The Best Booths, and What to See at the Fair

This younger Balinese artist, a rising star of the biennial circuit, has produced a stunner for what successfully counts as her New York debut: a grouping of works that revisit conventional Kamasan scroll work, which have been used for hundreds of years to speak Hindu mythologies and have lengthy been made by males. Sasmita told ARTnews earlier this yr that her purpose is to “place ladies as central figures” of those work, in order that they’re now not “relegated to mere ornament and reproductive roles.” She does so at Frieze in works similar to Vortex within the Land of Liberation (2025), whose central ingredient is a cowhide bejeweled with strings of beads. Painted onto that cowhide is a lady whose indifferent head grows a tree, as if she had totally fused with nature. Surrounded by a forest of hanging velvet strips, this girl is offered sanctuary and shielded from the gazes of passersby. That is the perfect sales space at Frieze—and a certain signal that this artist actually is one to observe.

Esther Mahlangu has labored prolifically, producing portray after portray whereas additionally taking over the occasional fee for manufacturers similar to BMW and Commes de Garçons, and so it takes some good curation to get to the guts of what makes her nice. Thankfully, this sales space, staged on the heels of a retrospective in her native South Africa and an look on the Venice Biennale, does simply that. It gives a stable sampler of Mahlangu’s latest output, a lot of which takes the type of work that translate patterns from the Ndebele tradition to canvas. A number of function starburst-like varieties outlined in black and set in opposition to sharp white backgrounds; some areas are crammed in utilizing crimson, cerulean, and sandy brown. Then, in a piece referred to as Homestead VI (2021), Mahlangu situates these patterns in a panorama with individuals and cattle, translating them onto the partitions and roofs of squat huts. She’s displaying that abstraction is, in truth, suitable with on a regular basis life.

These two artists don’t make a pure pairing: Judy Ledgerwood is thought for work that overlay abstractions with scrawled flowers; Leon Polk Smith was related to the hard-edge tendency of the postwar period and died in 1990. However this sales space reveals that they make fairly a pleasant duo. Smith’s technique for doing so was to create formed canvases in clashing colours rendered in order that they seem machine-applied, with proof of his hand nowhere to be discovered. Ledgerwood takes a distinct strategy, making fairly her grids and monochromes with typical signifiers of girlishness. Each are persuasive means for needling the conventions of modernism and tainting the purity related to European abstraction of the early twentieth century.

With fiber art fast emerging as the medium of the season right here in New York, it may be no shock that weavings and textile artwork abound at Frieze. Among the most compelling examples could be discovered at Tina Kim’s sales space, which is devoted primarily to artists hailing from South Korea. The stand capabilities as a memorial of types to Suki Seokyeong Kang, who died last month at 48; she was recognized for using hwamunseok mats, certainly one of which seems right here because the unlikely background to an abstraction fashioned from metal bars. Lee ShinJa, a nonagenarian quickly to be the topic of her first US survey on the Berkeley Artwork Museum, can be right here, represented by the fantastic Progress (Eighties), a dangling tapestry by which planes of brown and beige refract by means of one another. Kang and Lee are joined by a a lot youthful artist, the sculptor Mire Lee, who’s displaying items of sentimental material made onerous and crusty through clay slip. Hung in frames, Lee’s tattered materials look as if they’re being worn by ghosts.

It takes true expertise to shine in multi-artist cubicles, which frequently lack cohesive themes or aesthetics, and Ximena Garrido-Lecca has it aplenty, which is why this Peruvian-born artist stands head and shoulders above the remainder of her colleagues at Vermelho’s sales space. Based mostly in Lima and Mexico Metropolis, she has two works right here, each of them made out of copper, a metallic whose mining has generated a booming business in Peru, together with environmental disruption and harm to Indigenous communities. What would a reparative use of copper appear like? Garrido-Lecca seeks to search out one with Realignments X (from the collection Aleaciones con Memoria de Forma), 2025, by which copper tubes are woven collectively utilizing conventional Andean strategies. The work’s identify implies that Garrido-Lecca has wielded her metallic in a much less exploitative means than the companies that commerce in it.

This Parisian gallery’s stand contains one Prix Marcel Duchamp nominee (Benoît Piéron) and one Turner Prize winner (Jesse Darling), and that ought to qualify it as one of many hottest cubicles on the truthful. As a substitute, Sultana has gone in a extra subdued route, providing a cohesive quartet of artists pondering annoyed need. There’s a tiny nonetheless life displaying a vase full of carnations—from an admirer, maybe—by Jean Claracq, however the piece comes with a body so large it trumps the portray itself. Equally, there’s a small Darling {photograph} displaying the marks of a rosary pressed right into a patch of human pores and skin, however that work, too, incorporates extra body than artwork. The standout work right here is one that can not be totally seen: a P. Workers piece referred to as On My Dying Mattress / An Opus On Love / On Venus (phone), 2025, which right here takes the type of a semi-transparent pane of glass with a cellphone quantity written in marker onto it. Dial that quantity, and you’ll hear Workers intoning texts concerning the mysteries of affection.

Gordon Robichaux has routinely proven itself one of New York’s most adventurous galleries, and it does so as soon as extra with its Frieze sales space, a tribute to Jenni Crain, who died in 2021 at age 30. Crain, too, was much-loved right here as an adventurous seller, having based an offbeat gallery in Rockaway Seaside and labored as a director at areas similar to Kaufmann Repetto and Miguel Abreu. But as this sales space makes clear, she was fairly a gifted artist, too, with the power to breathe new life into Minimalism. Her sculptures have been likewise smooth and spare, and equally resemble unusable ornamental objects. However whereas the Minimalists have been primarily males who crafted heavy objects that exerted a powerful presence, Crain appears to have been extra enthusiastic about lightness and states of near-invisibility. Gesture 2 (2015), a pane of tempered glass bolted right into a metal ingredient on the bottom, is arguably the piece least simply seen at this truthful. It may very well be taken as a heartbreaking metaphor for being missed, even if you end up there in plain sight.