Frieze London 2023

Leonardo Drew (b. 1961, USA) is known for his significant installations and sculptures which explore the tension between order and chaos. His work has been seen in major museums worldwide and is currently the subject of a major new commission at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK on view through 2023.

Number 366 and Number 367 demonstrate Drew’s approach to manipulating organic material to create richly detailed works which resemble densely populated cities, urban wastelands or organic forms and evoke the mutability of the natural world. Both works were shown in the artist’s first solo exhibition on the continent at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg earlier this year.

The first in a series of six sculptures, made from aluminium panels, fixed to a steel armature and hand-painted in oils. These works are based on a series of small-scale paper sculptures, made from coloured and torn pages from a 19th century accounting journal from the Chiesa di San Francesco Saverio in Palermo. On double page spreads from the journal Kentridge made charcoal drawings and collages for an upcoming exhibition in Palermo. Kentridge continued by making colour swatches with the journal pages, in watercolours and coloured pencil. The colour swatches were torn into fragments that formed a procession of eleven small paper and wire sculptures. Kentridge chose six of the paper figures to upscale in metal.  Frieze London will be the debut of the first of this series of metal sculptures. The series will be exhibited later in full as part of Kentridge's solo exhibition at Goodman Gallery Cape Town at the end of 2023. 

Milk (2023) is part of an accumulation of elemental symbols within Kentridge’s broader practice. This series of bronze sculptures functions as a form of visual dictionary, giving thought to form. The sculptures are symbols and ‘glyphs’, a repertoire of everyday objects or suggested words and icons, many of which have been used repeatedly across previous projects. The glyphs can be arranged to construct sculptural sentences and rearranged to deny meaning.

Painter Misheck Masamvu (b. 1980, Zimbabwe) is widely regarded as one of the leading figures of the Harare painting school. Trained in Germany, Masamvu continues to live and work in Zimbabwe which provides rich inspiration for his gestural painting.  Monkey Bars and Antelucan form part of a new body of work that combines striking colour with a distinct expressionist style to establish a grammar of chaotic compositions, gestural brushwork and perpetually altered or mutated figures often depicted in states of flux or transformation.

Seema #2 forms part of Neshat’s body of work, The Fury - a series of photographs and a film that continues the artist’s exploration of the female body in the context of theocratic politics and gender apartheid of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Fury’s photographic subjects are women of all races, creeds, and ethnicities. Their bodies bear physical signs of abuse and social alienation. The message is clear: the bedrock of power and authoritarianism is the subjugation and control of the female body.

Beekeeper (Boy) II is a playful new sculpture by Shonibare that depicts a young boy wearing a Victorian style 'bee veil' over the artist’s signature globe in place of a head. The figure is studying a bee which he holds aloft from his basket containing rows of honeycomb. Fascinated by geographical and cultural identity and the natural world, Shonibare fuses these different references in this work. The child’s Victorian costume has been refashioned from Dutch wax batik fabric. A hallmark of Shonibare’s practice, the brightly coloured patterned batik fabric is a symbol of African identity. Designed in Indonesia, these fabrics are produced in the Netherlands and sold in West Africa.

Steeped in African American history, Carrie Mae Weems’s (b. 1953 Portland, OR) is considered one of the most influential contemporary American artists. In June 2023, The Barbican presented the artist’s first major UK exhibition. Weem’s was also recently announced as the winner of the 2023 Hasselblad Award, making her the first African American woman to claim one of the most prestigious honours bestowed on a living photographer. 

Her work investigates family relationships, cultural identity, sexism, class, political systems, and the consequences of power. Determined as ever to enter the picture—both literally and metaphorically—Weems has sustained an on-going dialogue within contemporary discourse for over thirty years. During this time, she has developed a complex body of art employing photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video.

In the early 1990s, Weems rose to prominence with her Kitchen Table series: intimate black-and-white photographs that undermine tropes of African American life and womanhood as they depict the artist seated at her kitchen table alone or alongside various other characters.

Sue Williamson (b. 1941, Lichfield, UK) emigrated with her family to South Africa in 1948. In the 1970s, Williamson started to make work which addressed social change and by the late 1980s she was well known for her series of portraits of women involved in the country’s political struggle, titled A Few South Africans (1980s). 

This year has seen Williamson in the spotlight on a number of occasions. In February, she presented a new commissioned work entitled Towards Another World on her first solo museum exhibition in the UK at The Box Museum, Plymouth. In March, her acclaimed joint two person exhibition with Lebohang Kganye, 'Tell Me What You Remember’ opened at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Currently, the three films from the No More Fairy Tales series can be seen on ‘Against Apartheid’ at KARST, Plymouth. Williamson will take up an artist residency at the Yale Center for British Art in November.

Williamson’s portrait Emily Hobhouse: Beloved Traitor honours the British human rights campaigner who was a heroine of the 1899 -1902 Anglo Boer War. Reviled by the British military establishment, Hobhouse travelled to South Africa to investigate the appalling conditions in the concentration camps set up by the British for the Boer women and children whose homes they had burned down. Her impassioned reports in the British press led to reforms. In Williamson's double portrait of Emily Hobhouse and the statue of the Boer woman with a dying child on her lap, Hobhouse reaches out of her portrait to lay a comforting hand on the shoulder of the woman. More than 23 000 women and children died in the camps, and are memorialised by this statue on the Women’s Monument in Bloemfontein. Hobhouse’s ashes are interred at the foot of the Monument.