Frieze 2024 at Cork Street

Cork Street Galleries is thrilled to announce its annual Frieze Week programme, highlighting exhibitions, extended opening hours, and special events that will coincide with Frieze London and Frieze Masters, Wednesday 9 – Sunday 13 October 2024.

All of the galleries on Cork Street will throw open their doors to welcome the evening crowds of Frieze West End Night on Thursday 10 October (18:00 – 21:00), with special events and private views.

Cork Street Galleries’s permanent roster of galleries, including Frieze No.9 Cork Street, Alison Jacques, Alon Zakaim Fine Arts, Flowers Gallery, Goodman Gallery, Holtermann Fine Art, MASSIMODECARLO, Messums London, Nahmad Projects, Redfern Gallery, Sam Fogg, Stephen Friedman, Tiwani Contemporary and Waddington Custot together have announced 15 exhibitions to celebrate the busiest and most exciting week in London’s art calendar.

FRIEZE No.9 CORK STREET (9 Cork Street) is pleased to present its programme for October, in which the Mayfair space will welcome three exhibitions featuring Rhea Dillon, John Giorno, Eunsil Lee, Sudhir Patwardhan, Francesca Woodman and more.

ALMINE RECH, ‘Memories of the Future’

Curated by Marco Capaldo, Creative Director of 16ARLINGTON, ‘Memories of the Future’ features 14 visionary artists. Each responding to Capaldo’s prompt that ‘memories are not immutable experiences existing only in our past, but rather ever-evolving experiences that continuously shape and inform our future’, the selected artists work across painting, photography and installation. Highlights include paintings by Rhea Dillon, Remi Ajani and George Rouy; sculptures by Jesse Pollock and Sandra Poulson; photographs by Francesca Woodman; and an installation in the form of John Giorno’s seminal DIAL-A-POEM ‘free poetry service’, first shown at MoMA in 1970.

CYLINDER, Eunsil Lee, ‘Treachery Skin’

Eunsil Lee’s solo exhibition ‘Treachery Skin’ explores the psychological interplay between suppressed desires and societal norms. Lee scrutinises the vulnerability of sorrow and despair, creating paintings that are akin to unfinished buildings. Dismantling states of psychological instability and the human nervous system with meticulous precision, Lee bares the tender flesh of emotion.

Vadehra Art Gallery, Sudhir Patwardhan, ‘Cities: Built, Broken’

‘Cities: Built, Broken’ is Sudhir Patwardhan’s first solo show in London. The leading Indian contemporary artist presents recent work, including large and small canvases and a body of drawings. The exhibition coincides with the Barbican’s show ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’, which also features Patwardhan’s work.

The three exhibitions run concurrently until 19 October 2024.

ALISON JACQUES (22 Cork Street) presents its first exhibition of British artist Alison Wilding (b. 1948 Blackburn, UK); a widely anticipated overview of the artist’s 50-year career, spanning work from 1975 to the present day. This show allows a comprehensive insight into one of Britain’s most respected and yet under-recognised sculptors.

Wilding’s work is often discussed in terms of materials and shadow, concealment and revelation; the artist refers to her work as ‘mostly abstract sculptures’. Outside of abstraction, her practice is very much related to human desires and bodily encounters. As Wilding says, ‘sculpture can be sexy’. Wilding often pushes together and juxtaposes unlikely relationships between materials including wood, rubber, paper and sand, focusing on her continued exploration of balance, weight and line.

Jacques will additionally present ‘Studio Origins’, a solo exhibition dedicated to seminal Brazilian artist Lygia Clark (b.1920, Belo Horizonte – d.1988, Rio de Janeiro). This exhibition runs concurrently to Clark’s first UK museum solo exhibition The I and the You at Whitechapel Gallery, London (Until 12 January 2025).

Clark is regarded as a radical innovator who pushed the boundaries of what is considered art, fundamentally redefining the relationship between artist and viewer. As a leading figure of the Neo-Concrete movement, initiated in Rio de Janeiro in 1959, Clark understood art as an organic phenomenon. She demanded a subjective, body-related and sensual experience which encouraged viewer interaction.

The two exhibitions run concurrently until 26 October 2024.

ALON ZAKAIM FINE ART (27 Cork Street) presents ‘Muhammad Ali in Focus: The Greatest’ by Chris Smith. The exhibition opens in conjunction with the release of an extraordinary book that celebrates the legendary boxer Muhammad Ali through the lens of acclaimed photographer Chris Smith. This immersive collection showcases a series of black and white photographs that capture the essence, strength, and charisma of one of the greatest sports icons of all time. Featuring recollections from both Alon Zakaim and Chris Smith, the book also contains an in-depth essay on the highs and lows of Ali’s career, written by renowned journalist Paolo Hewit.

