Crisp autumn foliage and the sight of white tents peeking above the trees in Regent’s Park—it could only mean the return of Frieze London and Frieze Masters. The two fairs kicked off their VIP previews on October 14th, drawing a typically well-dressed and spirited crowd, with Helena Bonham Carter, Andrew Garfield, and Tilda Swinton among the famous faces in attendance. It was a colorful, exciting, and—dare we say—jubilant opening, a celebration of the continuing dynamism of London’s art scene, which continues to prove its doubters wrong. Keep calm and carry on? At Frieze, it’s stay suave and shimmy through.
With more than 300 booths between them (172 at Frieze London and 140 at Frieze Masters), the fairs are showcasing everything from Triceratops skulls to transgressive sculpture.
Frieze London, which is dedicated to contemporary art, has regained a sense of vitality in recent years, perhaps spurred by the arrival of competitor Art Basel Paris across the Channel four years ago (this year’s edition opens next week). Works by established artists are still commonplace here, but many galleries use the opportunity to introduce emerging names and experimental practices to a receptive crowd. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the fair’s Focus section, dedicated to younger galleries, where risk-taking is the order of the day. Visitors might not love everything they see, but the fair is betting they’ll leave with a few discoveries. This year, intriguing art can be found in just about every corner of Frieze, including the restrooms (courtesy of London artist Gray Wielebinski, who has transformed urinal cakes and toilet-rim blocks into scented sculptures).
And while Frieze Masters, dedicated to historical art, has a reputation for being more subdued than its contemporary sibling, it too offered plenty of surprises, from lesser-known chapters of established artists’ careers to the Spotlight section, where solo presentations champion pioneering and overlooked figures. The fair also retains its charming eclecticism, with armor, jewelry, and rare books rubbing shoulders with paintings and sculptures by some of art history’s storied names.
While both fairs comfortably passed the ambiance check, they are ultimately judged on the strength of their buying activity, which appeared tentatively strong during the opening hours. Sold-out booths on VIP day included Gagosian, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Alice Amati, and a.SQUIRE, and reported sales were led by Jan Brueghel the Elder’s Still Life of Flowers in a Stoneware Vase (1607–08) for a price “in the region” of £5 million ($6.57 million) at Hauser & Wirth’s Frieze Masters stand. “I’ve been in London for every single Frieze Week since the fair’s inception, and I am here to say this city is as busy, energized, exciting, and excited as I ever have seen it,” enthused the gallery’s president Iwan Wirth.
“The fair felt much more manageable this year, with a positive energy throughout,” Federica Bonacasa, art advisor at Citi Wealth, told Artsy. “Many of the most in-demand works had been placed early on, and galleries seemed to feel a degree of buoyancy.”
The strong presence of international visitors also served as a reminder of London’s enduring status as a global art capital. This week, the city is buzzing with major museum exhibitions, an expanding constellation of satellite fairs, and standout gallery shows, offering plenty for art lovers of all stripes.“It really felt as though people had traveled to London as a destination,” added Bonacasa.
Here, we present our 10 best booths from Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2026.
With works by Ilana Savdie, John Banting, Hans Bellmer, Louise Bourgeois, Frank Bowling, Alexander Calder, Salvador Dalí, Willem de Kooning, Marlene Dumas, Leonor Fini, Nancy Grossman, Richard Hunt, Gustav Klimt, Maria Lassnig, Jackson Pollock, Egon Schiele, and Yves Tanguy
Painter Ilana Savdie, who grew up in Barranquilla, Colombia, returns to her home city’s carnival annually. Last year, one motif kept catching her eye: the alligator. It comes from the myth of the hombre caimán, or “alligator man,” who drinks a potion to spy on women bathing and gets stuck halfway between man and alligator. The motif made its way into the paintings at the heart of White Cube’s booth: huge canvases that undulate with fluorescent forms. “The idea of a hybrid being is a huge part of the work,” the artist said.
The alligator is most visible in Lip Lickers (2026), where reptilian mouths gape open. Savdie said the title evokes “someone salivating over a joke,” alluding to the Florida immigration detention center that was nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz” by the far right.
Savdie worked on the paintings side by side over several months, layering them and setting them aside to dry. “I’m dealing with the quick-drying mark and the slow-drying mark, and the friction between the two,” she added. Alongside the new paintings are recent, more minimal ink works with simple, swooping lines, and several 2024 works on paper, including oil monotypes and pen-and-acrylic drawings.
This central display, all on standard white booth walls, is surrounded by a sturdy metal grid hung with incredible pieces by major 20th-century names:Egon Schiele, Marlene Dumas, Leonor Fini, Frank Bowling, all artists whose practices have inspired Savdie. Visual echoes emerge between these smaller historical works and Savdie’s paintings. The grasping hands in Salvador Dalí’s Scène hystérique d’une femme avec tiroir (ca. 1937), for instance, find a counterpoint also visible in Savdie’s The Harbingers (2026). Savdie called these links “incidental.” “It’s coming from such an instinctive place at this point,” she said.
