Business Finance Media Technology Policy Wealth Insights Interviews

Art Art Fairs Art Market Art Reviews Auctions Galleries Museums Interviews

Lifestyle Nightlife & Dining Style Travel Interviews

Power Lists Nightlife & Dining Art A.I. PR

About About Observer Advertise With Us Reprints

At Frieze London and Frieze Masters, Rediscoveries Are Giving the Market New Momentum

Established names still anchor the market, but this year’s fairs owe much of their energy to new and rediscovered practices.

Frieze London and Frieze Masters opened on Wednesday (Oct. 14) at a slower, reset-era pace that has by now become familiar at fairs around the world. Even so, the aisles of both the contemporary fair and its sister show grew steadily busier as the day went on. After years of covering the fairs, Observer decided to start the day at Frieze Masters, and we weren’t the only ones. Mid-day, when moving between the tents, we overheard two prominent American collectors who’d structured their day similarly discussing the desire for genuine scarcity—the kind that makes an acquisition feel truly unique, like an opportunity not to be missed, as opposed to the artificially manufactured paucity that has sometimes fueled the contemporary market.

Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter

Thank you for signing up!

By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.

Frieze Masters hosted more than 140 galleries this year, with booths offering a journey through centuries of human creation, from antiquity to modernism. Its narrative grows broader and more diverse each year, inviting a multiperspectival reading of art history across geographies and long-overlooked viewpoints, with greater attention to mystical, queer, self-taught and Indigenous expressions long excluded from the canon. The result is a chance to reconsider these traditions not as isolated or marginal developments but as expressions of human creativity evolving in parallel across borders and time.

At the entrance, London’s ArtAncient has a Cypriot votive head of a man from the 7th-6th century B.C., discovered by Luigi Palma di Cesnola and once exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, priced at £250,000. Nearby are an Egyptian quartzite relief dated to 322 B.C. and an 18th-Dynasty Egyptian head of the lioness-headed goddess Sekhmet, both offered in the six figures.

The day’s top transaction was the sale of Jan Brueghel the Elder’s oil on oak panel Still Life of Flowers in a Stoneware Vase (presented by Hauser & Wirth in dialogue with a floating Calder), which fetched in the region of £5 million.

Although Hauser & Wirth has dealt in historical masters alongside contemporary art since its founding, the placement of the Brueghel marks a significant milestone. “It is one of the most important works we’ve ever been involved with, and its backstory reflects not just art history but the history of how art moved in the 20th Century,” gallery co-president Iwan Wirth said in a statement. Part of the Rothschild collection from 1911, the painting was confiscated by the Nazis in 1938 and later entered the collection of the National Gallery in Prague before being restituted to the Rothschild family in 2016. It then returned to the market and remained in private hands until the gallery found a new home for this early 17th-century masterpiece. Hauser & Wirth reported selling 23 more works at Frieze Masters, including a wartime painting by Francis Picabia for €1.1 million and Pablo Picasso’s Violon (1943), a collage of rope and oil on cardboard, for €850,000. Other artists sold across the gallery’s two presentations included Bob Thompson, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Avery Singer, George Condo, Lee Bul and Christina Kimeze.

Several of the day’s other top sales also came at Frieze Masters. David Zwirner and Victoria Miro, each exhibiting in both tents, reported selling three paintings by Alice Neel from their joint presentation in “Queering Modernism” for $1.8 million, $1.6 million and $1.6 million. Conceived by curator Anke Kempkes, the new initiative runs throughout Frieze Masters, challenging conventional narratives of modernism through works that engage with gender, sexuality and self-representation. Vito Schnabel Gallery, meanwhile, brought a roster of contemporary blue-chip names and reported first-day sales of a George Condo for $925,000, alongside works by Ai Weiwei (€450,000), Ron Gorchov ($400,000), Markus Lüpertz (€350,000), René Ricard and Man Ray.