The photographer’s second solo show at the London gallery will feature a curated selection of Smith’s most compelling and emotive photographs of Ali. These timeless images, many of which have never been publicly displayed, chronicle Ali’s illustrious career and personal moments, offering a rare glimpse into the life of a global icon beyond the ring.

The exhibition runs until 8 November 2024.

FLOWERS GALLERY (21 Cork Street) presents a solo exhibition, ‘The Crossing’, by the acclaimed Scottish artist Ken Currie. The Crossing transports viewers to an unknown archipelago, characterised by its desolate and barren islands and towering sea stacks. The landscapes, reminiscent of the westernmost islands of the Outer Hebrides, feature eroded rock towers that emerge from a deep, black sea, foaming and spraying at their bases.

In this stark and unforgiving environment, an unidentified community endures a precarious existence without shelter. Stranded or perhaps in a state of perpetual waiting, these figures balance barefoot on guano-coated rock faces and navigate the waters in wooden-hulled vessels, steered by hooded ferrymen through the treacherous sea stacks. Their weather-beaten appearance is marked by silt-stung, red-tinged eyes and skin.

The exhibition runs from 9 October – 16 November 2024.

GOODMAN GALLERY (26 Cork Street) Goodman Gallery is delighted to present new work by Kapwani Kiwanga in a solo exhibition, ‘Rudiments’. The exhibition follows themes related to transcultural exchanges, material histories and world-making established in the artist’s Canadian Pavilion presentation at the 2024 Venice Biennale ‘Trinket’ as well as her Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art show ‘Kapwani Kiwanga: Where salt and freshwater meet and crooked trees filter the sun’.

Rooted in research, Kiwanga’s practice reveals hidden histories that shape our present. ‘Rudiments’ continues the artist’s exploration of various forms of world-making, delving into how diverse cultures construct and interpret their origins while also drawing attention to how conditions of trade and exchange affect realities.

The exhibition runs until 6 November 2024.

HOLTERMANN FINE ART (30 Cork Street), is honoured to present works by Peter Buggenhout in the artist’s second exhibition at the gallery.

Buggenhout’s unique and compelling oeuvre consists of autonomous, seemingly disparate groups of sculptural objects. Resisting interpretation and devoid of symbols, the works engage the viewer in a dialogue on our inability to comprehend the complexity of the world. Speaking strong individual languages, there are visual traces of Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines, Arte Povera’s use of found material and the industrial detritus application by artists like John Chamberlain in works that defy easy interpretation yet draws the viewer into their individual cosmos.

On view will be the latest work from ‘The Blind leading the Blind’ group; works from Buggenhout’s new ‘King Louie’ series, a large wall-bound sculpture from ‘On Hold’ as well as works from the ‘Mont Ventoux’ and ‘Mute Witness’ groups.

The exhibition runs until 14 December 2024.

MASSIMODECARLO (16 Clifford Street) is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Swiss artist Olivier Mosset, titled ‘On the Lost Highway’, organised by American critic and curator Bob Nickas. In this exhibition, Mosset invites us to ponder the winding, uncertain paths of both life and art. Much like a road trip without a GPS, his works leave us questioning where we are, and more amusingly, whether it even matters. Mosset dissects the existential crisis of painting, pushing the boundaries of monochrome. In his chameleon paintings, colour becomes a shapeshifter, continually evading permanence.

The exhibition runs from 7 October – 9 November 2024.

MESSUMS LONDON (28 Cork Street) presents a group exhibition entitled ‘Emerging Landscape Painting’ which considers the individual and collective response to environment as represented in landscape painting today. This exhibition delves into the dynamic realm of contemporary painting through the lens of artists who reimagine and experience the natural world through their practices. Landscapes are a potent medium for exploring the intricate symbiotic relationship we have with nature and how, through painting, our perspectives can change to reflect this.

The exhibition aims to draw together perceptions of landscape through the eyes of artists who experience, observe, and appreciate it, demonstrating how understanding through observation can lead to different value systems of perceived beauty. The deeper purpose to not only reflect this beauty but to invite the viewer to reconsider their own interactions with the environment. With art forms that address everything from ecological issues to envisioning harmonious coexistence, the exhibition underscores art’s vital role in fostering awareness and inspiring change in our engagement in the world around us.

The exhibition runs from 9 October – 16 November 2024.

NAHMAD PROJECTS (2 Cork Street) presents ‘ALL KINDS OF GORGEOUS’, the first solo exhibition by London-based artist Murray Clarke (b. 1992) at the gallery. Known for his meticulous exploration of consumerism and material culture, Clarke’s newest works focus on the commodification of clothing and textiles, depicted in hyper-realistic detail. Drawing on the art market’s objectification of artworks, where luxury and the monetisation of culture play a central role, Clarke’s practice critically examines lust, value, and desire as they manifest through material goods.

