Frieze London's Focus Section Spotlights Six Emerging Galleries

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Frieze London's Focus section, dedicated to solo presentations by galleries operating for fewer than 12 years, is a particularly dynamic part of this year's fair. This segment is recognized for its capacity to offer unexpected discoveries, and the six featured stands showcase the breadth of its material and intellectual scope.

Jayeeta Chatterjee, represented by Chemould CoLab from Mumbai, explores women's labor through large textile pieces and woodcut prints. Chatterjee, who lives in Bengaluru but grew up in West Bengal, combines her printmaking training with nakshi kantha, a traditional quilting technique that is becoming rare. She prints figurative designs of women working, including in textile production, onto used saris from the depicted women. Her work also documents their lives through photography and audio; in The Infinite Weft (2026), decorative patterns transform into waveforms that evoke her conversations with her subjects.

Isaiah Davis, presented by King's Leap in New York, exhibits three pieces addressing the Black body and its vulnerabilities within social and political environments. Davis uses welded steel, emphasizing its loaded materiality and expressive potential. The central work, Undertow (2026), is a sculpture featuring triangulated I-beams on wheels, inscribed with words like“Token gets spent” and names, including Don, Jeff, and Sean. A chain extends from this wheeled object, affixed to the wall in a form that suggests a rib cage. Beyond evoking slavery, these sculptures also function as fetish objects and reliquaries, as seen in Vesselhood (2026), which features a penis through an aperture, and Gayer Secrets (2026), a piece that is part chastity belt and part sacred heart.

Amanda Moström 's installation, Bikini Bottom, from Rose Easton in London, repurposes market-sourced objects by applying goat hide for presentation in the art market. Her installation, which will be altered daily, transforms everyday items, such as an umbrella, a tissue box, and an office chair, into sensual forms through the animal skins. A found photo album within the installation shows a woman posing, often unclothed, for personal or more complex reasons. Moström's work also examines care, giving these mundane objects new potency and significance, which she tests by exhibiting them at the fair. A glitter ball, featuring mirrored tesserae interspersed with goat-hide swatches, projects a constellation onto the stand's wall.

Yuli Serfaty 's installation, Who's a Good Girl?, shown by Xxijra Hii from London, is noted as one of the fair's most unsettling stands. It includes two sculptures depicting a headless hybrid creature with multiple breasts, combining canine, human, and digital attributes. A central CGI video shows a training environment where this being initially struggles but then develops agency, escaping surveillance drones by exploiting system glitches. Serfaty's influences range widely, from feminist technoscience to Louise Bourgeois 's sculpture and the Capitoline Wolf in Rome. Her work is rich with metaphors for contemporary issues, including climate change and AI autonomy.

Ella Fleck 's installation, training material, presented by Ehrlich Steinberg in Los Angeles, emanates audio recordings from OnlyFans, an online subscription service often used by pornographers. Utterances such as“I've never seen such a nice cock before... Nice to meet you, Antonio” rumble through the floor speakers. Fleck worked as a“chatter” for a company managing communications for OnlyFans creators, including the“chatter scripts” used in the installation. Screens display data documenting more chats, the creation of fake chatter identities for explicit interactions, and the ultimate financial goal of the enterprise. The floor itself is partly constructed from recycled data-center architecture. This work functions as a journalistic sculptural inquiry into the alienated and illusory interactions that often pass for intimacy in contemporary society.

Tom Hardwick-Allan 's intricate multi-part work, Engine of Sickness and Light, from South Parade in London, features a wall piece appearing as a thin cross-section of an ancient tree, composed of nine interlocking plywood sections, with a central image of a baby in a womb. Upon closer inspection, it reveals a profusion of imagery reflecting Hardwick-Allan's wide-ranging interests: human and animal imprinting, numerology, alchemy, and augury. He considers his practice to be expanded printmaking, evident in his display of a“staircase,” more akin to an edifice, of printed matter. This includes his personal book collection, wrapped in cloudy translucent glassine paper and altered with oil and iron paste blobs and stains.

We previously reported:

Celebrities and art world figures gathered at Regent's Park for the VIP preview of Frieze London and Frieze Masters on October 14, 2026.

Minor Attractions art fair opened its fourth edition in London at The Newman hotel, featuring 38 galleries from 15 countries in 16 bedrooms.

Source: The Art Newspaper

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