Frieze New York Is Smaller but Still Packs a Global Punch

New York Times

08-05-2025

Visiting Frieze New York used to include a frisson of danger amid acres of great art. Held in a quarter-mile-long tent on Randall's Island, the New York edition of the art fair that appears on three continents offered world-class vistas of Manhattan as well as the threat of squalls that could flood the exhibits or fears that the big tent might take off like a kite in high winds.
Not anymore. For the fifth year, Frieze New York, which runs through Sunday, is anchored firmly in the Shed, the bunkerlike building in Hudson Yards. There's less art here than in the old days — 67 galleries, compared with nearly 200 booths in 2019 — but also less distraction. As art fairs have proliferated, it's refreshing to find Frieze New York still presenting work that is brash or downright risky, along with elements of the resolutely blue-chip TEFAF on Park Avenue and the cool midlevel Independent in TriBeCa. While art tourists can always gorge locally on art — for example, TriBeCa Gallery Night on Friday offers more than 70 participating galleries and art spaces — Frieze is a chance to travel through the global art world without leaving Manhattan. Here are a handful of booths that show you what art still has the capacity to do.
The London gallerist Victoria Miro is showing a handful of in-your-face artists who are not (or were not) afraid to speak their minds. Chief among them is the glorious Grayson Perry, a Turner Prize winner and cross-dressing potter who also wrote an iconoclastic autobiography titled 'Grayson Perry: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl' (2007). On display here is a tapestry, 'Fascist Swing' (2021), which remakes Fragonard's randy Rococo painting of cavorting lovers, and hulking ceramic vessels with provocative slogans like 'Free Speech is Hate Speech' inscribed in them. Along with Perry's works are figurative paintings by formidable female painters like Alice Neel and Paula Rego.
On the same floor, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, which has outposts in Brooklyn and San Francisco, has an exhilarating display of paintings by Esther Mahlangu, a member of the Ndebele people of South Africa. Mahlangu's abstract geometric canvases were made with a chicken-feather brush. Although they look much like paintings by European modernists and have been showcased in big exhibitions at the Pompidou in Paris and Documenta 9 in Kassel, Germany, in 1992, the paintings draw on community values and even prayers.
The Brazilian gallery A Gentil Carioca is showing three artists whose work highlights the earth — but through the filter of political, social and environmental concerns. Denilson Baniwa's watercolor and graphite on tururi (a natural vegetable fiber) celebrates Indigenous cosmologies, while Maria Nepomuceno makes sculptures with straw, beads, wood and ceramics drawn from Indigenous artisanal traditions. Kelton Campos Fausto paints with natural pigments on linen, showcasing Yoruba spiritual guides and clay vessels.
In the Focus section of the fair, which features emerging and younger galleries, South Korea's G Gallery is a standout with its presentation of the Korean-born, New York-based artist Yehwan Song. For her installation, Song created a faceted cardboard armature and projected video onto it. Titled 'Internet Barnacles' (2025), the booth-size work points to how water serves as a constant metaphor for digital activities ('surfing' the internet; 'streaming,' 'cloud'). If water seems anathema to digital processing, the use of cardboard serves as an antidote to the hard plastic, metal and minerals required to make the digital realm flow.
Painting is the fuel that generally runs art fairs, and Frieze is filled with plenty of it. The Chicago gallery Gray, which has an impressive display, is hosting two painters: the Michigan-based Judy Ledgerwood and the Oklahoma-born Leon Polk Smith (1906-1996). Smith was inspired by the primary colors of Mondrian and the curvaceous geometries of Brancusi and Jean Arp. His hard-edge abstractions are complemented here by Ledgerwood's playful compositions that draw from folk art — perhaps even wallpaper or fabric designs — as well as the lineage of modern abstraction.
From Los Angeles, Night Gallery is showing the Canadian artist Wanda Koop's 'Plywood Paintings' from 1981 to 1990. (In addition to her work as an artist, Koop also founded Art City, a free community art center in Winnipeg.) A couple of her large grayscale paintings, which look almost abstract, actually depict satellite dishes on buildings. Other paintings feature stark landscapes or a swan stranded in a pink ground. There is a spareness to Koop's paintings, but also a strong material presence, with buildings and trees carved out of chunky brushstrokes applied to heavy wooden panels.
I saw Malo Chapuy's paintings earlier this year in Mor Charpentier's Paris gallery, and they were an excellent complement to an extraordinary historical exhibition: 'Figures of the Fool: From the Middle Ages to the Romantics' at the Louvre, which explored how this tragicomic character prefigured modern humans and their existential condition. Chapuy recreates religious compositions from the Middle Ages and borrows old techniques, as well, including wooden panels and gold leaf and hand-carved frames — and then inserts modern-day objects into the mix. Gas masks and wind farms appear among the donors, saints and fools. What might read as a gimmick gains gravity when you ponder the connections between past and present politics, religions, wars, superstitions and so on.
Fairs are very much for-profit ventures (sadly, what isn't these days in the art world), but two nonprofit initiatives at Frieze deserve mention. The Artist Plate Project, founded to benefit the Coalition for the Homeless, features editions of dinner plates with images by famous artists, living and dead, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Louise Bourgeois, Sanford Biggers, Cindy Sherman and Jackson Pollock. For $250, you can help homeless people — and it's probably the most affordable way of being a shopper rather than a browser at Frieze. The other initiative, 'Incomplete* Listing,' compiled by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School includes a detailed list and map of 84 freely accessible reading spaces in New York. Some, like the Brooklyn Public Library, are more obvious. Others are lesser known, like the Library of the Printed Web at MoMA, the Morbid Anatomy Library & Giftshop or Wendy's Subway, a reading room, writing space and independent publisher in Bushwick. But they might be good places to commune with art-and-idea-minded people when the rush of Frieze week subsides.