Frieze London 2025: Where the Newest Galleries Got the Best Address in the Tent

ART & CULTURE · LONDON

Reading time: 8 min

A commercial art fair sells the front of the room to whoever pays most. Frieze London does the opposite. For a second year running, the galleries nearest the entrance in 2025 were not its blue-chip names but its youngest, and the decision was deliberate, structural, and repeated on purpose. That single piece of floor planning says more about how the fair now thinks than any sale it made.

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Frieze London returned to The Regent’s Park from 15 to 19 October 2025, its twenty-third edition since Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp founded the fair in 2003. More than 168 galleries from 43 countries filled the tent in the park’s southern reaches, its entrance on Park Square West, a short shuttle ride from Frieze Masters, the historical fair sharing the same week and the same park a little further north.

Esther Schipper

The numbers are the least interesting part of the story. What distinguished 2025 was a set of decisions about who gets seen first, who chooses the artists, and who gets to define what belongs at a contemporary art fair in the first place. None of them were new for their own sake. All of them were held for a second or third year running, which is the more telling fact: this was not a one-off gesture but a fair testing whether a different set of priorities actually holds up.

Eva Langret, artistic director of Frieze London and Frieze’s director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, has led the fair since November 2019. The edition she delivered in 2025 kept faith with a floor plan she introduced the year before, one that put the fair’s newest galleries at its front door and its most established names further in. That decision, more than any single sale, is where this piece starts.

Carl Freedman Gallery

The decision at the door

The stands immediately inside Frieze London’s entrance in 2025 belonged to Focus, the fair’s section for galleries no more than twelve years old. Blue-chip names, including Gagosian, David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, Pace and White Cube, sat deeper into the tent. That placement was not incidental. Frieze London built it deliberately as a floor plan in 2024, put its own discovery mechanism at the front door, and held the same arrangement in 2025 rather than treating it as a single-edition experiment.

Langret has described the reasoning in plain terms. “The audience was super excited,” she said of the first year of the new layout. “It enabled collectors to make new connections and discover new galleries.” She has called the response to the change “overwhelmingly positive,” and the fair kept it rather than treating it as a stunt for one edition.

The mechanism behind it rotates two of those entrance stands each year, so the youngest galleries at the door change annually rather than calcifying into their own hierarchy. For 2025 the newcomers at the front were Soft Opening, Portas Vilaseca and The Pit. It is a small piece of architecture with an outsized effect: it decides, literally, what a first-time visitor sees before they see anything else, and in 2025 that was work by galleries most of them had never heard of.

El Apartamento

Thirty-five galleries, three advisors, five themes

Focus itself, the section that now anchors the fair’s entrance, brought together 35 exhibitors from more than 20 countries, ranging from London and Barcelona to Seoul, Havana, Tbilisi, Cairo and Mexico City. Nine were new to the fair, including a.SQUIRE, Bombon, Coulisse, Cylinder, Gathering, Kayokoyuki and Eli Kerr. Twenty-five returned, among them the Havana gallery El Apartamento, showing collaborative work by Ariamna Contino and Alex Hernández.

The selection was made by three advisors drawn from galleries and institutions rather than from the fair’s own staff: Joumana Asseily, founder of the Beirut gallery Marfa’; Piotr Drewko, founder of the Warsaw gallery Wschód; and Cédric Fauq, chief curator at CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux. Between them, the 35 presentations clustered around five recurring concerns, loosely grouped by the fair as authorship and illusion, ecology and landscape, creation made amid conflict, memory and self-portraiture, and the domestic and the childhood home.

Stone Island, the section’s partner for a second year, funded bursaries for participating galleries alongside Frieze’s own subsidy, a detail that matters more than it might read: a young gallery’s stand at a fair like this typically costs more than its annual turnover can easily absorb. The section’s stand prize went to King’s Leap, the New York gallery, for its presentation of Michelle Uckotter.

Union Pacific

Artists choosing artists

A third structural decision, quieter than the entrance layout but built on the same instinct, ran through Artist-to-Artist, now in its third edition and sponsored by Tiffany & Co. Rather than a curator selecting the section’s six solo presentations, six established artists each nominated one they wanted to see shown: Abraham Cruzvillegas chose Ana Segovia, Camille Henrot chose Ilana Harris-Babou, Nicole Eisenman chose Katherine Hubbard, Chris Ofili chose Neal Tait, Amy Sherald chose René Treviño, and Bharti Kher chose Venkanna.

It is a different mechanism from Focus’s advisor panel, but it answers the same underlying question the entrance layout does: who gets to decide what counts as worth showing, and does that decision sit with the market or with the people who actually make the work. Ana Segovia’s paintings, shown by kurimanzutto at Cruzvillegas’s nomination, sold through most of the presentation across the opening days, priced between $25,000 and $60,000.

