The Frieze Art Fair is the moment when every museum, gallery and fashion flagship brings out their big art guns. Cue blockbuster exhibitions like African American icon Kerry James Marshall at the Royal Academy of Arts or Dover Street Market transforming their windows with the work of historic painter Georgia O’Keefe. The contemporary art fair itself continues, however, to be a place of fresh energy and creative discovery.
Frieze week first began in London in 2003. The art world was a quieter place then, slowly emerging from the YBA shock era and the big millennial projects like the Tate Modern. The baby of art magazine Frieze, it has slowly transformed London.
Here, we’ve rounded up some of the best artists you can discover at the fair. These are artists who question our relationship with identity, place, politics, beauty and emotion in varied ways. Painting is still the hottest medium in the art market, but these artists also step out into sculpture, installation, drawing and collage. Each has a unique aesthetic but all of them are unafraid to bring the emotional to the fore. Let’s dive in.
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Caroline Walker is one of the hottest painters of the moment. The Scottish artist who is showing with Ingleby Gallery at Frieze is best known for large scale figurative works depicting women at work or their daily lives. Here, women are working in studios and factories, holding babies, cleaning, tailoring, cooking, and teaching. Her photorealist work has an echo of 19th century classicism. This is work that we immediately connect with as a mirror of ourselves. These are large scale paintings held in collections from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC to London’s Tate. Emotional, pensive, intimate and beautifully rendered in oil.
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Jasmine Gregory reconfigures paintings as a giant pack of cards at Vienna’s Sophie Tappeiner – a gallery known for an almost entirely female roster of emerging, exciting names. Born in the States and based in Zurich, Gregory’s multimedia work explores ideas around systems of taste and wealth. In particular, she is interested in what happens when the structures and systems of society fall apart. Cue canvases emblazoned with “DIVORCE”. She has gained serious momentum in the past two years with international solo shows in London’s Soft Opening, MoMA PS1 in New York and the Istituto Svizzero, Milan. This is satirical yet beautiful work, sitting somewhere between abstraction, text and collage.
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American artist Gray Wielebinski makes sculptures, installations, videos and collages that prod at the constructed systems of power, politics and gender identity. His Frieze booth features sculptures that at first resemble vases for flowers or stationery but are, in fact, resin casts of gun grips made from bulletproof silicon carbide and alumina tiles. They form a critical take on the intersection of violence and beauty, eroticism and threat. Here, Gray shines attention on North American gun culture, and notably high school shootings. On a lighter note, fashion fans may recognise the London-based artist and his partner as figures in Goshka Macuga’s video installation for MiuMiu in Paris last October.
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Shaqúelle Whyte’s work, which is on view both at Pippy Houldsworth’s Frieze booth and Mayfair gallery, gives off ambiguity. The Wolverhampton-born artist studied at Slade and Royal College of Art and is quietly emerging as one of the best painters of his generation, whose work has been bought by the Arts Council and Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum. Although wrestling male figures are a recurring motif, ‘In Jesus’ name we pray’ (2025) shows new directions. The group figurative work reflecting the artist’s Jamaican heritage, in particular the funerary tradition of Nine Nights, echoes West African cultural rituals. The dark and lush landscape is filled with a mourning family together in peace. An evocative moment of all life revealed to us all.
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British artist Sarah Ball creates the kind of lush, light drawings and paintings that exude pop fantasies of femininity. Make up, hair, clothes, jewellery and beauty are at the heart of Ball’s work, reflecting teen years listening to the music of musical artists like David Bowie, Siouxie Sioux and Poly Styrene. These works play with the glam rock and punk expression of identity through how we look. The paintings are stunning, but it’s the works on paper that really shine out. Tender, intimate portraits in pencil that exude pleasure, gender fluidity and playfulness.
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New York City galleries Karma and Salon94 are joining up for this stunning booth at Frieze Masters, showing the late abstract painter Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori. Born in 1924, the Aboriginal artist created bold, vibrant canvases that reflected the landscape and stories of her native Bentinck Island in Queensland and her experience in the Kaiadilt indigenous community. Gabori only started painting in the last decade of her life and even represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 2013, two years before she passed away. This is one of those rare moments to see museum level work on a fair booth.
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John MacLean is one of the people who seems to flourish in whatever creative medium he turns his hand to. He is best known as one of the founders of The Beta Band, the Scottish band Big in the 2000s and known for their mix of psychedelia, folk and electronica. Then Maclean became an award-winning film director and scriptwriter with ‘Slow West’ (2015) and the more recent Scottish samurai film ‘Tornado’ (2025). It was during the pandemic, however, that John began to paint – something he had studied at the Royal College of Art and Edinburgh. His small, colourful landscapes and woodland forests are around A4 in size, impressionistic and quietly perfect.
