This year’s edition of Frieze Sculpture in Regent’s Park, London, brings together works by 14 artists from around the globe. Curated by Fatos Üstek, it’s the first time the exhibition has followed a theme, and the result is a stronger sense of cohesion, where works seem to speak not only to their surroundings but to each other.
‘In the Shadows’ invites artists to explore ideas of absence and ancestry, loss and transformation. Many of the works reflect on ecological collapse and the pressures of contemporary life, but there is also a sense of joy and hope in the conjuring of folkloric figures and effigies, an effort to connect with nature and ourselves. Here are five of our favourites.
Requiem (The Last Call) by Reena Sani Kallet
(Image credit: Frieze Sculpture)
Kallet invites visitors to step onto a platform to listen to the calls of bird species that have become extinct, playing out through two horn-like structures. The horns were inspired by early 20th-century wartime listening devices that were used for tracking the sound of enemy aircraft, but they also resemble hunting horns or a pair of giant binoculars, depending on how you approach them. It’s an incredibly beautiful and moving piece – as I stood there, a bird in a nearby tree seemed to be calling out, responding to the echoes of the lost song.
When I Remember Through You by Grace Schwindt
(Image credit: Frieze Sculpture)
Schwindt’s ceramic and bronze figure is caught in a process of transformation or decomposition – emerging from or returning to the earth. The head, fallen to one side, is cradled by a structure seemingly growing up out of the ground, while vines wrap up around one of the legs. It has both an uncanny and ancient presence, as if it had always been part of the park’s landscape.
Auguries (Lament) by Andy Holden
(Image credit: Frieze Sculpture)
Auguries (Lament) is a trio of totemic wooden sculptures positioned on telegraph poles. Each piece visually translates the song of a vanishing bird – the cuckoo, the nightingale and the crow, who isn’t endangered but serves here as a messenger – captured through 3D technology. It feels more dystopian than Kallet’s Requiem – a vision of a silenced landscape.
Fibredog by Assemble
(Image credit: Frieze Sculpture)
Within the context of a ‘serious’ art exhibition, a giant dog made out of straw, thatch and timber, bearing a striking resemblance to a shaggy, long-nosed lurcher, feels intentionally silly and therefore a lot of fun. It’s a work that harks back to folkloric customs and community-made art, to dancing around fires and drinking mead. When you stand beneath the dog’s belly you can smell the straw.
Ghost (Substitutes) by Erwin Wurm
(Image credit: Frieze Sculpture)
Wurm’s electric blue sculpture of an empty, crumpled suit is one of the largest in the exhibition. Positioned between the trees, just in front of one of the grand buildings that surround the park, it looks like an anti-monument to consumerism and macho culture. Its feet are firmly planted but if you look closely, it seems as if it’s on the verge of keeling over – it made me think of the hundreds of suited people silently commuting to and from work, of the impossible demands our professional lives put on us. Later, when I looked across the lawn, a man was lying at its feet, doing press-ups.
Frieze Sculpture is in Regent’s Park until 2 November