The booth was packed on VIP day, making Savdie hard to pin down for an interview. The gallery declined to give prices for the historical works, but Savdie’s range from $15,000 to $325,000.
—Josie Thaddeus-Johns
With works by Unathi Mkonto
In his simple curved wooden forms, Unathi Mkonto is exploring new languages for African architecture, drawing inspiration from the land. Mkonto is part of Working Title, Goodman Gallery’s incubator for emerging African artists, and was nominated by Yinka Shonibare for the gallery’s booth in Frieze’s Artist-to-Artist section. (The pair met in person for the first time at the fair.)
Here, the South African artist shows beechwood sculptures inspired by the umbrella tree, whose almost horizontal shape is common across African landscapes, bearing fruits and seeds. At the center of the booth is the largest work, Branching Umbrella (2026), a stacked pile of book-sized panels, from which arm-like extensions stretch more than 15 feet across. Small wooden spheres nestle between these branching rods, forming a minimalist gesture evoking a tree, its branches, and its seeds. For Mkonto, nature remains the best model for how to live. “All these shiny internet things are going to go away,” Mkonto said, “and we’re going to go back to that.”
Originally trained in architecture, Mkonto later taught himself woodworking. “I cut the wood into strips and bend it as far as it can go, and then I let it sit for a while, and it takes the shape,” he said. It took him years to understand the material, and he’s still learning. “Every day is something new,” he said. “I don’t get bored of it.” The resulting sculptures are deceptively simple, at once future-oriented and timeless.
By the end of the fair’s VIP day, the booth had sold out, with works priced between £8,000 and £15,000 ($10,605 and $19,885).
—J.T.-J.
With works by Steph Huang
If your stomach is rumbling after hours of marching around the fair, Steph Huang’s cheeky booth with Public Gallery will have you salivating. Titled “Lili Deli,” after her 2025 exhibition at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, her solo presentation of hand-blown glass and cast metal works in this year’s excellent Focus section offers “a critical audit of our consumer habits,” said Nicole Estilo Kaiser, the gallery’s director. Among the works are wall sconces made of tins of Perello olives and Lyle’s Golden Syrup, oversized shiny green glass olives, and a bar cart holding a bowl of pink high-fructose syrup (the syrup is real, and the gallery will have to keep flies away from it all week).
Born in Taiwan in 1990, Huang now works out of a studio at Studio Voltaire in London. Her practice revolves around two questions, Estilo Kaiser said: “What are we eating, and how is it getting to us?” Each work traces a link in the global supply chain. For instance, Golden Egg’s Matinee (2026) consists of a beautifully hand-hammered copper egg perched on bronze chicken feet inside a circular glass-and-powder-coated steel structure. Almost a furniture piece, it calls attention to industrial farms that “prioritize high yields and rapid growth over the basic welfare of animals,” Estilo Kaiser said. Elsewhere, tiny glass prawns point to shrimp farms in Indonesia, where forests have been cut down to make way for man-made ponds.
Other works explore the ingredients hidden in our food. Hold one of the glass slices of bread in Toasted (2026) up to the light and invisible ink reveals “E471,” an emulsifier found in most supermarket bread. Huang doesn’t exempt herself from this scrutiny. Much of what’s on view, including the glass olives, reflects what she eats and recycles. “We are, as consumers, seduced into buying the things that we do,” Estilo Kaiser said. Prices for works range from £7,000 ($9,200) to £12,000 ($15,800).
—J.T.-J.
Frieze London, booth A12
With works by Aiza Ahmed, Tanya Goel, Subodh Gupta, Jitish Kallat, Bharti Kher, Pushpamala N., Ayesha Singh, and Kuldeep Singh
Every figure in Aiza Ahmed’s installation at Nature Morte has an exaggerated nose. The distinctive feature recurs across the Pakistan-born artist’s unframed paintings on paper and fabric that hang haphazardly from the wall. Repeating the motif of a South Asian man in military dress, Ahmed considers the social pressures to conform to colonial masculinity. “Just because you have a uniform or a costume doesn’t mean the nation can homogenize,” she said.
Ahmed is one of three artists making their Frieze London debuts in “The Restless Present.” The booth is curated by Habda Rashid, senior curator of modern and contemporary art at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum. Rashid brought together artists from India and the South Asian diaspora whose work broadens our understanding of “visual culture, vernacular forms, systems of knowledge beyond the Western canon.” The title, she said, poses a question: “Is our present really static?”
