ART FAIRS:Frieze Sculpture 2018
Every year, Frieze selects a number of sculptures to be displayed outside of the tents of the Fair as part of their outdoor sculpture garden. Curated by Clare Lilley, the Director of Programme at Yorkshire Sculptue Park, Frieze Sculpture 2018 presents 25 new and significant works by 20th Century masters and leading contemporary artists from around the world including Tracey Emin, Elmgreen & Dragset and Sean Scully.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Frieze Archive
The 2018 edition of Frieze Sculpture is expansive and diverse, so that the public and collectors can experience world-class artwork in the beautiful English gardens, designed by Markham Nesfield in 1866. Frieze Sculpture 2018 brings together 25 artists from five continents. Presented by international galleries, the 2018 artists are: Larry Achiampong, John Baldessari, Rana Begum, Yoan Capote, James Capper, Elmgreen & Dragset, Tracey Emin, Tim Etchells, Rachel Feinstein, Barry Flanagan, Laura Ford, Dan Graham, Haroon Gunn-Salie, Bharti Kher, Kimsooja, Michele Mathison, Virginia Overton, Simon Periton, Kathleen Ryan, Sean Scully, Conrad Shawcross, Monika Sosnowska, Kiki Smith, Hugo Wilson and Richard Woods. The oldest living artist on the list, John Baldessari has shaped contemporary art as we know it. At the Regent Park, his polyurethane self-portrait is a playful and deeply personal penguin. It brings alive his own words when he said: “I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex”. Creating conversations with the sun is Conrad Shawcross. In his “Optic Labyrinth” every panel is different, so the way they respond to light is dynamic and subtle”. As the light dances on the designed steel mesh, it creates ever-changing patterns, symbolic of the ancient riddles and tales. With a simple immersive maze, the work engages with the sun and its shifting position throughout the day and the seasons, focusing specifically on how people navigate and orientate themselves both emotionally and physically in relation to its rise and fall. Dan Graham presents an exquisite glass pavilion. Originally commissioned in 2012 for London’s annual urban sculpture park, Sculpture in the City, Dan Graham’s large-scale pavilion, London Rococo, creates a critical engagement in his steel and two-way mirrored glass pavilion. Created as a hybrid, Graham’s pavilion blurs the lines between art and architecture and produces diverse optical effects. Kimsooja’s “A Needle Woman: Galaxy was a Memory, Earth is a Souvenir” (2014) reflects the modern millennium. The 46-foot high, 4.5-foot-diameter needle-shaped steel structure is made for an intimate exterior and interior experience inspired by the perspectival direction of nanotechnology and French philosopher Henri Bergson’s thoughts on memory as related to metaphysical perception. Kimsooja explores the notion of the needlepoint as an intersection between distance and memory threading across a cosmic scale. In Yoan Capote’s enigmatic sculpture of human teeth, concrete and bronze, entitled “Stress” the artist has collected the teeth of people from Cuba for several years; the work is a metaphor of psychological tension, resistance and a kind of social homage. South African artist Haroon Gunn-Salie’s group of crouching figures can silence you. “Senzenina” (2018) takes the form of a series of compelling headless statues that represent the striking miners who were shot by police.
Info: Curator: Clare Lilley, Artistic Director: Jo Stella-Sawicka, Regent’s Park, London, Duration 4/7-7/10/18, www.royalparks.org.uk
