Eight British artists reveal their Frieze stunners — SkimNews
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- Frieze art fair runs each October in Regent's Park, London, since 2003, and this year's edition profiles eight British-based artists showing works across sculpture, painting, drawing, and mixed media.
- Mohammed Z Rahman (29), a self-taught figurative painter who attended this year's Venice Biennale, is showing a seat-and-storage piece inspired by Frieze 2023's wooden shipping crates, decorated with fish drawings drawn from Bangladeshi kheta stitching folk craft.
- Alvaro Barrington (43) is selling a head portrait he frames as a 'hip-hop version' of canonical painting, citing the Mona Lisa, Girl with a Pearl Earring, and Picasso's The Weeping Woman as his genre lineage, and naming Tupac as both his dead and living favorite artist.
- Shaquélle Whyte (26), fresh off a Wolverhampton Art Gallery show, is preparing what he believes will make him the youngest person to hold a solo exhibition at South London Gallery, and confirms that Stormzy recently visited his studio.
- Louise Giovanelli (32) is debuting 'Cathexia,' her first painting fusing two disparate bodies of work — a face projected onto a glitter curtain, named after a Greek word for investing energy in a specific thing.
- Jake Grewal (32), whose Studio Voltaire show featured the largest painting he's made, is showing a large charcoal drawing of two figures following each other in a forest that he compares to 'an old film still' and says he'd love musician Anohni to buy.
Why it matters: The eight artists span a 17-year age range and self-identify across outsider art, queer-themed charcoal drawing, and hip-hop portraiture — meaning Frieze's tent in Regent's Park is hosting both institutionally trained sculptors and self-taught painters who name Tupac, Frida Kahlo, Turner, and Rothko as guiding stars, all under one October roof.
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