Endless unveils live-built Notting Hill portrait frieze for Frieze — SkimNews
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- Endless unveiled "Endless Frieze" at the Cris Contini Contemporary Gallery as part of Frieze London, featuring photographs of local buildings and street scenes alongside portraits of residents taken during a live Friday event
- Cheryl Devlin, a greengrocer whose family has run a Portobello Road fruit and vegetable stall for over a century, told the BBC she began selling on the stall at age five, recalling lemons "five for a shilling" in the 1950s
- Allyson Williams MBE, a board member of Notting Hill Carnival Limited involved since 1975, is featured as one of the sitters; she launched her costume brand Genesis Mask Band with her husband in 1980
- Endless builds the collage in real time — newly taken portraits are added to the wall immediately — describing the approach as carrying "elements of risk," including the possibility of a "happy accident"
- Cheryl Devlin noted Portobello has shifted dramatically, saying there used to be around 350 fruit and veg sellers on the market, now largely replaced by cooked-food and bric-a-brac stalls as locals "downsize" because they "can't afford the housing"
- Karl Amata of Sound Records on All Saints Road said the exhibition is needed because community gathering spaces have thinned: "Everything's been shut down, the shops, every cultural centre"
- The exhibition runs at Cris Contini Contemporary Gallery until the end of October, with fashion designer Karen Millen also among those photographed.
Why it matters: The exhibition's framing as celebration coexists with a gentrification undercurrent running through the sitters' own testimony: Devlin describes Portobello's transition from 350 produce sellers to a market of cooked-food stalls as locals are priced out, and Amata points to shuttered cultural spaces. For a global art fair usually associated with blue-chip sales, Frieze London using a slot to platform a multigenerational portrait of a single neighborhood marks a deliberate tilt toward community-rooted subjects over commercial spectacle.
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