What to See at Frieze London Art Fair 2025

This year, Frieze London made the very wise decision to spotlight the city’s booming young gallery scene. Articulate, nimble, and, crucially, priced for humans, London’s delightfully ambitious cohort of young gallerists has cultivated a loyal audience for irreverent programming that flies in the face of doomsday market headlines. Those implosions, after all, are happening only at the delirious top. What remains below is a resilient pocket of excitement and commitment to craft in an otherwise stagnant global scene. Framed at Frieze among a smattering of like-minded international peers, these upstarts make a persuasive case for dedicating not just a day to the tents, but another to the streets—to explore all of London’s thriving nooks and crannies.

Ginny on Frederick

“There is no excuse. You must do something fabulous when participating in a fair in your hometown,” says gallerist Freddie Powell of Ginny on Frederick when I reach him by phone. This declaration, said with an audible smile, defines Powell’s approach to art-dealing. Powell is a backyard minder—someone who takes immense pride in nurturing and uplifting what is beautiful, unique, and growing close at hand. It’s exemplified by his solo booth with his beloved friend, Alex Margo Arden, who began showing with Powell when the gallery was still a curatorial project in a sandwich shop (back before Powell says they both "accidentally grew up”).

For Arden, this evolution has looked like a celebrated run at Goldsmiths and the Royal Academy, capped off with an admired presentation about the potency of symbolic damage at the slick bellwether, Auto Italia. At Frieze London, Arden creates an immersive environment with two major sculptures that build on the artist’s interest in how the story of progress is always told at the expense of others. The work brings to mind references as far-flung as Anthea Hamilton and Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performances, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Roberta Breitmore, and Duane Hanson’s figures. It is, as Powell promised, fabulous.

Rose Easton

When Rose Easton visited artist Jan Gatewood in their Los Angeles studio a couple of years ago, they offered Gatewood a solo show on the spot. While not unheard of in the industry, the anecdote suggests a kind of kismet of sensibilities—one that the British gallerist has since expanded on by doubling down on the success of their first presentation together back in January with a solo booth at Frieze London.

Easton thought Gatewood’s practice was particularly suited to an art fair, given the way it revels in purloining, appropriating, and reorganizing other people’s labor. After all, there are few places where the flawed fantasy of intellectual property is more visible than in the jowl-to-jowl sprawl of an art fair.

Rather than turn away from these discomforts, Gatewood’s work embraces them, propelled by what Easton calls the artist’s “sly cheekiness,” which she says “allows Jan to deal with complex and emotional topics without turning people off.” Cuteness, one of Gatewood’s favored tactics, is deployed to great effect here in the form of an oversized teddy bear. Get close enough to cuddle and you’ll find that the fur is actually a repeating image of Offset, the rapper, posing with a Jordan Wolfson sculpture at some art fair past. In the end, the fair itself serves not just as context but as a collaborator in Gatewood’s work.

Brunette Coleman

Ted Targett and Anna Eaves of Brunette Coleman were first introduced to the work of Emma Rose Schwartz in 2023 by their American colleagues at In Lieu gallery of Los Angeles. The sensibility of the Nashville-born painter felt especially European to them, its anachronistic sensibility setting off comparisons to favorites like Egon Schiele and even more British connections, like Lucian Freud and Cecilia Paul. Unlike Freud and Paul, though, Schwartz doesn’t work from life. Her paintings and portraits are fictions that Schwartz conjures in the studio—working out each vignette with preparatory sketches. While not factual, the stories emerge from Schwartz’s memories of her childhood in Tennessee and the American Gothic tradition that courses through the region, which is characterized by the works of Cormac McCarthy and William Gay.

Schwartz’s presentation at Frieze London is a new body of work with a distinctively domestic focus; the open fields and distant barns of past series are gone. We are in the boudoir, and gallerists Eaves and Targett hope to conjure that intimate feeling with their installation. With so much fanfare around their last show with Schwartz, they are eager to show her inward evolution.

a. Squire

When Archie Squire, the namesake behind a. Squire, is not minding his jewel-box gallery, he’s on the road looking at art. And his program reflects the international group of artists he has met and invited back to London—often for their first show in the city. His Frieze presentation with Los Angeles–based artist Bogdan Ablozhnyy is an exemplary window into this cabinet-of-curiosities methodology. The fair is his first solo show with Ablozhnyy, following a group show they did together last summer.

