Freize
London and Frieze Masters just ended, they were held from 11th to 15th October
at Regent's Park in London, right in the heart of the city. The first dedicated
to contemporary art by living artists, the second focused on the great artists
of the past and contemporary classics.
Frieze is one of the most important and influential fairs in the world, capable
of attracting curators, artists, galleries, art dealers and collectors from all
continents. The fair was founded in 2003 by Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover
and this year, in its 20th edition, it attracted approximately 60 thousand
visitors.
We attended
the fair as visitors and we’d like to offer you a focus on Frieze London. Among
the proposals that impressed us the most, we mention Gagosian gallery, which
presented a solo show by the British artist Damien Hirst. The booth was showing
a selection of unpublished works entitled
The Secret Gardens Paintings
,
focused on paintings whose main subject are gardens. You can observe verdant
gardens, with flowers of every species in bright colors and arranged on the
canvases in a naturalistic way, sometimes chaotic, sometimes harmonious.
Looking into every single art piece, the spectator finds himself following the
same path as the artist: he begins with the recognition of a distinct
background, which gradually becomes a little blurred and a pictorial ardor that
tends towards disorder and confusion grows to abstraction. This also develops
on a material level with layers of splashes on the surface that recall abstract
expressionism, but on an almost flat and hyper-realistic background.
We can find the meaning in the relationship between man and nature: man's hope
of being able to somehow control nature turns into the realization that this
thing is totally useless and impracticable.
The
sculptural operation by Reza Aramesh, represented by Night Gallery and entitled
Action 241: Study of the Head as Cultural Artefacts
, is very significant
and contemporary.
With this series the artist represents through sculptures an archive of images
that portrays various bodies raped and subjected to the public gaze, especially
narrating the relationship between these acts and their representation in the
history of art. In this case Aramesh focused on an element so brutal and widely
represented in artistic history: decapitation. As an example, we can think
about the biblical episodes or those linked to the French Revolution, which
seems to have greatly fascinated artists of any era.
The artist
Vanessa Raw aroused much interest, proposed by Tracey Emin thanks to the
“Artist-to-Artist” initiative, in which a very famous figure in the art world
sponsored a lesser-known artist, in this case Vanessa, represented by Carl
Freedman Gallery. The exhibition presents a cycle of works focused on the theme
of sexual freedom: intimate and erotic homosexual scenes, bodies fused with
each other and at peace, with the surrounding nature. The landscapes are
totally undefined, a non-place generated by the artist's imagination.
The final message turns out to be a hymn to freedom, to liberation from the
chains of society with the aim of living in harmony with ourselves, with others
and with the nature.