Book dealers living in fantasy world
Daniel Crouch Rare Books has created a magical, Narnia-like stand at Frieze Masters with heavy wooden doors that lead into a room full of mythological maps. Titled I wisely started with a map!, the stand’s display traces over 2,700 years of fictitious cartography, featuring maps of much-beloved lands like Middle-Earth, Lilliput and Oz. How this show came to be is a tale in itself. Being regulars at the quiz night at their local pub in Oxford, one evening last year Daniel Crouch and his daughter Sophie competed in a round focused on fantasy fiction. A couple of pints later, the pair came to the conclusion that all good fantasy books start with a map. But sadly, Frieze organisers did not get into the fantasy spirit as much as they could have—the gallery had covered the doors to the stand in fur coats à la The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but fair staff sadly insisted they take them down. It was a no-no to Narnia.
Left to right: Anny Shaw, the X Muse co-founders Robert Wilson and Vadim Grigoryan, and Ben Lukea (sans spectacles) at Bar des Prés © David Owens
Writer makes spec-tacular admission
The crème de la crème of the art world descended on Bar des Prés in Mayfair earlier this week for an expert analysis of Frieze week by two of The Art Newspaper’s top team—Mr Ben Luke and Ms Anny Shaw. Our resident supremos gave entertaining and informed insights during the talk co-hosted by X Muse vodka, discussing the ins and outs of the art market plus the best shows in town, such as the Mike Kelley exhibition at Tate Modern. Kelley’s works are head-spinning in normal circumstances but Ben told the packed-out bar that the day he visited, the late artist’s works were even trippier than usual thanks to his new varifocal glasses. “It felt appropriate that, without any chemical interference, I was experiencing Kelley’s show in a profoundly altered state,” he said.
Hew Locke revealed that his monumental 2022 work Procession was inspired by Andrea Mantegna
Hew brings the bling
The Unexpected View event, where eight artists are invited to talk about their favourite works at the National Gallery, is always a Frieze week highpoint. This year, Hew Locke spoke about Andrea Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar, revealing that this epic work with “its insane amounts of gold, silver, bling and loot” and Black Roman soldier repainted by Mantegna to dominate the composition, had inspired his own epic Procession of 150-plus life-sized figures. Other contributions included Jeremy Deller on the humanity of Hogarth’s Shrimp Girl, and Dexter Dalwood enjoying Poussin’s Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake. Talk about tour guides!
Animal, vegetable, mineral? François-Xavier Lalanne’s Tortue Topaire II Courtesy of Ben Brown Fine Arts
Tortoise market picks up speed
We’re always on the lookout for the next trend and are proud to announce our latest discovery—turtle topiary. The market has gone a little crazy for tortoises brimming with bushes made by François-Xavier Lalanne, the playful French sculptor of animals. Tortue Topiaire III (2000), one of 70 works consigned to Christie’s New York by Dorothée Lalanne, the sculptor’s daughter, fetched a hefty $378,000 this week (with fees). Meanwhile Ben Brown Fine Arts gallery sold another Lalanne tortoise—Tortue Topiaire II (around 1992)—at Frieze Masters. “The tortoise—a symbol of longevity and resilience in both natural and mythological contexts—undergoes an imaginative transformation in Lalanne’s hands, becoming not merely an animal sculpture but a whimsical topiary, a functional object meant to house and display plant life,” says the gallery. Who knew animal art could be so appealing?
Sour grapes at gala dinner
To the surprise of some visitors, on Thursday, Frieze London shut its doors two hours early, at 5pm rather than the usual 7pm. This premature closure was to prepare for an expansive Collectors Dinner for more than 500 guests including participating galleries, key collectors and institutional bigwigs. As well as being served a vegan feast and lashings of wine, guests were also treated to a performance by Julianknxx, which involved 25 singers belting out gospel tunes. Nonetheless a few curmudgeonly gallerists were overheard muttering their displeasure at having lost two hours of potential sales. There’s just no pleasing some…
A modern-day Sisyphus—with a bag of sand
A man hauling a heavy bag of sand up a flight of stairs only for its contents to fall through the ceiling feels like a good metaphor for the lives of many art-world professionals during Frieze Week. So it is fitting that a performance by Barry Flanagan depicting just that was re-enacted at House of Annetta in Spitalfields this week.
The British artist’s 16-minute film the works (1969) was rediscovered last year, and a huge crowd gathered at the gorgeous Georgian venue—once owned by the architect and cybernetics pioneer Annetta Pedretti—to watch the work recreated by the Turner Prize-winning collective Assemble. The original piece— inspired by Flanagan’s experience as a labourer—sees a man called Collin take hessian sacks full of sand to an upper room, pour them out into a bag, then return downstairs and drill a hole through the ceiling, making the sand spill and accumulate on the floor beside him. The remake involved several performers and lasted two hours.
Freya Salway, Ben Luke and Lawrence Lek
credit Gareth Harris
Firework sparks fly in Soho Welsh chapel
Technology and art, and how they intersect, came under the spotlight in a lively panel discussion organised earlier this week by the new art and technology platform VIV Arts. Ben Luke of The Art Newspaper moderated the packed-out discussion (9 October), drawing insights from the artist Lawrence Lek and Freya Salway, head of the lab at Google Arts and Culture. Lek delivered some wry observations about driverless cars—a feature of his work—and the need to be real about these new-fangled motors. “There might be an existential crisis about such cars driving people around all day. They’re super intelligent but could end up stuck on the A4,” he told the crowd. VIV Arts are also presenting a mind-spinning work at their pop-up London space—the Welsh chapel in Soho—by the artist Julian Charrière whose film Controlled Burn (2022) presents an aerial landscape of imploding fireworks (the installation closes 12 October so pop in today). A visitor pointed out that the chapel venue was the Limelight club in a former life which, in its day, also induced “numerous psychedelic visions”.
UPDATED: This diary includes an extra entry added 12 October.
