Frieze London 2021: The Edition That Came Back to the Room, in Stone and Clay

ART & CULTURE · LONDON

Reading time: 8 min

Frieze London returned to The Regent’s Park from 13 to 17 October 2021, its first edition back under canvas after a year spent almost entirely on screens. Across 159 galleries, the presentations that carried the most weight, literally, shared a single instinct: clay remade as body, stone held in tension, mop fibre dyed into plumage. That instinct, repeated across stands that never spoke to one another, is the story this fair actually told.

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Frieze London ran from 13 to 17 October 2021 in The Regent’s Park, with a VIP preview on the 13th ahead of four public days. It was the fair’s first physical return since 2019: the 2020 edition did not take place as a tent show at all, replaced instead by an online viewing room while galleries, collectors and the fair itself worked out what an art market looked like without a room to stand in. A total of 159 galleries filled the 2021 tent, showing alongside Frieze Masters a short walk north in the same park, under the direction of Eva Langret, who had taken over as Frieze London’s artistic director in late 2019, just before the disruption began, and was now overseeing the fair’s first full return to canvas.

Instituto de Visión, Bogotá

The easiest way to describe an edition like this is a gallery list, and 159 exhibitors would make a long one. A directory would note who showed where, price a few headline sales, and move on to the next fair on the calendar. It would also miss what made 2021 distinct. Walk the fair stand by stand and a pattern turns up that no single gallery planned and no curator selected: an unusual concentration of work that depended on being seen in the room, not on a screen, because its entire argument was made in weight, glaze and grain. A boulder held against a concrete column by nothing but tension. A cleaning mop dyed and arranged into something closer to a bird. Clay fired into the shape of a hand. After a year in which the trade had learned to sell art through a browser window, the fair that came back was, stand after stand, an argument for the object itself.

The gallery that opened under a shadow, and answered it in colour

Thomas Dane Gallery, which shows between London and Naples, arrived at Frieze London 2021 having lost one of its own only weeks earlier. Philip King, the British sculptor, died in 2021 after a career that had done as much as any to define what postwar British sculpture could look like. King trained under Anthony Caro at Saint Martin’s School of Art in the early 1960s and became one of the so-called New Generation sculptors, the group whose brightly coloured, resolutely abstract work broke decisively with the bronze figure on a plinth. He later served as President of the Royal Academy from 1999 to 2004. Thomas Dane showed Sunrise (2007) at the fair in his memory, a later work from the elemental, ground-facing vocabulary King turned to once his career moved past the primary-coloured fibreglass forms that made his name.

Thomas Dane Gallery, London / Naples

The gallery’s other presentation answered that history rather than simply sitting beside it. Alexandre da Cunha, the Brazilian-British artist who has spent two decades turning found domestic objects into sculpture, showed Kentucky (Partridge) (2021), a totemic form built from dyed cleaning mops. Da Cunha’s practice runs directly through the same lineage King helped establish: sculpture made from whatever is at hand, judged on colour, silhouette and how convincingly an ordinary object stops reading as one. Here, mop fibre dyed and gathered into a plumed, upright form reads at a glance as feather rather than fibre, the kind of transformation that depends entirely on standing in front of it to register. A gallery that had just lost the sculptor who helped invent that permission to use anything was, in the same tent, showing exactly what the permission still produces.

Boulders in tension, forty years of borrowed weight

A few stands over, Sean Kelly’s presentation made the same argument in geology rather than domestic cloth. Julian Charrière, the Swiss-French artist whose work has spent years engaging with ice cores, volcanic rock and the timescales that make climate change legible, showed Not All Who Wander Are Lost (2021), a sculpture built around the form of a glacial erratic, the kind of boulder a retreating glacier picks up in one place and deposits in another, sometimes thousands of years and hundreds of miles apart. It is a sculpture about displacement measured in millennia, shown in a tent that itself only exists for five days a year.

Sean Kelly, New York

Beside it, Jose Dávila’s Untitled (2021) took the same raw material, a rock, and turned it into a question about balance. Dávila, who works from Guadalajara, has spent years in direct conversation with the history of American minimalism, restaging its language of raw industrial material with nothing holding it up but friction and counterweight. His 2021 piece rested a rock against a concrete column with no visible fixing, the entire sculpture legible only as a held breath: it is not permanent, it is not fixed, and its whole meaning is the tension a viewer can see is real precisely because nothing else is propping it up. Charrière’s boulder and Dávila’s boulder never shared a plinth. They shared a booth wall, a material, and an argument that neither photograph nor a viewing room thumbnail can carry: weight has to be felt to be believed.

