What to See at Frieze New York 2024

Frank Bowling's Untitled (Mother's House) (1966) at Hauser & Wirth

Created the year Frank Bowling moved from London to New York, this masterful 1966 work is one of a series that pays homage to the artist's mother, Agatha Elizabeth Bowling, and her house and shop, known as 'Bowling's Variety Store', in New Amsterdam, Guyana.

From a singular photograph taken of the three-storey, clapboard, colonial house on the Coronation Day of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, Bowling created approximately 25 paintings between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s.

The work has been noticeably altered by the addition of a further piece of canvas stapled lower down the work in a nod to his seamstress mother, who was a formidable figure in the artist's life.

'Apart from London, which is more important in my life than any other place I've been in, and perhaps New York, New Amsterdam is the most important place,' Bowling told Art UK in 2022. 'It reappears all the time... even in my quiet moments, it reappears.'

Untitled (Mother's House) was recently included in the artist's critically acclaimed touring exhibition, Frank Bowling's Americas, which travelled to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2022 and 2023.

Leon Kossoff's Demolition of YMCA Building No. 2, Spring (1971) at Xavier Hufkens

Leon Kossoff's (1926–2019) expressive paintings of London brilliantly capture the British artist's deep affinity with both people and place.

Discovering in 1971 that the Young Men's Christian Association building at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Great Russell Street—part of his daily walking route to St Martin's School of Art, where he taught—was being demolished.

While saddened by the loss of the historic 1911 building to make way for a large hotel complex, Kossoff nonetheless found himself invigorated by the daily scenes of upheaval. Throughout the spring of 1971, he made four paintings depicting the demolition, including Demolition of YMCA Building No. 2, Spring (1971).

In this painting, we see men and machinery amid a mound of excavated materials. Kossoff's dense layering of paint gives the work an expressive surface, while the homogenous colour palette of earthy tones obfuscates any clear distinction between workers, equipment and construction site, hinting at the precarity of the depicted scene.

Arlene Shechet's Seventh Son (2024) at Pace Gallery

American artist Arlene Shechet's whimsical sculptures seem to teeter on the edge of transformation. Crafted from hunks of wood, steel slabs, and ceramics with tactile glazes, her works are best explored from every angle, to discover every nook, cranny, and cavity.

Seventh Son (2024) is a precariously balanced assemblage of painted and dyed hardwood, steel, and ceramic. The main bulk of its body rests upon a hollow cylinder, positioned horizontally and seemingly poised to set in motion with the slightest nudge, while a lone steel bar juts out at an angle, suggesting a deliberate effort to halt any potential movement.

The work's different textures—smooth, rough, grainy, crackled, spongy—and interplay of natural hues with pops of bright orange, pink, and yellow, create striking contrasts between material and colour. It's a stellar example of Shechet's inimitable and exploratory approach to sculpture.

Shechet's presentation at Frieze coincides with the opening of her exhibition, Arlene Shechet: Girl Group (4 May–10 November 2024) at the Storm King Art Centre in New Windsor, New York, where she debuts six new large-scale commissions.

Antonio Obá's kurú keré: antebellum / estripulia (2024) at Mendes Wood DM

A regular fixture on Mendes Wood DM's exhibition programme, the Brazilian artist Antonio Obá had his sixth solo show at the São Paulo-based gallery last year.

Growing up in Ceilândia, an agricultural suburb of Brazil, Obá spent his childhood drawing. And, although his practice has since expanded to encompass painting, sculpture, and installation, the clean lines and subtle tonality of his canvases still belie his affinity to the pencil.

His compositions are quiet and considered in their exploration of complex social histories, namely the deployment of Black bodies in historical and political narratives.

During Frieze New York, in addition to his presentation at Mendes Wood DM, Obá's solo exhibition of new drawings, Erase the Silence, will open at Archipelago, an arts-and-research institute in Germantown, New York (27 April–2 June 2024).

Lisa Jo's Mercy Rule (2024) at David Lewis

Lisa Jo works between media, from cinema and photography to painting and ceramics. As the daughter of Korean immigrants, born and raised in America, and now residing in Berlin, Jo's work embodies a broad spectrum of influences.

In her paintings, Jo starts with glimpses of the female form, drawing inspiration from French erotic comics from the 1970s. She takes fragments—a limb here, a hint of a hip or a thigh there—and transforms them into colourful, overlapping, abstract shapes.

At Frieze New York, the Los Angeles-born artist, represented by David Lewis since September 2023, will present her large-scale painting Mercy Rule (2024).

In this dense composition, fluid grey lines delineate recognisable physical features—free-flowing hair, folds of skin—while amorphous shapes in mustard brown, dark green, black, and indigo overlap. With an added layer of surrounding segments in lighter, neutral tones suggesting negative space, the painting resists obvious figuration.

What remains evident is Jo's penchant for ambiguity, which charges her work with mesmerising intrigue.

Monika Stricker's Vogelperspektive (Bird's-eye View) (2021) at dépendance

Those well-versed in Monika Stricker's practice will recognise the male crotch as a common motif in her paintings. The German-born artist's exploration of male gender challenges traditional portrayals of sexualised bodies in art history.

For Frieze, dépendance presents Stricker's oil-on-canvas painting Vogelperspektive (Bird's-eye View) (2021). Rendered in a sublime blue and green palette, the painting features a seated figure—legs bent, hands resting between the knees—its head is that of an exotic bird with wings spread wide. At the focal point where their legs part, the artist has left a dark space devoid of any discernible hint of genitals.

The subjects Stricker portrays, along with her painterly style, lends her work a mythic quality. Utilising thinned-out oils, she painstakingly builds up multiple layers to create the fluid gestures that define her subjects. The interplay of light and dark, along with the hazy effect of these painterly washes, capture Stricker's sensual, ephemeral forms.

Chris Martin's Taz (Queen of Spades) (2023) at David Kordansky Gallery

Sparkling specks, swirling patterns, and bursts of polkadots—Chris Martin's canvases incorporate non-traditional art materials, such as sequins and glitter, to explore spirituality and memory through formalism.

In Taz (Queen of Spades) (2023), viewers may find themselves looking upon a glittering galaxy filled with clusters of nebulae or the depths of the sea at night, where bursts of bright colours mimic bioluminescent creatures.

Martin has been a key figure in the painting scene of Williamsburg, New York, since the 1980s, drawing inspiration from jazz music, outsider art, and everyday forms of visual expression. His large-scale, funky paintings are remarkably accessible; their whimsical and improvisational style resonates with people from all ages and backgrounds.

Seung-taek Lee's Untitled (Non-painting) (1985) at Gallery Hyundai

As the longest-running and one of the most revered contemporary art galleries in Seoul, Gallery Hyundai has propelled Korea's most influential artists—including Kim Tschang-Yeul, Lee Ufan, and Minjung Kim—to international attention.

At Frieze New York, the Korean gallery is staging a solo presentation of work by Seung-taek Lee, a pioneer of the Korean avant-garde and one of a group of experimental artists who embraced modernist influences in the wake of the Korean War in 1953.

Formally trained as a sculptor, Lee developed a practice based on the concept of 'non-sculpture', which privileges no particular medium or style but, instead, transforms ordinary objects by investing them with metaphysical meaning. Here, we find a block of paper—pages torn from an antique book—bound by a thin red rope.

Running concurrently to the Venice Biennale, the two-person exhibition Invisible Questions that Fill the Air at Palazzo Loredan features six decades of work by Lee and his American contemporary, conceptual artist James Lee Byars, highlighting their major contributions to the 20th and 21st century avant-garde (17 April–25 August 2024).