The best contemporary artists from around the world.
Frieze Art Fair 2021 comes to London, bringing together major galleries from around the world, including a programme of talks and special projects addressing some of the most relevant conversations in art today. Frieze Week will bring London alive with art and creativity, with an extensive schedule of museum, gallery and partner events across London.
In support of artists and studio providers across the sector we’ve highlighted some exhibitions we’re planning to see during the week. These are just a few examples of events open to the public, please don’t hesitate get in touch and your suggestions for the week.
The Studio Voltaire Capital Project
Studio Voltaire will open its doors after their £2.8 million capital project to expand and redevelop the site. The studio and exhibition space reopen with three exhibitions, the first and expansive exhibition of over 80 paintings, drawings and sculptures, from William Scott.
The exhibition is accompanied by a series of works presented in the public realm, surronding Studio Voltaire. Scott’s works can be seen as a form of activism, eloquently describing his desire for social change. Scott’s paintings address wider questions of citizenship, community and cultural memory.
Anthea Hamilton’s, The Garden is an ambitious project combining art and horticulture. Designed to be used by visitors, local residents and onsite artists, her planting scheme combines ornamental flowers and shrubs with edible plants. Artist Nicholas Byrne has been invited to design a gate for the garden, which further opens up the garden to the immediate neighbourhood, bringing art in the public domain.
Finally, Monster Chetwynd presents a new short film which continues her interest in the power of alternative energies. Free Energy is an exploration of the uncontainable energy that can be created within performance, as well as the individual’s role in society in relation to energy consumption.
Copperfield
Copperfield Gallery Linked to Antole Studios, friends of Creative Land Trust are opening their doors as part Freize week with an exhibition from Hetain Patel (Bolton, 1980). Baa’s Gold is a deeply personal, revisiting of the artists relationship to his family, immigration and, re-appropriating his family’s place in British society. This new series of paintings takes its aesthetic cues from the gleaming black car paint of each hearse his father’s garage produced. Picked out in gold detailing, the subject of these high gloss mise-en-scenes follows yet another influence on Patel’s life – his late grandmother Lakshmiben Patel, who his family all called “Baa”, meaning “Mother” in Gujarati.
Copperfield’s will also be showing a new video work ‘Beyond The Substrata’ . Shot within the site of an abandoned supermarket, Larry Achiampong dissects the socio-political threads of race, class, gender and gentrification with his newest work. ‘Beyond The Substrata’ is a film that reconfigures their affect not only on the wider east London area, but also on the black body. Within the film the artist uses the supermarket as a space to critique contradictions within modern society. The work is an artistic act of counter-surveillance, playing on the all-seeing eyes and repressive structures that have become the norm in consumer culture and retail environments.
Cubitts
“Cubitt is an artist-led co-operative built on a belief in the value of art and artists in society.”
They will be showing: a rant! a reel! the first London solo exhibition by Glasgow-based artist Camara Taylor, curated by Languid Hands.
The work stems from an ongoing research project that uses ‘silt’ and the process of ‘desilting’ as both metaphor and methodology to examine Scotland’s intimate entanglement and key roles in the development of the current global order. Negotiating flimsy cultural memories, illegible archives and Black gestures, the exhibition acts as a repository for Taylor’s current Transfixions (after Shola von Reinhold) as they work towards a film currently situated in the gut.
Frieze Sculpture at The Regent’s Park
Frieze Sculpture is a range of public art works addressing themes including architecture, geopolitical power structures and environmental concern. Curated for the ninth year by Clare Lilley (Director of Programme at Yorkshire Sculpture Park), the 2021 edition features Rasheed Araeen, Daniel Arsham, Anthony Caro, Gisela Colón, José Pedro Croft, Carlos Cruz-Diez, amongst others. Free and open to all, viewers can access Clare Lilley’s audio guide here.
South London Gallery
The South London Gallery (SLG) established in 1891 to ‘bring art to the people of south London’ has been free and open to the public for more than 125 years, presenting contemporary art exhibitions, film and performance.
Shut the Club Down, explores dance music and nightlife culture in 1990s Peckham and Camberwell through two venues: Peckham Lazerdrome and Imperial Gardens. Both clubs presented innovative solutions to the challenges of the time. Lazerdrome was one of the first nightclubs in London to take the rave scene indoors, while Imperial Gardens was known for kick-starting the music and literary careers of up-and-coming artists in London. Discover the history of both venues through filmed footage, photos, music and more in the Archive.
Alvaro Barrington presents a new body of works, in his first solo exhibition in a UK institution, Spider the pig, pig the spider. The central concept of the show is that of a relatively near future in which Augmented and Virtual Reality have evolved to the point that people routinely choose which identity or character to adopt in different social and other situations, with digital and real life becoming completely intertwined. Paintings integrating printed and digitally rendered elements merge Peppa Pig from the children’s cartoon with Napoleon and other pigs from Orwell’s Animal Farm, and Anansi the Spider from the African folktale with Louise Bourgeois’s bronze spider sculptures.