Clay remaking the body, two galleries apart

The connection worth drawing out of Frieze London 2021, and the one a gallery list would never surface, sat between two stands that had no reason to be read together. At The Modern Institute, the Glasgow gallery founded in 1997 and now representing around 45 artists, Jesse Wine showed Presently (2021), a ceramic sculpture built from abstracted hands and feet, glazed in paint and dusted with copper powder. Wine has built a body of work around exactly this reduction, the body broken into its most expressive fragments and rebuilt in fired clay, glossy and slightly wrong in scale.

The Modern Institute, Glasgow

Not far away, Alison Jacques showed work by Hannah Wilke, the American artist whose small sculptures in fired clay, made from the 1960s onward, folded and pinched the material into forms drawn directly from the female body, a vocabulary she carried through into the photographic self-portraiture that defined the rest of her career before her death in 1993. Wine and Wilke never worked in the same decade, the same country or the same register: his ceramics are wry and outsized, hers were intimate and confrontational. But both arrived at the same material for the same reason, using clay because it is the one substance that records the hand that shaped it as clearly as it records the body it depicts. Placed only a short walk apart at the same fair, the two presentations made an argument about ceramic sculpture that neither gallery had any reason to plan and that only becomes visible by walking the whole tent rather than one stand’s programme.

Alison Jacques, London

Alison Jacques carried the same instinct into textile with Sheila Hicks, the American artist based in Paris who trained under Josef Albers at Yale and has spent six decades building sculptural work from dyed and woven fibre, colour applied not with a brush but by the thread itself. At Instituto de Visión, the Bogotá gallery showing alongside Mazenett & Quiroga, Vanessa Da Silva’s Inner Landscapes pushed the same instinct further still, biomorphic forms built from foam, fabric and sequin in saturated colour, sculpture that behaves more like skin than like stone. Three galleries, three materials, one shared conviction that colour in sculpture is a structural decision rather than a finish applied at the end.

The image, held at arm’s length

Not every strong stand at Frieze London 2021 made its case in raw material. Matthew Marks Gallery, showing work from roughly 33 artists across its New York and Los Angeles spaces, brought a different kind of weight to the fair: the weight of an image rather than an object. Alex da Corte, who has spent his career mining consumer culture, colour theory and the emotional register of advertising, showed a neon window artwork, light itself standing in for the sculptural mass everywhere else in the tent. Beside it, the gallery showed Prelude #3 (1990) by Peter Cain, the American painter who died in 1997 having built a short but distinctive body of work from car advertising, stretching and distorting automotive forms until a Cadillac or a Corvette reads as something closer to a hallucinated body than a vehicle.

Matthew Marks Gallery, New York / Los Angeles

Société, the Berlin gallery, pushed that same interest in the mediated image furthest of all, showing a self-portrait sculpture by Bunny Rogers built around the aesthetics of Neopets, an early-2000s virtual pet website, alongside video work by Petre Cortright, whose practice has drawn on webcam and screen-capture footage since the early internet, and pieces by Timur Si-Qin engaging directly with blockchain-linked, NFT-based work. It was a fitting note for the fair’s return: a year after the whole trade had learned to sell art through a screen, one of its most fluent galleries put screen culture itself on the wall, right alongside the boulders, the mop fibre and the fired clay making the opposite case a few stands over.

Société, Berlin

Final thoughts

None of the galleries at Frieze London 2021 planned to make the same argument. The Modern Institute did not know Alison Jacques was showing clay body fragments a short walk away. Sean Kelly did not coordinate with Jose Dávila’s dealer on a shared interest in unsupported weight. But a fair is not only its individually curated stands; it is also whatever pattern turns up when 159 of them are walked in one afternoon, and in 2021 that pattern was unusually legible. Coming back from a year spent looking at art through a browser, the strongest work in the tent turned out to be the work that only means anything in the room: a boulder that only proves its balance by staying up, a mop that only reads as plumage from three feet away, clay that only records a hand’s pressure when you can see the surface it left.

Frieze London has continued to return to The Regent’s Park every October since, including its most recent editions, covered in full in our piece on Frieze London 2024, where a different kind of physical argument, an entire floorplan rebuilt around how visitors move through the tent, took centre stage. Read together, the two editions make the same underlying point from different directions: at a fair that could, by now, comfortably run itself as a catalogue, the thing worth travelling for is still the room.

That is worth holding onto precisely because 2021 was the edition where it was least guaranteed. A fair returning from a year of screens could easily have leaned further into what a screen does well, clean installation shots, priced works, a scroll rather than a walk. Instead, gallery after gallery chose to bring work that a photograph actively undersells. Weight, glaze, dyed fibre and held tension do not compress well into a thumbnail, and the fact that so many of the fair’s strongest presentations were built from exactly those qualities suggests the room itself, rather than any single sale, was the point being made that October.