Ablozhnyy was originally introduced to Squire through another compelling artist in his program, Nina Porter, who attended the Städelschule with the latter and also studied under the great Monika Baer. These are the kinds of art-historical lineages—personal and professional—that Squire is invested in, because he is ultimately interested in facilitating what comes next. He recalls feeling just that when visiting Ablozhnyy’s studio for the first time. “I felt like there was something new [happening in the work],” Squire says. “There was something special about his promiscuity with materials.”

Like much of the work shown at a. Squire, Ablozhnyy’s practice roots itself somewhere between sculpture and photography—here, toying with photography’s corpse: the flash, the sound of the shutter, all reanimated into fresh provocations.

Sophie Taippener

Although not a Londoner, Sophie Tappeiner shares a sentiment with her British colleagues by keeping overhead low so that the program can be as adventurous as possible. In her hometown, Vienna, Tappeiner is known for flying in radical international voices that are often not available in secondary art cities. For the artists who come to Austria, it is a chance to try out something they might not want to debut in New York.

Tappeiner takes that same approach to fairs—focusing on singular presentations that offer her artists a chance to engage a new audience, as is the case with her solo booth with Jasmine Gregory, which complements and amplifies the artist’s London debut at Soft Opening gallery. The booth and exhibition come on the heels of Gregory’s excellent MoMA PS1 solo show curated by Jody Graf, and use that momentum to catapult one of Gregory’s most compelling recent series, her Divorce Paintings, to the forefront. Shown in a great big pyramid—leaned or stacked on each other, “house of cards” style, as Tappeiner refers to it—Gregory’s paintings can be purchased as individuals or as sets. Holding each other precariously aloft, Gregory’s paintings evoke a familiar crisis. They point to a system with the potential for collapse.

King’s Leap

“Frieze has always been this flashpoint in art that is not only about the market. I’m thinking about Tino Sehgal’s piece ‘This Is Exchange’ or early Gavin Brown presentations,” Alec Petty, founder of King’s Leap, tells me on the phone. “And when I look across the aisle, I see friends. We feel like we are in dialogue with these galleries.”

Hailing from New York, King’s Leap shares the tenacity of the upstart London set—often staging ingenious, possibility-stretching shows with modest means. Petty’s approach to the fair is reflective of that philosophy: a major installation by Michelle Uckotter that, at first blush, appears to be a smaller-than-normal booth of paintings—until you look through the viewfinder and find a hovel occupied by performers, as if lifted from one of Uckotter’s stocking-strewn paintings. It’s an Étant donnés moment, but also a nice sequel to Uckotter’s last body of work, which involved a double feature exhibition with Los Angeles dealers Marc Selwyn and Matthew Brown, centered around her first 15-minute short. Then, her film served as the still life for a new suite of paintings; at Frieze, it’s the reverse. The paintings now appear as studies for the performance—a format that speaks directly to the fleeting nature of the fair and winks at what remains when all the paintings alight.

Hot Wheels

After establishing their reputation in Athens, Hot Wheels gallery founders Hugo Wheeler and Julia Gardener brought some of that momentum to London and easily slid into the top of the class. The work Hot Wheels has brought to Frieze London this year feels like an encapsulation of their own journey, with Greek-born artist Aanatasia Pavlou presenting a series of large-scale oil and gesso paintings that she made during a recent summer residency at Gasworks in London. The show also follows on the heels of her solo debut with the gallery back at their Athens space this September. The repetition of the work across their spaces echoes a quality in Pavlou’s work.

Pavlou’s practice revolves around acts of return, layering, scraping back, and revising until an image seems to breathe on its own. Drawing from collage, photography, and the residue of gesture, her moody canvases hum with traces of decision-making and decision-erasing. Each surface holds the record of its birth, as if the paintings are still negotiating what they want to be—a fitting image for a gallery in motion between two cities.