This theme is perhaps most explicit in the large inkjet print by photographer Pushpamala N., who restages Vasco da Gama’s arrival in India as depicted in a 19th-century painting, casting herself in the role of the Portuguese explorer. The editioned work, which is also held in Tate’s collection, is surrounded by an ornate golden frame that emphasizes the theatrical construction of this historical moment, now reimagined through a postcolonial perspective.
Another thread running through the booth is the urgency and speed of India’s 20th-century modernization. Reflecting the shift from traditional village life to fast-paced urban centers, Subodh Gupta paints the pots and pans of village cooking “almost into abstraction,” Rashid said. Against raw canvas, this silver cookware is engulfed in blurred, gestural brushstrokes, evoking what has been lost and what remains.
—J.T.J.
With works by Fernanda Galvão
An alien landscape flourishes across the walls of Casa Triângulo and Foundry Seoul’s shared booth. In her richly colored paintings, Fernanda Galvão conjures fantastical scenes that could depict the bottom of the sea or a desert. In her early twenties, the Brazilian artist, born in 1994, survived cancer twice, said Rodrigo Editore, partner at Casa Triângulo. The experience led her to study her own cells and explore the relationship between the microscopic and the cosmic. “Everything exists in a single cell and also in the whole universe,” he said.
Working with charcoal, dry pastel, oil stick, and oil on linen, Galvão builds up hybrid forms that resemble sea anemones or strange plant life, rendered in a bruised palette of browns and blues, shot through with neon. These are “fictional landscapes,” Editore said, where “fictional human beings and nature…exist in different dimensions.” Titles like Acid Pearls, Night Ghosts, and Velvet-flower, Seed-eyes and the Black-hole-shells (all 2026) hint at the otherworldly environments she’s evoking. Her surroundings also seeps into the work. After a trip to Joshua Tree, she started including more dry, desert-like forms in her paintings, as seen in an untitled triptych on view in the booth.
Now based in France, Galvão is gaining international momentum. Last summer, she showed alongside David Hockney and Georgia O’Keeffe in “Alien Shores,” a group show of strange landscapes at White Cube Bermondsey. She is also one of four winners of the ArtReview x Casa Wabi prize and has recently joined the roster of Berlin gallery Barbara Thumm, where she will have a solo show in July 2027. More than half of the booth’s works had sold by the end of VIP day priced €7,500 to €30,500 ($7,838 to $34,185).
—J.T.-J.
With works by Shiko Munakata
Bold black lines, softly bleeding colors, and expressive figures define Takato Kano Gallery’s striking solo presentation of works by Japanese printmaker Shiko Munakata. Spanning works from the 1950s through the early ’70s, the booth offers a fascinating look at the artist’s experimentation with woodblock printing, a medium he helped push in radical new directions.
Munakata drew his subjects from a wide variety of sources, from religious figures to boats, blending spiritual symbolism with everyday subjects. Among the highlights is a series of 10 hanging scrolls each depicting a Buddhist disciple, which relate to works exhibited at the São Paulo Bienal in 1955 and the Venice Biennale in 1956, where Munakata gained international recognition.
As gallerist Kano explained, Munakata departed from traditional woodblock techniques by developing urazaishiki, or reverse coloring, applying pigment to the back of thin washi paper rather than its surface. “The black line is the most important, so color never dominates,” Kano said. The resulting soft, diffused hues allow the forceful outlines to remain at the forefront.
This interplay of forceful linework and delicate color lends the works an extraordinary vitality. Prices for works range from £9,000 ($11,871) to £650,000 ($857,398).
—Arun Kakar
Frieze Masters, booth D9
With works by Alice Neel
As visitors approach David Zwirner and Victoria Miro’s joint booth, they are greeted by Alice Neel’s striking 1966 portrait of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. With his mouth agape and eyes wide behind dark-rimmed glasses, Ginsberg appears mid-exclamation against a swirling backdrop of blues, grays, and whites. The arresting painting offers a fitting introduction to a presentation dedicated to Neel’s portraits of queer individuals and their wider circle.
The presentation draws on “At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World,” an exhibition curated by Hilton Als that debuted at Zwirner Los Angeles in 2024 before traveling to Miro in London last year. Other highlights include Kris Kirsten (1971), whose subject meets the viewer with a direct, defiant gaze, and John Cheim (1979), a portrait of the New York art dealer. The works showcase Neel’s fascination with the people who shaped her world, each portrayed in all their individuality.
Few artists captured the complexities of human character through portraits quite like Neel. With her loose, expressive brushwork and unflinching psychological insight, the American painter turned portraiture into an intimate record of the communities around her, often depicting individuals overlooked by the mainstream.
The booth is part of the fair’s new “Queering Modernism” initiative, which explores the influence of gender and sexuality on 20th-century art. To this end, the presentation also includes archival materials that shed light on the lives of Neel’s sitters.
