London’s exceptional art scene comes alive in October. This week, an autumnal Regent’s Park plays host to the art fairs Frieze London and Masters, and celebrates its 20th year, alongside a host of dynamic open-air works installed in its verdant grounds for Frieze Sculpture.
It's an exciting time for the art lover, as every gallery, museum and pop-up space opens their key exhibition for the year, highlighting new names and celebrating the art world’s sure-fire hits. This year, there are shows that explore the political potential of art as activism, untold stories are brought to the fore and women’s rage is unleashed to formidable effect.
Here are some of the best exhibitions to catch this week…
Modern Women at Frieze Masters
Frieze Masters is the fair’s calmer strand, focusing on historical works. For this edition, a curated section is dedicated to artists making work between 1880 and 1980. Modern Women is overseen by non-profit AWARE, whose goal is to retell the male-dominated narrative of art history. The charity researches 19th- and 20th-century art, from the evolution of first-wave feminism into the powerful second wave of the 1960s, '70s and beyond. The 10 artists exhibited at Frieze Masters include Faith Ringgold, whose searing paintings and quilts confront racial injustices in the United States; Lisetta Carmi, the Italian photographer who chronicled Genoa’s trans community in the 1960s; and Émilie Charmy, a French avant-garde painter whose radical nudes subverted the expected subject matter of women artists in the early 20th century.
