Seven artists to watch from Frieze London 2024

Frieze London came with much anticipation (and hesitation) this year…not least because of gloomy market outlooks. But the mood was cheery, and the crowd was buzzing. Top sales at Frieze London including a painting by Lisa Yuskavage for $2.2 million at David Zwirner, five Ha Chong-Hyun pieces in the range of $540,000–$649,000 sold by Kukje Gallery, White Cube’s Al Held painting, which sold for $450,000, and Thaddaeus Ropac’s sale of Antony Gormley’s SHELF III(2024), which sold for £500,000 ($653,227). Almine Rech reported sales of most of its artists and sold out of its works by booth focus Ji Xin, each priced up to $50,000. Thibault Geffrin, senior director at Almine Rech, commented: “We entered the fair with many questions on our mind: Will Frieze’s new layout serve us? Will we see the impact of collectors prioritising Paris over London this year? We’re very pleased to report on a very successful week. We have met many new collectors and are happy with the new location and overall layout.”

Frieze London 2024. Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy Frieze / Linda Nylind.

Changes to the fair included a welcome rejig of the floor plan developed by the architectural studio and design experts A Studio Between, presenting a more spacious feeling layout and bringing the Focus section of younger galleries and solo booths to the front – shifting some of the big hitting blue chip galleries deeper into the fray. The introduction of the new ‘Smoke’ section, focused on ceramics, was also something to get stuck into, as was the return of the ‘Artist-to-Artist’ area, with six world-renowned artists selecting new voices for solo booths. Across the fair, we wanted to highlight a few of the artists that caught our eye…we can’t wait to see what they bring to the table over the next 12 months.

Mariane Ibrahim, Frieze London 2024. Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy Frieze / Linda Nylind.

Here are our top seven artists to look out for: 

Ayla Tavares

Hatch Gallery and Galeria Athena

We loved the new ceramics ‘Smoke’ section of the fair and were particularly drawn by the work of Bazilian artist Ayla Tavares, whose practice investigates and establishesrelationships between architecture, everyday objects, and archaeological and sacred artefacts to think about memory and new ways of conceiving time. Her new commission Witnesses was a site-specific installation that unifies different temporalities. Tavares offers a unique perspective on the concepts of borders and migration in her works, seeing ceramics as a living medium engaged in a continuous exchange with its surrounding environment.

Peter Uka

Mariane Ibrahim – Artist-to-Artist

Selected by Hurvin Anderson for the Artist-to-Artist section, Peter Uka’s rich figurative paintings draw from his childhood memories of Nigeria in the 1970s and 1980s, a period of significant transformation in the newly independent nation. In his nearly life-sized canvases, his powerful storytelling and incredibly rich palette is wonderfully forthright, confidently and joyfully using colour and centring on the Black figure, capturing both moments of quiet interaction and more direct interactions between the outward gazing subject and the viewer.

Rose Easton, Frieze London 2024. Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy Frieze / Linda Nylind.

Liorah Tchiprout

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery

Liorah Tchiprout has been on our radar for quite some time, and we absolutely loved her solo show with Marlborough Gallery last year, but we can’t help feeling that a perfect fit has now been found for the artist at Pippy Houldsworth, who also presented a solo show a couple of months ago. Tchiprout’s powerfully figurative works are inspired by Yiddish poetry and puppetry (her portraits are in fact of puppets the artist creates herself) and we can’t get enough of her beautifully melancholy paintings.

Guimi You, Yellow Garden, 203.2 x 165.2 cm, oil on linen, 2024

Guimi You

Almine Rech

We came back to enjoy Guimi You’s painting a number of times. The South Korean artist, who is also currently enjoying a solo show, Unwind, in the gallery’s Mayfair space has such a unique style that exudes a sense of peace in nature and in everyday life – a refreshing moment of respite from the pace of the fair. Her lush, softly textured and hued scenes merge a sense of dreams and reality, inviting the viewer in to slow down and take a breath. The moments of solitude she depicts are precious, breaking free from routine, making each secondfeel valuable.

Ginny on Frederick, Frieze London 2024. Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy Frieze / Linda Nylind.

Charlotte Edey

Ginny on Frederick

Ginny on Frederick’s solo presentation of Thin Places by Charlotte Edey invited visitors into a domestic space where the psychological met the architectural and the mundane becomes the magical. The title Thin Places borrows from a Jennifer Higgie text that describes locations where the ‘threshold between the physical and spiritual world grows thin, where the ephemeral is made tangible.’ This blurring is evident in Edey’s tapestries and pastel drawings. They are like physical windows into interior landscapes. The symbols woven into these works—pearls, webs, moons—serve as poetic markers of psychological states, inviting viewers to contemplate memory, time, and identity in ways that feel deeply personal yet universal.

Evie Gold

Rose Easton

Seemingly simple, Evie Gold’s booth with Rose Easton presented two drawings, an accompanying text and two sofas on which to take it in. But in fact this was another example of the artist’s brilliant exploration of cinema, memory and how we work through the past. The drawings from her Acts of Violence series reproduce stills from two films which depict buildings on fire – as a standalone gesture these drawings bring to the forefront questions of blame and responsibility, however at the same time they are a framing device for the text, which uses narrative voices to explore agency, victimhood and what version of truth we choose to hold on to.

Palace Enterprise, Frieze London 2024. Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy Frieze / Linda Nylind.

Benedikte Bjerre

palace enterprise

If you didn’t story this booth of 125 foil, helium-filled baby penguins at Frieze were you even there? Seriously though, Bjerre’s installation The Birds has something. Satisfying and exposing our desire for entertainment, it also offered a witty take on mass consumerism and climate change. At the same time, Bjerre’s work references Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film, contrasting the director’s vengeful enactment of his birds’ agency with his penguins’ merry acceptance of their own fate.