Frieze London 2025: 5 exhibitions not to be missed at London’s biggest contemporary art show

We’ve been doing this now for three years. There’s nothing more interesting than hearing an artist speak about another artist’s work and why they’re interested in it or why they think it matters. It’s really about the spirit of collaboration and bringing people together. There are artists, for instance, who nominate artists whom they studied with 30 years ago, or there are artists who nominate artists whose work they’ve been following for many years.

That’s the case with Camille Henrot, who nominated a great young artist who works in ceramics called Ilana Harris-Babou. And between those two, there’s actually lots of kinship in terms of materials, so that’s interesting. Then there’s Bharti Kher, who nominated an amazing artist from India called T. Venkanna, who is going to present those really large, bold paintings about sexuality. They’re really huge, several meters wide, and they’re really gorgeous.

Nicole Eisenman selected a wonderful artist called Katherine Hubbard. She works with photography, and her work will be presented by the Company Gallery from New York. It’s a really poignant and touching presentation – Katherine is taking photography with her ageing mother, who has a disease related to Alzheimer’s. They’ve been engaged in this practice of producing quite intimate photographs, partly documenting their lives together, partly documenting the evolution of her mother’s condition. And it’s not just documentary style – there are lots of performative elements and working with props around the home, and it’s quite playful, but it’s ultimately about grief and loss.

I think the power of art is that there are things that happen to all of us in life, but there are no words to really express those circumstances. But there are some artists who really tap into these personal experiences and are able to create something that speaks to all of us. It’s a universal language that we can all really respond to and all really find ourselves in.”

Echoes in the present

“We have this other special project called Echoes in the present. Every year we work with a guest curator at the Fair, and they have carte blanche to invite a group of artists and galleries and articulate a theme or their vision. Last year, we did this amazing section looking at ceramics with Pablo José Ramírez, who is a curator from Los Angeles. This year, the project is curated by Jareh Das, a curator based between Dakar in West Africa and the UK. He really wanted to think about the kinship and relationship between artists from West Africa and artists from Brazil, which is, of course, rooted in the really traumatic history of the transatlantic slave trade. The exhibition is about the creative relationship between artists from those two sides of the world that are connected, albeit by a really traumatic event, and thinking about those historical links and what that means today. We have a number of galleries from Brazil and West Africa, and artists from Dakar who are participating in the Fair for the first time.

I think that’s been one of the things that we’ve always been really conscious about, but even more so now – we can’t necessarily show what everyone is doing at any one time, but we try to give as much of a snapshot as we possibly can of the global art world. So that’s been part of the trajectory in terms of Frieze London – to try and be as representative as we can of this global art world.”