“Some of the best facelifts money can buy!” Madness and Millionaires Frieze Art Gallery – Review | Frieze art gallery

HeyOn the face of things, Frieze is pretty terrible. It represents the art world at its most shamelessly commercial, its most greedy and its most capitalist. This is the flea market, with all its champagne, ridiculous costumes, and obscene excess and shameless display for anyone willing to drop a large sum of money on a ticket. This is what reviews complain about about Frieze in general, with all the greedy capitalist knives being stabbed into the heart of their pure, beloved art.

But Frieze, and the more precise Frieze Masters, aren’t really about the art. This art gallery in Regent’s Park, London, is certainly the largest art gallery in the UK, attracting the world’s best galleries and artists. But Frieze is not about painting, sculpture and conceptualism, it is about selling. Going to Frieze is all about mindset. If you come here looking for innovation, passion and aesthetic brilliance, you will be let down. But if you come here to experience the art world – to watch deals get done, to see the market in full flight – it really is a lot of fun.

Be careful: by attending Frieze, you will inevitably see a huge amount of absolutely meaningless, completely unknown, instantly forgettable paintings. Abstract, figurative, geometric, whatever you want, there is an endless amount here, because they sell, and almost all of them are bad. You’ll see ceramics that look as if they were made by four-year-old children. You’ll also see some of the best facelifts money can buy. Some people here are so tight they would tear up if they sneezed.

The exhibition is vast, perhaps endless. The key is to follow your instincts. Look at everything but just stop and think about the things that immediately strike you. That’s what Frieze is for – flexing your artistic muscles and aligning with your gut.

The exhibition is divided into sections: focus, artist to artist, curated/differentiated spaces, and then the main exhibition. Focus is the place to be for young galleries, and is always where you will find the most interesting experimental art.

This year begins with London-based painter Glenn Podvine at the gallery Xxijra Hii, who fills his mirrored room with huge nude self-portraits, depicting himself mid-grinding silly as he does a soccer drill. They are astonishingly drawn: he takes greater pains to capture the folds of the scrotum than most artists do of faces. They are funny, even ridiculous, but they are also unique depictions of the deconstruction of fragile masculinity.

If you’ve never found whales exciting, Luís Lázaro Matos’ pastel colors should turn your head. They reimagine Benny the Beluga, the whale that was stranded in the Thames in 2018, as a Mediterranean animal who wears a Speedo and lives like a fish out of water. In the middle of the public exhibition pavilion, Shen Liu created a metal pool bubbling with duckweed under neon lights, all surrounded by strange biomechanical paintings.

The Artist to Artist section sees young artists being picked up by big names. Ana Segovia was co-opted by Mexican intellectual Abraham Cruzvilegas, and her close-up paintings of cowboy genitalia are all made of denim, leather, and rampant sensuality.

In the main body of the exhibition, Lauren Halsey’s solo show by Gagosian is a rare moment of defiant joy in a safe and somewhat austere part of the tent. The Los Angeles artist creates massive cast plaster murals of everyday black life — children, cars, arcades, barbershops, gyms — in a kind of ancient Egyptian take on American street culture. It’s bustling with the energy of life in South Central Los Angeles.

The gallery is absolutely packed with artists tearing down Huma Bhabha’s post-nuclear sci-fi sculpture – there seems to be one every 15 metres – and when you finally come upon an original at David Zwirner’s booth, you realize how much better it is than its imitators. The bust shown here is a classic pope, all grim and macabre.

I’d be happy to take home at least one of the two Celia Ball portraits at Victoria Miro, and John Baldessari’s huge portrait at Spruth Magers would no doubt look great over the sofa. Peter Saul’s absolutely horrific cartoons by Michael Werner are stunning, as is the paperwork by Turner Prize nominee (and likely winner) Nina Callow.

At Freeze Masters, 10 minutes north, the experience is completely different. Primarily intended for pre-2000 work, it is more refined, quiet and elegant than its bold counterpart. Do you want an ancient Roman bust? A suit of Greek armor? Marc Chagall? Marcel Duchamp? Giant triceratops skull?! This is where you will get it.

Elsewhere in the show: elephant Giorgio de Chirico, shimmering deep-sea blue Yves Klein on paper, some eye-melting artwork by Victor Vasarely and Yoshio Seckin, plenty of stunning Dutch flower paintings and a stunning display of fine ancient Roman glass.

Is this year’s freeze better than last year? Is it worse? Not really. A frieze is a frieze. It’s hectic, overwhelming, filled with too much art and too many rich people. It’s beautiful, it’s stupid, it’s exhilarating, it’s silly, it’s downright exhausting – it’s the art world at its worst, but also at its best. Let’s hope it never changes.