—A.K.
With works by Ibrahim El-Salahi
It’s not often that visitors get to see an entirely new side of an artist as celebrated as Ibrahim El-Salahi. Yet Vigo Gallery has brought together a remarkable selection of rarely seen early paintings by the Sudanese modernist, offering a glimpse into a pivotal chapter of his career. Dating from his student years at London’s Slade School of Fine Art between 1955 and 1957, the works show the artist’s experimentation, where he began to dismantle traditional forms of representation in pursuit of his own distinctive visual language.
Titled “Pre-Pixel,” the presentation brings together works from the artist’s family collection, most of which have never been publicly exhibited. “He starts breaking down the pictorial plane,” Vigo Gallery’s Sebastian Salisbury told Artsy, describing a crucial turning point in the artist’s development. The fragmented forms and geometric structures of his Untitled paintings from 1956 and 1957, for instance, demonstrate his growing interest in breaking images into smaller, interconnected parts. Their gridlike compositions give the impression of pixels, evoking the visual language of digital imagery decades before its emergence.
Often described as a pioneer of African modernism, El-Salahi became the first artist from the continent to receive a retrospective at Tate Modern in 2013. His celebrated practice would go on to fuse Arabic calligraphy, African visual traditions, and Western modernism. Here, visitors encounter the beginnings of that artistic language. Works are priced from £145,000 ($191,265) to £400,000 ($527,630).
—A.K.
With works by George Rickey, Josef Albers, Georg Baselitz, Ross Bleckner, Sam Francis, Peter Halley, Alex Katz, Robert Mangold, Allan McCollum, Louise Nevelson, Hermann Nitsch, Georg Karl Pfahler, Ed Ruscha, Pierre Soulages and Andy Warhol.
There’s a mesmerizing sense of movement at MARUANI MERCIER’s booth, where George Rickey’s delicate kinetic sculptures hang overhead and punctuate the space, their slender metal elements gently shifting with the surroundings (and forcing a few visitors to get out of their way). More than 20 works spanning five decades of the American sculptor’s career take center stage in this elegant presentation, which makes a compelling case for an artist whose influence has arguably outpaced his recognition among collectors.
“He is really well known in the art world, in art history,” gallery founder Serge Maruani told Artsy, noting that Rickey’s work is held in more than 180 museums worldwide, yet remains comparatively unfamiliar to collectors. The gallery began representing the artist’s estate in Europe earlier this year, and the booth includes rarely exhibited works alongside pieces previously shown in museums. Prices for works by the artist range from £14,000 ($18,467) to £200,000 ($263,815).
The sculptures are shown alongside two early paintings from Josef Albers’s iconic “Homage to the Square” series. Rickey considered Albers a mentor, and their works offer contrasting yet complementary explorations of perception, through movement and color respectively.
Elsewhere, the booth brings together an impressive roll call of works by post-war heavyweights, including Georg Baselitz, Pierre Soulages, Alex Katz, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol. It’s an emblematic Frieze Masters presentation: museum-caliber names, thoughtfully orchestrated dialogues, and an abundance of visual riches, all assembled with a touch of class.
—A.K.
With works by Ossip Zadkine, Eduardo Paolozzi, William Turnbull, Paul Mount, Margaret Lovell, Auguste Rodin, and Helaine Blumenfield.
At Bowman Sculpture’s booth, a pair of hulking metal works by Scottish sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi are designed to be climbed on, crawled through, and played with. These unusual 1970s creations (priced at £120,000—$158,289—each), which sit at the intersection of sculpture, architecture, and playground equipment, offer a fascinating glimpse into a chapter of Paolozzi’s career when the artist was rethinking how art could inhabit public spaces.
Created during a period when Paolozzi was collaborating with designer Terence Conran, the sculptures were conceived with children in mind, combining bold, architectural forms with an unexpected sense of play. One features intricate handwoven elements and carefully softened edges, while the other adopts a more angular, architectural form. Both have previously been exhibited at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. “This was a completely different way of looking at sculpture,” gallery director Mica Bowman told Artsy, describing the artist’s ambition to create something “beautiful, architectural, but also that people can engage with.”
Elsewhere, the works on view explore the more expressive possibilities of sculpture through Ossip Zadkine’s Tête d’Orphée (Head of Orpheus) (1956), a Cubist-inspired interpretation of the mythological musician, alongside exemplary works by Auguste Rodin, William Turnbull, and Margaret Lovell. Together, the booth offers a compelling journey through the evolution of modern sculpture, from expressive treatments of the human form to fractured planes and playful architectural experiments. It’s a thoughtfully assembled presentation that invites visitors to consider sculpture as something to experience.
—A.K.
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