UNWORLDING AT
FRIEZE

UNWORLDING AT FRIEZE

The Asian art presence at Frieze London was well attended this October.

The mood at Frieze London and Frieze Masters2021 (13th to 17th October) was upbeat with reports of strong sales and praise for the positive mood across all five days of the fair. Together, the two fairs reunited the world’s major galleries in a celebration of the creative spirit of the city. Frieze came back with a band after the hiatus last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The event saw strong international attendance, with sold-out tickets across the week, bringing together galleries, institutions, artists, and arts organizations for a safe and successful week.

Eva Langret, Director of Frieze London reports “It was a joyous moment to see everyone come together after so long. This year’s fairs are the result of two years of thinking about new models, hybrid events, the opening of No.9 Cork Street and the launch of our membership programme – all those conversations have now come to fruition,” she writes adding “We are grateful to our participating galleries for all rising to the challenge and joining us to celebrate everything London has to offer.”

Nathan Clements-Gillespie, Director of Frieze Masters, also confirms that the international participation was just what the Frieze Masters needed.
In line with this year’s reduced capacity, Frieze London and Frieze Masters attracted 80,000 visitors and featured over 290 galleries, showing across both fairs as well as via Frieze’s online platform, Frieze Viewing Room. The fairs’ celebrated curated programme was led by Unworlding, a section of Frieze London curated by Cédric Fauq (Chief Curator, CAPC musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeau) and Stand Out at Frieze Masters, curated by Luke Syson (Director of Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). Hybrid programming included LIVE, curated by Languid Hands (Rabz Lansiquot and Imani Robinson) and both Frieze London and Frieze Masters talks series.

Vadehra Art Gallery, Nature Morte, and Jhaveri Contemporary are among the participants at Frieze London 2021. The show of strength from India is apparently ‘not surprising,’ given that even the New York Times has announced that the Indian art world not only survived, but thrived during 2020 and 2021(India’s Art World Has Suffered, and Thrived, in the Pandemic – The New York Times (nytimes.com). At their booth, Nature Morte showcased the works of Jitish Kallat, Imran Qureshi, and Tanya Goel.

Kallat’s Epicycles (2020-21) reflect the artist’s ongoing study of the dialogues between the local and the cosmic and between past and present. The works metaphorically document the early months of the pandemic in 2020 through Kallat’s heightened observation of everyday physical and aesthetic changes in his studio environment in Mumbai: a fallen stem, a new crack in the wall, or an abstraction beneath a chair. He interweaves these markers of life at home with images drawn from the iconic touring exhibition Family of Man, organized at MoMA by photographer Edward Steichen in 1955. That show presented hundreds of images sourced from photographers working around the world and sought to be a “declaration of global solidarity” in the decade after World War II. Bringing together intimate images from his studio with a global trove of humanity, Epicycles attends to the unique experience that the pandemic brought about ‘hyper-locality’ amidst a shared worldwide experience.

As poet and critic Susan Stewart has written in her examination of the miniature, ‘the interiority of the enclosed world tends to reify the interiority of the viewer’. As we concentrate on painted detail, we may also become conscious of the subtle flicker of muscular contractions as we look, the pace of our breath as we pause, or the distribution of weight between each foot as we stand. With this heightened awareness of our interior, the world comes to a greater awareness of our surroundings- the height of the ceiling, the sweep of the wall- and perhaps even of the environment beyond: the concert hall that the gallery embraces to the left or the busy traffic in the streets to the right. To accentuate this experience, Qureshi has painted the walls in darkening shades of grey- a subtle tonal shift that encourages us continually to re-examine our relationship to the surrounding space.

On one level, Goel’s Botanical Studies are a diary of a period of stillness, developed over a year in which most travels beyond one’s city or neighborhood stopped. They are also studies in the truest sense, as Goel deconstructs the color profile and parts of the plant, presenting these as flattened abstractions that address all of the dimensions and components of a flower image.
As in earlier bodies of her work, an algorithm and modernist grid underlie and give form to her works. At the center of each composition is the pistil of the flower, with each overlapping radial, presenting a different dimension translated into flat space. The resulting images are beautiful and layered and not necessarily legible or representational, neatly avoiding cliché.

Vadehra presented work by contemporary artists at Frieze London this year, including paintings by B.V. Doshi, Rameshwar Broota, and Atul Dodiya, photographs by Sunil Gupta, photographic installations by Shilpa Gupta, Porcelain works by Faiza Butt as well as mixed media works by Anju Dodiya in a curation titled A Brief Current. Vadehra also presented a booth at Frieze Masters showing the works of A. Ramachandran. As part of Spotlight, they are presenting a rare body of early drawings, etchings, and canvases from the 1960s and 1970s by the celebrated Indian modernist in a curation titled A Victorious Storm: Early Works by A. Ramachandran.