For collectors whose interests reach even further back in time, leading fossil dealer David Aaron is presenting an exceptionally complete, 150-million-year-old Camarasaurus supremus skull. Making the specimen rarer still is an Allosaurus tooth embedded in its lower jaw, preserving evidence of an encounter with one of the apex predators of the Late Jurassic. Priced at £1 million, the skull had drawn significant interest by the end of VIP day, though no sale had been finalized. Its appearance comes amid renewed attention to the fossil market following Sotheby’s record-breaking sale of Gus and the recent announcement that Jodi, the 68-million-year-old Nanotyrannus previously offered by David Aaron as Chomper, is heading to the auction house’s rostrum on Oct. 27 with an estimate of $6-9 million.

The more traditional Old Masters segment also had a strong opening, with reported sales including Edwin Lord Weeks’s At the Entrance of the Palace of Amber, Rajasthan (c. 1887), Pietro Antonio Novelli’s A Recumbent Lion and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s Caricature of a Man in Profile (c. 1755-60), alongside Leonor Fini’s illustration for Fêtes secrètes (c. 1978) and Alexandre Iacovleff’s Portrait of Hu Xuan-Zhai (1931).

Making its Frieze Masters debut, Andrew Edlin Gallery pairs work by two long-overlooked figures: Antiguan painter Frank Walter (1926-2009) and American sculptor Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015), both enjoying growing institutional and commercial recognition. Walter’s vivid, intimate depictions of Caribbean landscapes and everyday life have drawn increasing attention since his work appeared at the 2017 Venice Biennale, and an exhibition at David Zwirner in Los Angeles, opening Nov. 13, should further build momentum. His works were priced between $20,000 and $370,000. Buchanan’s humble shacks and assemblages become powerful repositories of memory, preserving the often-overlooked histories of Black communities in the American South and translating experiences of displacement and resilience through vernacular architecture. Following her inclusion in this year’s Venice Biennale, she is the subject of her first European survey, “Weathering,” at Spike Island in Bristol and will feature in the upcoming exhibition “Hard Art” at MoMA PS1. Her works are priced between $70,000 and $125,000, and several sold on opening day.

Worth a stop this year is “Spotlight,” a feature of Frieze Masters since 2012, returning in its largest edition to date. Curated by Devika Singh and Sofia Gotti, both academics at the Courtauld Institute of Art, the section continues to expand the traditional Western canon. Bringing together pioneering figures of 20th-century modernism from Asia, South America, the Caribbean, Africa and Europe, it focuses primarily on works from the 1950s through the late 1970s, revealing distinctive languages of abstraction and figuration that often developed independently of the movements that came to dominate Western art history.

North African modernism has an especially strong presence this year. The fair’s first Moroccan gallery, Casablanca-based Loft Art Gallery, is presenting works by Mohamed Melehi, a leading figure in Arab abstraction and a founder of the influential Casablanca Art School. Titled “Wave Forms,” the presentation traces the evolution of Melehi’s distinctive language, shaped by his life journey and exchanges between Morocco, Europe and the U.S. while remaining deeply rooted in the country’s visual traditions. The result is a series of strikingly contemporary, almost hard-edge compositions that combine rhythmic waves of color with geometric precision. The works are priced between $100,000 and $400,000, with pieces from the 1970s and 1980s proving most popular with collectors.

Nearby, Tunis-based Elmarsa Gallery turns its attention to Algerian-born Mahjoub Ben Bella. Having moved to France before Algerian independence, he was exposed to the movements emerging at the time, from Nouveau Réalisme to abstraction, which led him to develop an intricate abstract language of signs and calligraphic marks. Without identifying directly with Lettrism, his practice explored the possibilities of writing as image, transforming signs into an abstract visual field suspended between communication and pure form, often with an almost sculptural physicality. Prices in the booth range from $30,000 to $130,000.

London’s Grosvenor Gallery is presenting Pakistani artist Syed Sadequain, whose intricate accumulations of signs and symbolic forms reflect his engagement with the expressive possibilities of calligraphy and the psychological dimensions of abstraction.

Another fascinating........

© Observer