October’s chilly light spluttered through the trees of Regent’s Park as London once again made its bright claim as an important centre of the global art world. However despite a gloomy economic forecast the 23rd edition of Frieze London and the 13th of Frieze Masters didn’t just return to the capital. They transformed it. For five days, from 15 to 19 October 2025, the twin fairs created a cultural ecosystem where emerging voices stood alongside centuries-old masterpieces, where indigenous weaving traditions conversed with contemporary installations, and where the overarching question of creative vision united across boundaries and generations. This year’s editions captured something essential, art’s capacity to bridge time, identity, and place, centred on London’s historic park but striking sparks throughout the city.
Alongside the fairs, Frieze Week animated the city with a dynamic programme of exhibitions, performances and events across London’s leading institutions and galleries, reaffirming the capital’s position as a major centre of the international art calendar.
Fair director Eva Langret commented: ‘The artists and galleries at this year’s exhibitions show how Frieze London and Frieze Masters together capture London’s global outlook and historic depth’.
As you walked into the fair, Soft Opening set the tone with bold statements exploring cross-generational dialogues, and a debut solo show by London-based artist Ebun Sodipo, featuring sculpture and wall-based collages that draw on ancestral knowledge and visual archives to explore the Black transfeminine experience and subvert historical notions of race and gender.
Now in its third edition, the Artist-to-Artist section returned with six established practitioners presenting solo projects by emerging voices, highlighting Frieze’s enduring commitment to artistic exchange and peer-to-peer recognition within its global network. Standing out this year was Mexican-American artist René Treviño, nominated by Amy Sherald, showcasing a series of paintings and fabric sculpture that mixed European and Mesoamerican histories, represented by the Dallas-based Erin Cluley Gallery. René has been developing this project for many years, following painstaking research into the archaeology of his ancestral region, on both sides of the border.
Among this year’s must-see presentations by various established galleries we could include Gagosian, which showcased new works by Los Angeles native Lauren Halsey, whose Afrofuturist and Funk-inspired installations and sculptures explore themes of identity, and civic engagement. Cecilia Brunson Projects gave a voice to work by indigenous artist Claudia Alarcón, who, alongside her individual practice, leads the Silät collective, an organisation of one hundred women weavers of different generations from First Nations communities in Argentina.
Lisson Gallery curated a well balanced selection of works that reflect on the fragile beauty of the environment and the consequences of human impact on its ecosystems. Bringing together sculpture, installation, painting, film and photography, the presentation created a dialogue between various artists.
Following the successful redesign of the 2024 Frieze, the Focus section, for emerging galleries up to 12 years old, remained at the heart of the fair. This year, 35 exhibitors, representing over 20 countries, presented solo or dual shows. Among the most engaging were:
Christelle Oyiri, represented by Gathering, with an immersive installation blending playful, acid-green visuals with a critical exploration of the lasting impact of the use of insecticides in farming on Martinique and Guadeloupe.
Eunjo Lee, represented by Niru Ratnam, with a trilogy of films as a continuous narrative, using gaming-graphics software such as Unreal Engine and Blender to create immersive worlds.
Alex Margo Arden, shown by Ginny on Frederick, with an unusual remake of an Accident Reporting Board painting and a sculpture made from decommissioned mannequins from the National Motor Museum, reflecting on labour, progress, and its human cost.
A fresh approach was introduced by the Rose Easton gallery, with Jan Gatewood showing mixed-media drawings incorporating gestures from children in his studio neighbourhood, alongside Xin Liu, at the Public gallery, with a kinetic water tank overrun with duckweed, accompanied by embroidered latex panels and speculative ecosystems.
Across the golden leaves of Regent’s Park, Frieze Masters is famous for its encounters across time, and what better example of that tradition than Daniel Crouch Rare Books’ presentation of ‘This Sceptred Isle’ offering a survey of 700 years of British maps highlighting cartography’s role in shaping national identity. That could be followed by the October Gallery with its first showing of Japanese artist Kenji Yoshida’s works from the 1960s and 1970s, highlighting the evolution of his unique blend of traditional Oriental and European modernist styles. Born in 1924, at age 19, he was conscripted and consigned to become a kamikaze pilot during WWII. While many of his comrades flew away to certain death, Yoshida’s eventual survival came about only because the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki precipitated Japan’s sudden surrender. These traumatic experiences left him profoundly conscious of the fragility of life and the proximity of death, an awareness that permeates all his work.
Emanuela Tarizzo, Frieze Masters’ director, stated: ‘This year Frieze Masters brought landmark rediscoveries into view — from a Rubens panel to a rare Ptolemaic relief — and pair them with fresh readings of the 20th century.
A mild Autumn afternoon outside the marquees of the fairs, enticed the public to view the installations for Frieze Sculpture throughout the English Gardens of Regent’s Park, which included a walking tour by artist Grace Schwindt explaining the intricacies of her glazed ceramic and patinated bronze creation ‘When I remember through you’. Also to be enjoyed was ‘The Tale of Eye, the Seed and the Snake’, a moving performance of a collaborative writing piece, presented by Galleria Doris Ghetta and Victoria Law Projects. Lucía Pizzani and Lucia Pietroiusti recited fragments of their text, accompanied by sounds from hand percussion instruments and a guest appearance by singer-songwriter Luzmira Zerpa, who intoned evocative songs from Venezuelan rural and Indigenous communities associated with transformation and healing.
If you couldn’t get into Frieze, art can still be seen outside the fairs and other venues on the streets of London thanks to ST.ART Gallery’s Defrost London, a custom-built, fold-out exhibition trailer that is turning the thoroughfares of the capital into a moving art venue.
What a treat!
Frieze and Frieze Masters ran from 15–19 October; Frieze Sculpture is on at Regent’s Park in London till 2 November 2025
Images courtesy as per caption otherwise Trebuchet