The Sunday Painter

Echoes in the Present

The fair’s third curated section for 2025, Echoes in the Present, was curated by the independent curator Dr Jareh Das, who works between the UK and West Africa. It traced a dialogue between artists from Brazil and from Africa and its diasporas, framed around what Das has described as shared histories shaped by the forced movement of African people across the Atlantic and by the cultural exchange that followed.

Ten artists carried the section, shown by galleries including Tafeta (Bunmi Agusto), Galerie Atiss Dakar (Serigne Mbaye Camara), Simões de Assis (Diambe), Selebe Yoon (Naomi Lulendo), Jahmek Contemporary (Sandra Poulson), Mitre Galeria (Aline Motta), Nara Roesler (Alberto Pitta) and Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel (Tadáskía). Pitta contributed a site-specific installation of archival textiles, work that reads as much as a material history of Bahian carnival costume as it does painting or sculpture.

Xavier Hufkens

What sold, and what museums chose to keep

Trade at Frieze London 2025 was brisk from the opening hours. Gagosian’s solo presentation of Lauren Halsey’s Afrofuturist installation work sold out on the first day. Ginny on Frederick sold out its solo stand of Alex Margo Arden within hours, at prices between £20,000 and £30,000, and the presentation went on to win the inaugural Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation Prize. Lehmann Maupin sold more than fifteen of Do Ho Suh’s thread drawings and fabric works, and Timothy Taylor came close to selling out a run of seven Daniel Crews-Chubb paintings priced between £70,000 and £95,000 each.

GRIMM

On the fair’s contemporary stands, Hauser & Wirth sold Ellen Gallagher for $950,000, Avery Singer for $800,000 and Henry Taylor for $300,000. Lisson Gallery placed an Otobong Nkanga tapestry for $600,000, and Sprüth Magers sold a George Condo painting for $600,000 alongside a run of twenty-one works by Marcel Van Eeden. Modern Art won the fair’s main stand prize for a solo presentation of Sanya Kantarovsky’s glazed stoneware sculptures, with Taka Ishii Gallery and Project 88 named as special mentions.

Institutional buying ran alongside the private sales. The Frieze Tate Fund acquired works by Barbara Walker and Lubna Chowdhary for Tate’s collection. The Arts Council Collection bought from five artists, including Vanessa Raw and Olu Ogunnaike. The Contemporary Art Society’s Collections Fund acquired work by Michael Landy and Shaquélle Whyte, a reminder that a fair week this size is also, quietly, a year’s worth of public collecting decisions compressed into five days.

James Cohan

A stand-up set instead of a sculpture

The 2025 Frieze Artist Award, the fair’s annual commission for a work made specifically for the site, went to the artist Sophia Al-Maria, who used it to stage something the award had not produced before: a live stand-up comedy performance titled Wall-Based Work, delivered inside the fair rather than hung on a wall in it. The title does the work of the joke itself, needling the assumption that a commission for an art fair has to result in an object a gallery can eventually sell.

It is a small thing next to the sales figures and the section counts, but it belongs in the same column as the entrance decision and the Artist-to-Artist nominations. Each one, in its own register, asks the fair to make room for something other than the default.

Pace Gallery

Two fairs, one park, different remits

Frieze London and Frieze Masters share a park, a week and a shuttle bus, but not a subject. Frieze London is where a gallery shows what an artist is making now: the newest Do Ho Suh, the newest Lauren Halsey, a stand-up set commissioned for the tent itself. Frieze Masters, which launched nine years later in 2012 and ran its own fourteenth edition on Gloucester Green the same week, exists for the opposite case: historical work, connoisseurship, and the specific provenance that separates a genuine rediscovery from an old object with a good story attached. The two fairs are frequently covered as a single event because they share dates and a postcode. They are better understood as answers to two different questions, one about what is being made and one about what has already been made and is only now being properly seen.

Johyun Gallery

Final thoughts

It would be easy to write up Frieze London 2025 as a set of numbers: 168 galleries, 43 countries, sales in the high six figures before the opening day was over. All of that is true, and none of it explains why the edition is worth remembering.

What made 2025 distinct was a fair willing to rebuild its own hierarchy on purpose, more than once, and to keep doing it once the first attempt worked. The entrance went to the youngest galleries instead of the ones who could pay most for it. A third of the solo presentations were chosen by other artists rather than by curators or the market. A commission for the fair’s most visible award became a comedy set instead of an object. None of these are radical ideas individually. Held together, and repeated for a second and third year, they describe a fair that is treating its own floor plan as an argument rather than just a seating chart.

That is the version of Frieze London worth carrying into 2026, when the fair returns to The Regent’s Park from 14 to 18 October. The question worth watching is not which gallery gets the biggest booth. It is which one gets the door.