Frieze Focus 2024: Interconnectivity and Rebellion Against Division.

Frieze London’s annual Focus section is held in high esteem as the leading platform for emerging galleries and artists to showcase their innovation and talent. This year’s collaboration with Stone Island showcased thirty-four presentations, a mixture of galleries and solo artists from across five continents. From digital installations and balloon animals to the more traditional mediums of painting and sculpture, the thread that tied a number of the Focus artworks together seemed to be a rebellion against the problematic division that society faces today.

Nils Alix-Tabeling, Candelabre, ‘Night Butterfly’, 2023. Public Gallery, London and Piktogram, Warsaw.

A subversion of boundaries and yearning for connection seemed to be the tone of this year’s Focus section at Frieze London 2024. Fostering the connection of galleries and artists from across several continents was Joumana Assily (Founder, Marfa), Piotr Drewko (Founder, Wschód), and Cédric Fauq (Chief curator, CAPC musée d’art contemporain, Bordeaux). The advisors curated thirty-four gallery and solo artist presentations that display the innovative talent of the emerging art scene. Explorations of boundaries, whether a rewilding abandonment or stark materialisation of them, were exhibited throughout the section. Here are some of New Wave’s top picks:

The first artist I came across was Charlotte Edey, represented by Ginny on Frederick, who presented a series of works titled ‘Thin Places’. Eight frameworks and two stain glass windows created the ambiance of a chapel or 19th century reading room. The frameworks were crafted from textiles embroidered with beads and semi-precious stones and drawings. The gallery commented “they are spaces that are ‘and’ rather than ‘or’, they’re bodily and architectural, they’re inside and they’re outside.” The sweeping forms within Edey’s drawings allude to biological forms, whether a hand or what could be tunnels of the heart, juxtaposed with structural backgrounds. While Edey’s compositions and forms seem to reference early female surrealism and domestic scenes, her own fantastical sparkle is stitched into the frameworks with delicate beading. Upon closer inspection, amongst the beads are sometimes ribbon, pearls, or even antique clock hands. Becoming enveloped in Edey’s mystical chapel delves the viewer into a boundaryless realm where binaries do not dictate.

Charlotte Edey, 'Thin Places', The Drawer (2024). Frieze Focus, London.

Another Focus artist defying the confines of human constructs of society is Dimitra Charamandas. From Cairo, Gypsum gallery presented the Greek-Swiss artist’s series of paintings, titled ‘The Sting’. The artist explained that her canvases “explore the quiet resilience and protective systems of natural ecosystems”. Layers of watered-down acrylics on cotton in an organic colour palette of greens, blues, lilacs, and browns evoke the symbiosis of nature. This fluidity is contrasted with sections of thicker paint, portraying the resilience of the natural world. The paradox of fragility and fortitude seems to be the answer to Charamandas’ question that inspired the series, “how do we actually protect values, bodies, souls?” The artist commented, “I somehow organically turned towards plants and ecosystems and how they, in symbiosis, have this resilience and ways of protecting.” ‘The Sting’ urges us as viewers to reconsider the binaries of vulnerability and resilience; it encourages us to question where the balance truly lies and confronts the idea that, within modern society, we have lost sight of how to protect values, bodies, and souls. Perhaps the answer is not in the technological innovations and endless scrolling on screens, but in a return to nature.

Around the corner, we land in both the past and future with Nils Alix-Tabeling’s sculptures that indulge the viewer in pagan traditions and witchcraft. Upon first glance, the structures are haunting and imposing, while on closer inspection there is a fantastical intimacy about them. Honouring an 8 BC pagan temple in Montbouy, France, the details of Alix-Tabeling’s sculptures capture the ethereal energies of the water deities pilgrims would worship and seek healing from. In a contemporary reimagination of pagan ritual, Alix-Tabeling deconstructs gender archetypes; Public Gallery, who represent the artist at Frieze this year, wrote, “the artist recentres queer and female voices of rebellion and encourages radical futures to be imagined.” In Le Déesse de Montbouy (2024) a combination of the Celtic carving of a sheela na gig with river water pearls and dilapidated wings looks towards an alternate reality where humanity is not bound to modern ideals, instead existing in a mystical realm where rebellious beings thrive in their interconnectivity.

David L. Johnson instead chose to highlight the violent division within society through his ongoing ‘Loiter’ series presented by Galerie Noah Klink. The spiked metal sculptures were originally installed on standpipes in New York City. Known as standpipe spikes, the objects would deface the city’s architecture in the name of capitalist productivity. To deter the public from loitering, essentially ‘doing nothing’, the spikes were an aggressor, a regulator of the capitalist agenda. Johnson decided to highlight the outdated physical divisiveness of these objects by removing them and exhibiting them in galleries. Seemingly falling under the ‘found objects’ category of sculpture, the viewer’s perceptions of the spikes might extend beyond the limits of their intended function and instead, through Johnsons actions, evolve into a challenge to hyper productivity. In the rapid pace of today’s society, where the next best thing is merely a few seconds, or taps, away, perhaps loitering is just what we should do. Whether we sand, sit or, lean, in groups or alone, if we loitered, even just for a second, and really experienced the world around us we might just feel a little more connected, a little more alive.

David L. Johnson, 'Loiter', Removed Standpipe Spike (2024). Frieze Focus, London.

Frieze Focus 2024 is showcasing some incredible emerging talent that, upon viewing, made me feel more connected and alive. Breathing new life into the art world, these artists gave me hope that we’re not becoming entrenched in a money driven market void of human emotion and are instead genuinely exploring "values, bodies and souls". To find out more visit Frieze Focus at https://www.frieze.com/article/focus-returns-champion-young-galleries-frieze-london-2024.