Preview: October 11–12
Public days: October 12–15
Lehmann Maupin returns to Frieze London for the 19th time with a presentation that spotlights our artists’ institutional and gallery activity on both sides of the Atlantic. Booth highlights include new works by Nari Ward and Tammy Nguyen ahead of their first solo exhibitions in the UK, both opening at Lehmann Maupin London. Additionally, the gallery will present new sculptures by London-based, Korean artist Do Ho Suh, as well as works by Erwin Wurm and Nicholas Hlobo, who have concurrent exhibitions in the UK. On view at our gallery space in South Kensington is the two-artist exhibition Disfigurations, featuring London-based artist Mandy El-Sayegh and Berlin-based artist and curator Kader Attia, whose works are also on view in our booth.
Preceding Nari Ward’s solo exhibition and UK debut at Lehmann Maupin London this November, our Frieze presentation includes the artist’s historical work Chrysalis (2010), alongside a new copper panel work titled Restin’ Our Heart (2023). Widely celebrated for his sculptural installations of found objects, Ward often uses detritus sourced from his neighborhood in Harlem to activate the emotional resonance of everyday objects. Chrysalis features a faux-baroque mirror that frames an unheralded or premature version of an American flag made from foam. An assemblage of both nascent material and aspirational ideals, Chrysalis assumes an ever-evolving and anticipatory state of being; the work suggests America itself is a work in progress. At the same time, Chrysalis confronts the vulnerability of consumer culture through reflection and suggested metamorphosis.
Do Ho Suh's boundary pushing use of paper as a sculptural medium is reflected in a group of works presented publicly for the first time at the fair. Developed between 2007 and 2021 at Dieu Donne in Brooklyn, Suh's Self-Portrait/s are Gampi and Abaca paper casts of his Uni-form/s: Self-portrait/s: My 39 Years (2006). The works build on the artist’s long-standing inquiry into ideas around identity, memory, and physical space. For Suh, clothing presents the most immediate personal space we inhabit. In these new paper works, the uniforms are ghostly apparitions of their original selves—a memorialization of intimate spaces once occupied and the associations and memories those spaces hold. These works will next be presented in the artist’s solo exhibition Do Ho Suh: Tracing Time at the National Galleries of Scotland from February 17 - September 1, 2024, which will offer an expansive view of the foundational role that drawing and paper play in Suh’s artistic practice. Concurrent with Frieze London, Suh's work is included in UNBUILD: A Site of Possibility, The Drawing Room's inaugural exhibition after twenty years of nomadic activity. The exhibition will run through December 10, 2023.
Also debuting at the fair is a new, large-scale painting by Tammy Nguyen, whose first solo exhibition in London opens at Lehmann Maupin in March 2024. Nguyen is known for paintings, drawings, artist books, and prints that explore the intersections between geopolitics, ecology, and lesser-known histories. In her new painting, Casella (2023), which features the eponymous musical composer from Dante’s Divine Comedy, Nguyen considers the ways that language and narrative construct areas of moral ambiguity or ethical confusion. To do so, Nguyen weaves a fictional narrative that merges Dante’s storytelling with the geopolitical theater that characterized the proxy wars carried out in Southeastern Asia during the Cold War, evidenced here in the helicopters that circle out of Casella’s hand amidst an imagined tropical setting. Nguyen’s first solo museum exhibition is currently on view at the ICA Boston through January 28, 2024.
In conjunction with his survey exhibition Trap of the Truth at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Erwin Wurm will present works from his Bag Sculptures and Flat Sculptures series. In Flat (Flat Sculptures) (2022), Wurm manipulates the formal qualities of sculpture by transferring the concept of volume to the flat picture plane. Here, he takes the literal word “flat” and expands it to consume the surface of the canvas in voluminous script, ballooning and distorting the text almost beyond recognition. Wurm likewise applies his signature humor to previously inanimate objects in Hurry (Bag Sculptures) (2023), where the artist has endowed a handbag with limbs. Caught mid-stride, the hurrying handbag might be viewed as an anthropomorphization: an embodiment of the consumer’s personal identity.
Concurrent to their two-artist exhibition at Lehmann Maupin London, our presentation includes works by Kader Attia and Mandy El-Sayegh. The artists share an artistic commitment to exploring the underlying forces and structures that shape our contemporary world. Presented in tandem, their work explores fragmentation, part-to-whole relationships, and processes of fusion and synthesis. In her Piece Painting series (2023), El-Sayegh examines connective threads through the assemblage of disparate materials and imagery. Meanwhile, Attia’s The Ruins of Revolution (2019) explores both the vulnerability of the human voice in marginalized communities and the strength of community action.
Lehmann Maupin’s Frieze London presentation also includes a new work, Dark Earth(Strata) (2023), by Teresita Fernández. In this latest edition to her Dark Earth series, Fernández transforms thousands of delicate slivers of raw charcoal into meticulously assembled relief images that suggest an expansive idea of place—from the ancient and subterranean to the futuristic and cosmic. Imagined as vertical cross-sections that span from underground geologic layers to heavenly realms, the works reveal bodies of subterranean water—typically invisible to the eye—embedded into the stratified ground. Fernández has commented that “landscape is more about what you don’t see than what you do see.” Her long-term engagement with challenging socially-constructed ideas about place and landscape in Dark Earth unapologetically reveals the buried and often omitted or erased colonial violence that continues to shape our present-day perceptions of the people and places around us. In the summer of 2024, Fernández will be the subject of a major, two-artist museum exhibition with Robert Smithson at SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico.
Other highlights include: a painting by Hernan Bas, ahead of his solo exhibition at The Bass Museum, Miami; works in acrylic and ribbon on canvas by Nicholas Hlobo, in conjunction with his inclusion in the exhibition, Unravel, at the Barbican, London; two new wall works by Loriel Beltrán, ahead of his London debut at Lehmann Maupin in Spring 2024; as well as new works by Rogelio Baez Vega, Billy Childish, Lee Bul, and McArthur Binion.
On Saturday, October 14, Frieze Masters will host a conversation between Mandy El-Sayegh and curators, Flavia Frigeri of the National Gallery and Valerie Cassel Oliver of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The conversation will take place at 3PM in the Frieze Masters Auditorium.