Frieze London 2022

Esther Schipper is delighted to present major works at Frieze London 2022. Our presentation at the Booth F07 will have a special focus on works that draw on a painterly idiom. The booth will include works by Martin Boyce, Matti Braun, Sarah Buckner, Angela Bulloch, Simon Fujiwara, Rodney Graham, Andrew Grassie, Ann Veronica Janssens, Isa Melsheimer, Sojourner Truth Parsons, and Karin Sander. 

After Light references Martin Boyce’s Dead Star series in which lamps with cast bronze lamp holders were shown. The impossibility of illumination through the bronze elements lent these pieces a melancholic poetry, aligning the wonders of the solar system with the quotidian presence of industrial or domestic lamps. 

Matti Braun's work consists of a silk panel in a narrow aluminum frame. The rectangular image shows a progression of deeply saturated colors. The work is a continuation of Braun’s series of seamless color progressions on silk. Because of their intense coloration, these works are technically extremely demanding to produce. 

A recurring theme in Sarah Buckner’s work since Fall 2021, the artist’s depictions of female nudes among shadowy, possibly magical figures, have both a dark note of revenge and danger, as well as humor and an appetite for new beginnings. Some of the representations of fantastic fauns and nymphs, paired with everyday characters and personal experiences, were inspired by her reading of Stéphane Mallarmé’s symbolist poem l’après-midi d’un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun, published 1876). Another source of inspiration for Buckner’s recent images of women, is Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s essay Nymphs which theorizes the representation of female figures – magical and human – and sparked for the painter new ways of imagining and depicting the female form.

Works from Simon Fujiwara's Who the Bær series recreates iconic master pieces by famous, historically significant artists through the perspective of his cartoon figure Who the Bær, among them Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani and Paul Gauguin.  

Angela Bulloch’s sculpture Viridian Green consists of four assembled geometrical forms that were conceived within a digital imagining programme. To envision the work in its entirety the viewer has to turn around it, which at times seems graphic—almost abstract—shifting between two and three dimensions. The sculpture’s two-dimensional geometry recurs in the unique wall drawing by Bulloch, also presented at our booth.   

Held in a palette of bright blues, purple, red and yellow, Rodney Graham’s painting, executed in oil on canvas, recalls the coloring of a Mediterranean scene.  Some sections have a rough-grained surface, stemming from the use of sand mixed into the paint. The work is from a new suite of paintings that brings together motifs from Graham’s own previous series of paintings in which the artist reformulated various modernist idioms.  

Andrew Grassie’s intimately scaled, precisely painted work is executed in tempera, a painting technique associated with pre-Renaissance panel paintings anteceding the development of oil paint. Grassie chooses motifs that had attained his attention for reasons he cannot always explain. Photos from his image archive, sometimes many decades old and exuding a vague awkwardness, became sources for these works.  

The iridescence of Ann Veronica Janssen’s Magic Mirror is created by a dichroic polyester film between the sheets of fractured but held intact glass. As one moves around the work, each seam reflects the light at different angles, creating variant shapes and colors.  

A ceramic sculpture by Isa Melsheimer was conceived on occasion of her solo exhibition at the International Centre for Art and Landscape, Vassivière Island. The work draws on the architecture of Italian star architect Aldo Rossi (who with Xavier Fabre designed the institution's 1998 building).  

The work of Sojourner Truth Parsons, a young Canadian artist who joined the gallery this spring, has an emotionally charged, dreamlike quality. With their silhouetted figures and abstract objects, the graphic clarity of Parsons’ scenes gives us clues but shrouds all in mysterious darkness that seems to tell a story. 

Karin Sander’s glass work belongs to a series made of liquid glass spread out on a surface, which slowly welled over its edges until it solidified into drop-shaped offshoots. With their shapes reminiscent of solidified liquids, these cooled-down glass sculptures are reminiscent both of lava and ice, or solidified paint drops.