity in the realm of temporary exhibition design. Read more here
Ellie Stathaki
Celia Paul at Victoria Miro Frieze
Celia Paul's ghostly portraits are hard to look away from. In this self-portrait, she becomes the subject - translucent yet intense, it's hard to decipher her scrutinising gaze.
