The seven best booths at Frieze London 2025

As the leaves turn and the temperature drops, it can only mean one thing for London’s art scene – Frieze is back. In the gloom of uncertain markets, the mood was surprisingly cheery. Much can be said for last year’s popular decision by Frieze London to give a fresh reconfiguration to its layout, placing confidence in younger emerging spaces by ushering them into prime positions. This year, the same strategy holds, with galleries under 12 years old immediately highlighted at the entrance to the fair and blue-chip brands moved further back into the fray. So our top picks include the big names as well as the lesser known, finding energy and inspiration in both. Frieze has still got it – and so does London.

Esther Schipper

Booth A07

Esther Schipper booth view: Frieze London, 2025. Photo © Andrea Rossetti

#FLODown: One of the younger galleries positioned at the front of the fair, Esther Schipper participates this year with a solo presentation by Sarah Buckner, whose strangely alluring paintings are filled with figures, characters and motifs, existing in mysterious setting and adepicted in dreamlike, muted colours. Often depicting young women, or sometimes children, with archetypal appearances, Buckner uses photographs, memories, or even literary texts as sources. By trying to give them form in the painting process, she approaches her own self, using painting as “a shadowy activity that arises from one’s own experiences, moods, moments, visions, sensations, and that matures from various pools, from one’s own gut. Like a spider?”

Gagosian

Booth D14

Lauren Halsey, Frieze London, 2025, installation view © Lauren Halsey. Photo: Maris Hutchinson. Courtesy Gagosian

#FLODown: Gagosian’s solo installation of work by LA-born and -based artist Lauren Halsey incorporates several components. In the centre, a six-foot-tall plaza sign honours the textual iconography, color palettes, and creative wordplay found on Black and Brown-owned business signage in working-class neighborhoods. “Bling Tax and Things” and “Affordable Black Art” serve as reminders of the continued importance of nonwhite businesses and cultural institutions in communities navigating the realities of gentrification and economic displacement. On the surrounding walls, a series of sculptural reliefs assemble a historical, contemporary, and mythicgraphic record of South-Central LA, while at the same time conjuring up the cosmological carvings of ancient Egyptian and Mesoamerican civilizations. And as a dense wallpaper mural composition covering the booth’s entire exterior, a colourful, busy collage of images showcases and celebrates the multiplicity and abundance of Blackness and Afro-diasporic expressive life.

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery

Booth A21

Shaqúelle Whyte, In an embroiled fashion, 2025, oil on linen, 220 x 240 cm, 86 ½ x 94 ½ in

#FLODown: New and unseen works by Pippy Houldsworth Gallery’s exciting young roster are on show this year, with a particular focus on memory, community, and our relationship with the natural world, and including Jennifer Bartlett, Seba Calfuqueo, KV Duong, Jacqueline de Jong, Sophia Loeb, Mario Martinez, Tamar Mason, Wangari Mathenge, Katy Moran, Masao Nakahara, Nengi Omuku, Liorah Tchiprout, Shaqúelle Whyte and Qualeasha Wood. This booth is also testament to the gallery’s commitment to and reputation for nurturing the careers of its artists. As one of two winning artists of this year's CAS Collections Fund at Frieze award, Shaqúelle Whyte’s painting In an embroiled fashion (2025) has been acquired by the Walker Art Collection, National Museums Liverpool. Also, a work by Liorah Tchiprout, Thewell is poisoned, yet still you drink (Holloway Gothic I) (2025) has been selected through the Arts Council Collection Frieze Acquisitions Fund to join the Arts Council Collection.

Pace

Booth D23

Installation view, Pace at Frieze London, Booth D23, Oct 15 – 19, 2025 © William Monk

#FLODown: In a solo booth of new work by British painter William Monk, Pace’s presentation brings together entirely new paintings and works on paper to coincide with the release of his first comprehensive monograph, published by Phaidon earlier this year. Produced over the course of the past year, following his travels to the islands of Corsica and Mallorca, central to the work is the figure of the sentinel: solitary, watchful, and quietly enduring. Impressions of the Mediterranean saturate this figure’s surroundings, which meditate as much on memory and perception as on the specific features of the coastal landscape. Cacti emerge as a central motif in the new paintings, and they are abstracted into swathes of vibrant colour, their pin-pricked forms blurring the line between the real and surreal- a tension that is fundamental to his practice.

Lehmann Maupin

Booth C13

Installation view, Lehmann Maupin, Frieze London 2025.Photo: Courtesy Lehmann Maupin, New York/ Studio Kukla

#FLODown: Lehmann Maupin’s presentation focuses on works by internationally renowned artist Do Ho Suh, whose major exhibition The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House is currently on view at the Tate Modern. Selections from Suh’s Specimens, ScaledBehaviour, and Spectatorsseries are on view, in addition to several thread drawings and a large-scale fabric bathroom installation. Suh reproduces the most mundane domestic fixtures, such as doorknobs, light switches, plug sockets and fuse boxes, in translucent fabric, transforming utilitarian objects from his former abodes into sublime works of art, each one a small, studied architecture that marries with his own personal life with a more universal metaphor – one that represents the rooms we all once inhabited and the settings for memories that last forever in the deepest recesses of our minds.

Sadie Coles HQ

Booth D13

Installation view, Frieze London, Sadie Coles HQ. Credit line: © The Artist/s. Courtesy the Artist/s and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Andrea Rossetti

#FLODown: Hot on the heels of the gallery’s exciting expansion, with a new space just opened on Savile Row, Mayfair, in time forFrieze Week, the Sadie Coles HQ booth this year is a compendium of the gallery’s established roster. Asserting its veteran position on the London and international scene, presented here is something of a ‘best of’. However, in the midst of chaotic art fair excitement and wider world uncertainties, the presentation centres calmly on a significant work by the celebrated artist Ugo Rondinone, a serene, still blue fired glass horse sculpture, a reminder of the perpetuity of time and nature, and a vessel of spiritual contemplation.

Modern Art

Booth A06

Sanya Kantarovsky at Modern Art. Photography courtesy of Modern Art.

#FLODown: Winner of the 2025 Gallery Stand Prize at Frieze London, Modern Art presents work by Sanya Kantarovsky. Born in Russia in 1982 and emigrating to the US at the age of ten, Kantarovsky’ practice spans film, sculpture, drawing, printmaking and curating, with painting at the centre of his practice. In the new stoneware works presented by Modern Art, he experiments with ash glazes, oxides, scale and form, referencing 20th Century British studio pottery and its relationship to Japanese traditions. For Kantarovsky, this experimentation has been an inquiry into relinquishing control and opening the process of making to chance. The group of vessels was made in collaboration with potters Aleah Stewart-Souris in Craryville, New York, and Irakli Khantadze in Tbilisi, Georgia, and showcase Kantarovsky’s painterly approach, with glazes incorporating copper carbonate, cobalt oxide and manganese dioxide.

 Frieze London continues until 19 October 2025, at The Regent’s Park. For more information head to www.frieze.com

Words by Tani Burns