Yearly, the Focus part at Frieze London presents a snapshot of what younger artists internationally are occupied with and making work round, and the way younger galleries are defining and representing their native rising artwork scenes. In 2025 there are, in fact, many artists who’re addressing world points: warfare, displacement, the local weather disaster. However there are others who’re exploring how these points can have an effect on self-identity, reminiscence and particular person inventive authorship. Type the micro to the macro, listed here are 5 themes to look out for in Focus this yr.
Authorship, Authenticity and Phantasm
A number of displays throughout Focus have a look at how the inheritance of concepts and viewpoints can undermine ideas of authenticity.
Chicago-based Mika Horibuchi (56 Henry) makes use of the historically well mannered medium of watercolour to look at affect and Western artwork historical past. She repeats photos at totally different scales or in varied types to query how the topic and object of a portray relate to at least one one other, and the way that may distort the inherent ‘worth’ of a piece.
Born in Nashville, painter Emma Rose Schwartz (Brunette Coleman) can also be closely influenced by the previous, particularly the cultural place of US people artwork, with explicit reference to the troubled histories of the American South. Her works, human-scaled and hung low on the wall, counsel a toddler’s-eye view of historical past – partial and solely partially knowledgeable.
Alina Rentsch, displaying with Petrine, takes a distinct method, contemplating the artwork honest itself as an authored assemble. Working with supplies usually related to the business sphere, Rentsch explores how the setting of the honest circumstances the way in which we have a look at artwork.
Ecology, Panorama and Disaster
The worldwide local weather disaster hangs over Focus like a pall. A number of artists think about the damaging legacy of human interference inside ecosystems; others have a look at particular points of the way in which that man, animal and plant may work together.
Ariamna Contino and Alex Hernández (El Apartamento) from Cuba map the human consumption of vitality and pure assets equivalent to water and timber, not simply in agriculture however within the manufacturing of their very own artworks. Korea’s Rim Park (Cylinder) additionally questions materiality in her work and sculptures, incorporating foraged parts equivalent to moss and tree roots to query the place the panorama may finish and the artist start.
Different artists are much less literal. In ‘Venom Voyage’, Christelle Oyiri (Gathering) tackles the poisoning of the ecosystem of her native Martinique and Guadeloupe with chlordecone, an insecticide extensively used on banana plantations. Her set up juxtaposes environmental catastrophe with an acid-bright vacationer fantasy, teasing out totally different sorts of colonial toxicity.
Painter, sculptor and musician Luís Lázaro Matos (Madragoa) additionally takes a left-field method to environmental points. His site-specific set up ‘Benny the Beluga’ makes use of cartoonish humour to discover how humanity’s self-serving and needy anthropomorphism shields us from confronting the truth of the local weather disaster.
Equally lowering disturbing world realities to a human scale, Chinese language artist Xin Liu (Public Gallery) is displaying a metal tank crammed with duckweed-covered water. A mechanical web periodically skims the weed off the water, just for it to return in a meditative cycle of denuding and regrowth.
Korea’s Eunjo Lee (Niru Ratnam) additionally faucets into the religious dimension of dwelling issues. Her movies The Lullaby of the Ruins, When Forgiving the Daylight and Earlier than the Shadow Taught the Solar think about that animals, pure objects, machines, viruses and DNA may all have consciousness. It’s not us and them: it’s simply ‘us’.
Creation amid Battle
Man-made destruction as a theme will not be restricted to the surroundings in Focus this yr. Wars and conflicts additionally function prominently, together with questions of the way you may proceed to create in a world intent on destruction.
Born ‘within the ruins of the Soviet Union’, Ana Gzirishvili, displaying with Georgia’s Gallery Artbeat, creates assemblages that appear pulled from scenes of destruction. Wooden, metallic struts, bits of clothes and moulded leather-based trace at each the violent and sudden juxtaposition of supplies by explosions and aircraft crashes, and the priapic impulse of nationalism.
Grey Wielebinski (Nicoletti) additionally investigates the aestheticization of violence and its hyperlinks to each nation- and manhood. His wooden sculptures based mostly on discovered gun grips are introduced in a fairground sales space, suggesting the overlap of childhood video games and high-school shootings.
Egypt’s Yasmine El Meleegy and Marianne Fahmy, displaying with Gypsum, each have a look at industrial dehumanization and the way it can overwrite private and nationwide histories. El Meleegy crafts wall items from shattered home dinnerware, whereas Fahmy’s tapestries mix mechanization and hand embroidery.
Reminiscence, Psychology and Self-Portraits
Subsequent to those that have a look at the workings of historical past, many artists on this yr’s Focus handle reminiscence and points of human psychology.
Warsaw’s Galeria Wschód is displaying Japan’s Kenji Ide and Danish artist Anton Munar. By means of totally different media, each artists have a look at how place invokes reminiscence, how reminiscence creates a way of place and the way journey could be each a common human expertise and a deeply private particular person one.
The current works by Poland’s Rafał Zajko (Coulisse) ‘mix folklore, popular culture and science fiction to discover the late-capitalist drive to “foreverize” – a time period coined by US creator Grafton Tanner in 2023 to explain a cultural motion that seeks to endlessly extend the previous.’ His items typically conflate the illusory permanence promoted by governments with private gestures of existence, like sticking chewing gum on monuments.
‘Deadtime’ by Cally Spooner at palace enterprise explores ‘efficiency tradition’ – how we outline ourselves by means of productiveness, ‘metric sociality’ and digital visibility. Central to the set up is a wall, the color of uncooked muscle, which is symbolically erased by the artist utilizing white emulsion.
Additionally utilizing paint symbolically – although in a really totally different manner – Chinese language Brooklyn-based Xingzi Gu (Gallery Emptiness) employs conventional Chinese language brush portray method, with its steadiness of technique – moist/dry; skinny/thick – to think about dualities of the self inside relationships and throughout cultural boundaries.
One other artist who makes use of the thought of self and the opposite to have a look at themes of change and anxiousness is Mexico’s Enrique López Llamas (Llano). El otro protagonista de la noche (The opposite protagonist of the night time) is a collection of 16 video vignettes that work as an allegorical coming-of-age narrative.
Dwelling, the Home and Childhood
Knowledgeable by private psychology, particular person historical past, reminiscence and cultural id, house is a recurring there throughout this yr’s Focus.
Anne Low (Franz Kaka) makes use of textiles in wall works and sculpture. Deeply conscious of the diasporic histories inherent in textiles, and the way in which that they outline the home house, her wall works items are based mostly on a mattress curtain, a drawer lining and a fitted sheet, manufactured from hand-dyed and -woven silk.
One other artist who makes use of the micro surroundings of the home house to invoke cultural histories, Toby CATO Grant is presenting ‘the house of an imagined Caribbean household’ on Harlesden Excessive Avenue’s stand. It contains wallpaper, a textured carpet and collaged household portraits from CATO’s personal assortment of outdated Polaroids.
Lebanon’s Omar Fakhoury (Marfa’) additionally appears to be like again to childhood, however by way of the myths, anecdotes and superstitions that he heard rising up. He presents these as culturally particular, whereas acknowledging that they concurrently seem nearly universally throughout the globe in several varieties.
Additional Info
Frieze London and Frieze Masters, The Regent’s Park, 15 – 19 October 2025.
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Primary Picture: Emma Rose Schwartz, TV Dawn, 2024. Courtesy: the artist and Brunette Coleman. Photograph: Jack Elliot Edwards
