Frieze Sculpture 2022

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The annual Frieze London art festival takes place in October each year. There are a several indoor galleries, but also a free to view Sculpture Gallery in Regent's Park. I ran there to see this years works.



Matthew Darbyshire, Hercules Meets Galatea, 2022 
The re-imagining of Greco-Roman figures in Hercules Meets Galatea encourages us to examine the ever-changing lexicon of sculptural motifs including sign, symbol, substance, structure, surface, source and sexuality. 


Ugo Rondinone, yellow blue monk, 2020 
Ugo Rondinone’s yellow blue monk (2020) is part of the artist’s recent “nuns + monks” series. These works explore the transcendence offered by the natural world, and through color, form, and mass, evoke an altogether contemporary version of the sublime.  


Robert Indiana, Imperial LOVE, 1966–1971  
Self-proclaimed ‘painter of signs’, Robert Indiana converts text into sculptures, referring to them as ‘one-word poems’. His most iconic, ‘Love’, is a theme he returned to time and again.


John Wood and Paul Harrison, 10 signs for a park, 2022 
The kind of signs you see in a park, but not the signs you see in a park. 
They don’t point you anywhere, tell you anything or ask anything of you. 
They point at themselves, tell you things you already know and only ask you to have a little think. 
The kind of think you’d have in a park.



Alicja Kwade, Tunnel-Tell (Ceci Sera), 2020 
A solid boulder is punctured effortlessly by a stainless-steel tube. Tunnel-Tell (Ceci Sera) examines the space of brute matter by permitting viewers to peer through solid mass. This simple act allegorizes our own limited view of what we call reality.  


Ron Arad, R.A. (born 1951), Dubito Ergo Cogito, 2022 
Rodin’s The Thinker has left, leaving us the bronze volume he was just sitting on, with an imprint of his bum and feet. On display here is a prototype for a series of six.  



Jordy Kerwick, Vertical Plane Me, 2022
Jordy Kerwick (Australia, b. 1982) transports you into his dream world of mythology, folk law and misadventure, that feel like a reinterpretation of his 10-year-old self’s hopes, dreams and fears. These sculptures carved in Portland Stone are inspired by Ken Webster’s book ‘Vertical Planes’ (1989).  



Tim Etchells, Don’t Look Back, 2022
A simple idiomatic phrase, cut into weathering steel, asks us to think about it afresh in dialogue with context and landscape.


Shaikha Al Mazrou (b. 1988, UAE), Red Stack, 2022
Enlarging her folded steel sculptures, which resemble balloons and displays of origami, Al Mazrou seeks to represent tension, weight and space, borrowing from conceptual art and geometric abstraction, and formally from minimalism.  


N.S. Harsha, Desired for – Arrived at, 2021
Harsha’s bronze sculpture Desired for – Arrived at is constructed not on the basis of linearity or logic but on the crooked, visceral movements of desire in our ever-changing positions in life.  


Beverly Pepper (1922-2020), Curvae in Curvae, 2013-2018
Beverly Pepper titled Curvae in Curvae after the Latin word curvae, meaning bent or curved. A dominant motif in her oeuvre from 2012, Pepper’s curves poetically render the Cor-Ten steel mass as weightless.




Péju Alatise, Sim and the Yellow Glass Birds, 2022
Sim is a nine-year old girl who lives in two worlds. In one world she is a domestic servant in Lagos. In the other world, Sim lives in dreamland with talking birds and butterflies where she can fly.







Ida Ekblad, BOOK OF BOREDOM, 2022
Conveying a rich sense of abundance and corporality, this painted bronze sculpture presents a vibrant composition, filled with fragmented, angular patterns and shapes, from the artist’s own expressive paintings.


Emma Hart, Big Time, 2022
Hart makes art that does something; here setting her sculptures to work outside. Radiant ceramic sundials, reinvented with faces, wait for exposure. Each dial is under a different time pressure, taking way too much or not having enough.



Pablo Reinoso, Speaker’s Corner, 2022
With the convivial grouping of his ‘Speaker’s Corner’, Pablo Reinoso invites you to sit down and relax, to chat with friends or contemplate the beautiful natural surroundings of The Regent’s Park.


Ro Robertson, Drench, 2022
The latest manifestation of Ro Robertson’s exploration of the ‘terrain of the queer body’ which welds the figure and landscape as one.




John Giorno, SPACE MIRRORS MIND, 2022
The John Giorno Foundation and Almine Rech present a previously unseen sculpture by John Giorno from the late series entitled Stone Poems: a found glacial granite into which a poetic phrase is engraved.  



George Rickey, Five Lines in Parallel Planes, 1966
Iconic within the sphere of 20th century public sculpture, George Rickey’s oft-monumental, precisely-calibrated works evoke a poetic elegance that belies the complexity of their design.

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