↑ Simon Lehner, Echo figure (Gray matter cycle), 2023, Edel Assanti Gallery

PAI_32’s Highlights from Frieze 2025

Text Marie Ivanova

Frieze London 2025, held in Regent’s Park from 15–19 October, opened with a noticeable tightening of focus. Crowds were heavy, but the strongest presentations resisted theatrical gestures. Instead, they leaned on clarity — controlled material languages, edited booths, and work that asked to be read slowly rather than consumed at a glance.

Across the fair, a clear through-line emerged: artists treating material precision as a way to negotiate lived experience — memory, community structures, the body in relation to space. Issy Wood (Michael Werner) continued her examination of desire and status through lush, psychologically charged surfaces. At Modern Art’s new Bennet Street space, Joseph Yaeger’s “Polygrapher,” including the smoky work To tell you the truth(2025), extended his cinematic, film-still approach to memory, melancholy and projection. Lauren Halsey (Gagosian) pushed her civic iconography forward, translating the visual logic of South Central Los Angeles into sculptural languages that read as both monument and neighbourhood archive.

Elsewhere, Do Ho Suh (Lehmann Maupin) presented translucent architectural forms and thread drawings that continue his long-standing inquiry into belonging, domestic space and displacement. Simon Lehner (Edel Assanti) showed uncanny, quasi-anatomical figures that collapse self-portraiture, memory and technological mediation. At HOLLYBUSH GARDENS, Siobhan Liddell’s “The Knowing and the Not Knowing” (2025) rewarded patience: quiet, perceptual traps that unfold in their own time. T. Venkanna (Gallery Maskara), selected by Bharti Kher for the artist-led “Artist-to-Artist” initiative, brought graphic, confrontational figuration that felt both mythic and intimate. Xin Liu (Public Gallery) presented a systems-based ecology of bodies, liquids and engineered structures — a stand-out in terms of concept and execution. And at xxijra hii, Glen Pudvine staged a chapel of self-regard and self-interrogation, a claustrophobic, mirror-lit environment in which masculinity is treated not as certainty but as ordeal.

If last year’s Frieze flirted with spectacle, 2025 felt like a correction. The mood on the floor suggested a quieter confidence: artists insisting that narrative, politics, autobiography and craft can inhabit the same object — and that the work doesn’t have to shout to be heard.

Issy Wood

Simmering surfaces and razor-sharp wit: Issy Wood’s presence around Frieze Week continued her hot streak this year, with recent bodies of work circulating widely and collectors paying attention. Keep an eye on Michael Werner’s programme if you missed her in the fair frenzy. 

Joseph Yaeger at Modern Art

“Polygrapher” inaugurates Modern Art’s new Bennet Street space — opening just after the fair. Yaeger’s smoky, cinematic watercolours (including To tell you the truth, 2025) promise an atmospheric solo that extends the week’s momentum into November.

Lauren Halsey at Gagosian

Gagosian’s solo presentation of new works by Lauren Halsey was one of the sure bets of the fair: bold, community-rooted reliefs and structures with the artist’s unmistakable vernacular poetics.

Do Ho Suh with Lehmann Maupin

Thread drawings, Specimens and fabric architectures offered a concise survey of Suh’s investigations into memory, home and scale — a focused booth from a master of translucid space.

Simon Lehner at Edel Assanti

Lehner’s “Echo Figure (Gray/Grey matter cycle)” works — motorised, life-scale bodies in silicone, resin and fibreglass — occupied that uncanny zone between sculpture and apparition.

Siobhan Liddell at HOLLYBUSH GARDENS

Liddell’s “The Knowing and the Not Knowing” (2025) drew viewers into quiet, perceptual riddles — works that reveal themselves in second and third looks.

T. Venkanna at Gallery Maskara — selected by Bharti Kher

Part of Artist-to-Artist, Venkanna’s large-format ink and egg-tempera paintings pressed personal mythologies into bold, graphic fields — a standout of the initiative curated by artists for artists. 

Xin Liu with Public Gallery

Solo booth: “Insomnia.” A living system of liquids, plants and steel, Liu’s work mapped circulation between bodies and environments — one of the most talked-about presentations across the week.

Glen Pudvine at xxijra hii

A mirror-lined chapel of self-portraiture, “The Church of Self” staged the male body as devotional struggle — carnal, uncomfortable, and unmissable in the Focus section.