Frieze booth A13 — Thomas Dane Gallery
Here, the Thomas Dane booth felt like a microcosm of the fair itself — expansive in ambition, generous in range, yet threaded by a consistent curatorial temperament. With artists from Hurvin Anderson’s quietly vivid interiors and figuration to Anya Gallaccio’s elemental installations, the space accommodated a layered conversation between abstraction, embodied presence, and materiality. The inclusion of names like Caragh Thuring, Salman Toor, and Paul Thek introduced shifts in scale and sensibility, urging the viewer to roam from painterly gestures to sculptural intimacies. The booth operated less as a sales pitch and more as a constellation: each work resonating against its neighbors, inviting moments of dissonance and surprise.
Frieze booth B14 — Stephen Friedman Gallery
Stephen Friedman’s offering was anchored by a series of works on paper and large-scale paintings by Sarah Ball, a lean yet bold gesture that emphasized refinement over accretion. In a milieu often enamored of spectacle, this booth felt austere in the right way: the quiet force of Ball’s mark-making and compositional tension resonated, allowing absences and negative space to do as much work as pigment. One sensed the gallery trusting the viewer’s patience, refusing to overfill the walls. In that restraint was a certain confidence.
Frieze booth C14 — Timothy Taylor
Timothy Taylor’s presentation of a solo booth by Daniel Crews-Chubb — including a welcome debut in sculpture — signals a push beyond the purely pictorial. The dialogue between Crews-Chubb’s painterly language and his sculptural forays must have shifted the booth’s gravitational center, inviting the viewer to recalibrate. You could feel the tautness of ambition in a space that is ambitiously hybrid: neither wholly painting nor object, but hovering between. That liminality is risky, and if the booth succeeded, it succeeded by holding the tension without collapsing.
Frieze booth F4 — Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix
Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix’s decision to dedicate its booth to Delaine Le Bas struck a chord of necessary resistance. Le Bas’s work — conditioned by histories of Roma identity, marginalization, and unassimilable memory — tends toward insistence rather than persuasion. In that context, the booth likely operated as both memorial and provocation: a space in which beauty and confrontation are inseparable. I imagine walls that are at once raw and formal, where traces of life press through abstractions. The gallery’s faith in Le Bas’s voice felt not just curatorial, but ethically anchored.
Frieze booth D1 — Lisson Gallery
Lisson used its platform to cast a wide net: Sarah Cunningham, Ryan Gander, Leiko Ikemura, Otobong Nkanga, Laure Prouvost, and others — artists whose practices engage with embodiment, ecology, time, and rupture. The booth must’ve felt like an ecosystem, with work speaking across media but bound by shared weight. There’s a kind of generosity in that ambition: the space to let diverse practices cohabit without flattening them. Yet the risk is incoherence; the trick is in how the works modulate each other. If well hung, the booth would have felt like a series of resonant counterpoints — a small world you wanted to walk through more than once.
Frieze booth F32 — NıCOLETTı
Here, the spotlight fell on Gray Wielebinski and their investigations into the aestheticization of violence — a proposition both urgent and fraught. In a booth meant to be intimate but intense, Wielebinski’s new works likely flanked margins of discomfort: how representation, metaphor, and form negotiate trauma. The airline between provocateur and poet is narrow, especially in a fair setting, but I suspect NıCOLETTı embraced the vertigo. The works would linger in your mind, especially if one looked beyond the surface to the weight beneath.