The exhibition runs from 7 October – 28 November 2024.

SAM FOGG (15D Clifford Street) presents ‘Cobalt and Turquoise’, a focus exhibition exploring the use of blue pigments and glazes in the production of fine stone-paste ceramics in the Kashan workshops during the period between c.1150-1350.

The twelve objects presented reflect the diverse production of medieval Persian ceramics workshops and their vibrant experimentation with blue glaze and underglaze-painting combinations.

The exhibition runs until 18 October 2024.

STEPHEN FRIEDMAN GALLERY (5-6 Cork Street) presents ‘Fragments from the treasure house of darkness’, Kehinde Wiley’s first solo exhibition in London in three years following ‘The Prelude’ at The National Gallery.

Wiley is known for his vibrant and highly naturalistic paintings of contemporary African American and African Diasporic men and women, reconstructing hierarchies and conventions of classical portraiture. Marking a new direction in his practice, the artis has created two multi-part paintings for the exhibition alongside a series of 60 paintings inspired by historic miniature portraits that first appeared in European royal courts in the sixteenth century. These deeply personal objects were used throughout centuries to symbolise love, and to commemorate births and deaths.

The exhibition runs until 9 November 2024.

THE REDFERN GALLERY (20 Cork Street) presents ‘John Carter RA: In Colour’.

“It was a surprise to see the use of powerful colours in my own earlier paintings,” says the artist. “I found that it brought a different kind of energy and “presence” to the work even an increased voltage! I realised this was something which could be reintroduced and in turn could form fresh possibilities of development.”

For many years John Carter’s work has been associated with greys and pale blues, but there have always been occasional forays into stronger colours. Using a new approach he allows the colours to appear in their full intensity. This exhibition, which includes work from 1980 to the present day, is clear evidence of this renewed interest.

The exhibition runs from 9 October – 1 November 2024.

TIWANI CONTEMPORARY (24 Cork Street) is proud to feature the first of two solo presentations (the second in Lagos early 2025) by Emma Prempeh, where pictorially she considers for the first time, landscape, and its relevance as an expansion of her hyperreal perceptions of home, belonging and memory. Her paintings depict events, people, interiors, places and still life from past and recent memories, emphasising and representing the passing of time and the instability of memory. On occasion, Prempeh includes projected still or moving imagery, to invite experiential and performative encounters with her work.

‘Wandering Under a Shifting Sun’ accounts for recent shifts in Prempeh’s personal life as she divides her time between London and Kampala, Uganda. Her experience of living between continents and developing new kinships and extended family, has overlapped with more established familial conversations around belonging in relation to her grandmother and mother’s memories of St. Vincent in the Eastern Caribbean, and their subsequent migrations to London; and her Ghanaian father and the aspirations he has for the plot of land that he owns in West Africa. Pertinently, the artist’s growing consciousness around decolonial and indigenous activism around land rights, and her migrant status as a newcomer to Uganda, has begun to expose greater nuance and complexity of her diasporan subjecthood. ‘Wandering Under a Shifting Sun’ invites us to observe Prempeh’s poetics of relation, manifest as a visual magic realist interpretation of the events and vistas shaping her life in this new series of paintings and installation.

The exhibition runs until 17 November 2024.

WADDINGTON CUSTOT (11-12 Cork Street) presents ‘Retables’, an exhibition of new work by French painter Fabienne Verdier (b.1962, Paris, France). In this new series, Verdier breaks from the conventional canvas format and adopts the structure of a winged altarpiece, reimagining it outside of a religious context. No longer connected to any liturgical function, Verdier’s ‘Retables’ instead employ individual abstract motifs, painted with her iconic large-scale brushes, to evoke individual phenomena of the natural world. Further paintings from the series will be shown in a coinciding exhibition hosted by Galerie Lelong in Paris, bringing to light this remarkable body of work across two cities simultaneously.

Over a career spanning more than three decades, Verdier has been concerned with painting invisible forces that define the natural world, such as the pull of gravity, the movement of wind or the vibrations of sound. Her research takes her deeper into the complex connections between the energies and forms of nature, drawing comparisons between splayed tree branches with forks of lightning, a vortex of water to the spiral of a creature’s shell, or the capability of a single line to suggest a landscape or horizon line. Rendered abstract motifs painted within the altarpiece format, these silent marvels of everyday life are presented as sacred; Verdier’s new series is an urgent call to cherish and protect the natural environment.

The exhibition runs until 17 November 2024.