Fair play: Ben Luke's guide to Frieze Art Fair
Frieze opens up today to reveal a joyous big top full of contemporary art – Ben Luke takes a tour and has some fun
If there's one quality that leaps out from the stands at this years Frieze Art Fair, it's a childlike exuberance. Humour is such a prominent tactic in contemporary art, but in recent years the fair, now in its eleventh year, has had a more mature, modest mood. This year, it’s as if many of the 150 dealers have declared: “It’s playtime!” The booths are awash with colour and comedy, even if it often lurches into black humour and satire.
The generally upbeat mood of the art suits Frieze’s new design – they’ve stripped back the number of galleries by 30 and created a bigger and higher space, so the fair feels more open, lighter and more welcoming than it has for years. Of course, there are many, much more poetic, darker and more troubling items on view, but the frequent characterisation of Frieze as a kind of arty theme park has never seemed more apt.
Showstopper
Showstopper: 'Safety Cones (After Richard Serra),' 23 Sculptures, 2013, by Rob Pruitt
ROB PRUITT
Safety Cones (After Richard Serra), 2013
Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York
The maverick American artist Pruitt, who is best-known for his paintings of pandas, is one of the art world’s current darlings and this work — which has pride of place right at the entrance to Frieze — has proved an instant hit. Twenty-three traffic cones fill the gallery’s allocated space, and each is decorated with gurning faces, crazy glasses, wigs, beanies and hi-vis fleeces — these bland and ubiquitous bits of street furniture have been given personalities. Sitting on black-and-white geometric plinths, the cones cordon off the rest of the booth, particularly two paintings by Alex Katz, acting like deranged security guards. The title’s reference to sculptor Richard Serra is baffling — their quirky playfulness represents everything the minimalist sculptor’s steel monoliths are not. Perhaps these fluorescent sentinels might guard the public from being caught beneath one of Serra’s famously weighty works.
And so to bed
And so to bed: 'Untitled,' 2011, by Lili Reynaud
LILI REYNAUD-DEWAR
I Am Intact and I Don’t Care, 2013
Frieze Projects
As well as inviting galleries to show their best, Frieze always commissions a handful of artists from across the world to produce new projects, which this year all sit in a space at one extreme of the Regent’s Park tent, with a buzzing atmosphere that feels like an artist’s studio. Reynaud-Dewar’s performance piece is among the most memorable in the fair’s history. In a trippy decorative bedroom, she lies, sits or leans against a bed, in the middle of which is a pool of black liquid, frothing and spurting its contents on to the sheet and the artist’s pure white outfit. There, she reads from novels — I caught a racy drugs-and-sex section from Guillaume Dustan’s In My Room. It’s the latest in a series of bedrooms created by the French artist, exposing her private life to the world.
Biggest price tag
Très cher: 'Titi Tire,' left, and 'Sacred Heart,' right, by Jeff Koons
JEFF KOONS
Lobster, 2007-12
Gagosian Gallery, London, W1
Gagosian isn’t revealing how much its cluster of Koons kitsch costs but a version of Lobster went for $6.3m at auction in May, so the collection of four works on show together are the costliest at Freize. The security guards stationed nearby almost look like part of the installation, turning the whole thing into an unintentional satire on the excesses — even the insanity — of the art world
Pretty expensive: 'Cat on Clothesline (Yellow),' by Jeff Koons
Wittiest work
Witty: 'Made in Africa (Assembled in China),' 2013, by Djordje Ozbolt
DJORDJE OZBOLT
Made in Africa, Assembled in China, 2013
Herald Street, London, E2
Ozbolt is best known for his vivid figurative paintings, which have a surreal, often macabre feel, infused with absurd humour, and underlying political messages. Recently, the Serbian-born artist has turned to sculpture, and his balance of wit and visual allure remains intact. These five sculptures, seen as a single work, are based on gaudy pseudo-African sculptures bought from street vendors and flea markets, which explains the “Assembled in China” part of the work’s title. It’s a sardonic take on globalisation and the incongruence of African objects being fashionable home-decor trinkets – and with its beacon-bright colours, it’s also an arresting sight from across the fair.
Womb with a view
Original: 'Portrait of the Artist,' 2013, by Jennifer Rubell, photographed at Frieze Art Fair
JENNIFER RUBELL
Portrait of the Artist 2013
Stephen Friedman Gallery, London
Inspired by the emotions triggered by her recent pregnancy, Rubell’s vast “self-portrait” is, she says, both “feminist and feminine” — intended to stick two fingers up at the notion that women can’t be creative when with child. It’s made of fibreglass but more closely resembles marble, as Rubell wanted to reference classical and neo-classical sculpture through the ages, and particularly its masculine history.
Despite its scale, though, it doesn’t feel too bombastic, partly because it’s so welcoming — you’re invited to climb into the void in the reclining figure’s abdomen.
After the fun of the fair, there is plenty of cerebral art at Frieze, too. Ben Luke picks his top five
Double aspect: 'A double basement being built in Hampstead', 2013, by Jeremy Deller
JEREMY DELLER
A double basement being built in Hampstead
The Modern Institute, Glasgow (£75,000)
Ever the most topical of artists, Deller continues his satire on modern Britain that was such a hit at this year’s Venice Biennale with this new work. With a banner created by his trusty friend Ed Hall, Deller targets the phenomenon of London’s super-rich creating vast luxurious basements in historical homes. Around the banner, Deller has created a decorative pattern by using tiny neolithic arrowheads, a reminder of the breadth of British history and a hint at a simpler age.
SARAH LUCAS
Sheela Na Gig, 2012
Sadie Coles HQ, London, W1
(price not disclosed)
The historical tradition of the Sheela Na Gig is ideal territory for the lewd surrealism of Lucas. Medieval gargoyles and grotesques found on churches and castles, they feature naked women opening their vaginas — it’s thought they are pagan goddesses or fertility symbols. Lucas recasts them for the modern age, using her trademark stuffed tights to represent the figure, and vast concrete toilets to represent the genitals. Standing on sandy Mexican bricks, Lucas pulls off a work which is bawdy and brilliant.
ELMGREEN & DRAGSET
He, 2013
Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris (€150k)
Always looking for witty plays on the history of art and design, the Scandinavian duo have created this homoerotic retort to the famous (but rather boring) sculpture The Little Mermaid, which sits in Copenhagen’s harbour. Unlike her solemn bronze, he glimmers with silver-coated resin, and is an exuberant accompaniment to their other famous image of childhood, the golden boy on a rocking horse, which stood on the Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth, and is recreated on a less monumental scale on Victoria Miro’s stand at Frieze.
DAVID SHRIGLEY
A Burden, 2012
Anton Kern Gallery, New York ($35K)
Few artists are funnier than Shrigley, who has a series of drawings and sculptures on one of the fair’s best stands. The bronze sculpture Lady Having a Poop (2013) is as absurd as it sounds but the pick of his works is this take on backpackers that will ring true with anyone assaulted by rucksacks on the Tube. Huge and cumbersome and stuck on the back of a musclebound male mannequin, it’s typical Shrigley — by adjusting a regular daily object, he propels it into surrealism.
HELEN CHADWICK
Piss Flowers, 1991-92
Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, W1 (price not disclosed)
Chadwick’s cluster of white floral forms in the sculpture park sneaks up on you, with simple shapes looking almost childlike from afar. But when you get close you notice the strange organic growths that spring up from them, made by the artist and her partner, David Notarious, peeing into snow and then making casts in bronze from the holes left behind. It’s a mischievous play on masculinity and femininity, as Chadwick’s holes create phallic shapes and Notarious’s make shallow voids.