Frieze London ★★☆☆☆ / Frieze Masters ★★★★★ / Regent’s Park, London
Painting is back in vogue at the giant art fair. But it’s superficial and silly rather than sleazy and shocking. The Masters section is where the work to lust over is – with an actual space rock for sale
Everything has turned upside down in Regent’s Park. The two Frieze art fairs that take place here in October have changed places. All the danger, outrage and obscenity you might hope to find among the up-to-the-minute contemporary galleries at Frieze London have migrated to Frieze Masters. It is an unholy joy while its supposedly cutting-edge sibling has aged into a crashing bore. It’s coming to something when two pumpkins are the most outrageous spectacle at Frieze London. People congregate around them as if desperately seeking that famous Frieze vibe of the insouciantly daring. “Pose with the pumpkins!” a photographer is saying – and many people will want to be snapped with Anthea Hamilton’s sculptures. Bold, orange, funny and meaningless, they dominate a show created by Hamilton at Thomas Dane Gallery’s stand. But the main reason they stand out is that a couple of pumpkins will do that in a sea of paintings.
I thought I loved looking at paint. But Frieze London puts that addiction to the test, an aversion therapy. There seem to be more canvases than in the National Gallery. You walk in and immediately see a spread of abstract starbursts by Jadé Fadojutimi in the prestige site occupied by Gagosian. She doesn’t hold it. Her paintings boom and crash with colour yet they don’t stop zinging long enough to let you sink into them. And there are paintings to the left of her, paintings to the right. Whichever path you take through the labyrinth of booths, you will come across every kind of painterly commodity: pictures of people, pictures of dogs, even a picture of the Muppets riding bikes through a park by Keith Mayerson.
