For the 2017 edition of Frieze London, Sprüth Magers will present a selection of works by Jenny Holzer, Astrid Klein, Barbara Kruger, Pamela Rosenkranz and Kaari Upson. The presentation draws on Sex Work: Feminist Art & Radical Politics, a new section at this year's fair, curated by Alison Gingeras. The timely tribute celebrates female artists from the 1970s onward whose work has been situated at the extremities of feminist art practice, with a particular focus on artists who engaged explicitly sexual iconography in their work. By contravening the mainstream understanding of feminist art practice, many of these artists were excluded from major museum shows on the subject, and therefore the section also recognizes the important part that their galleries had in championing their work.
Since the very beginning, Sprüth Magers has cultivated important female postmodernist and conceptual artists. Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer and Astrid Klein were amongst the first female artists represented by the gallery in Cologne in the 1980s, and were featured in the seminal Eau de Cologne magazines alongside many other major female artists. Kruger's visual language draws from the world of graphic design and incorporates specific colours and text fragments familiar from advertising and everyday visual culture. Holzer also works with materials drawn from ordinary, everyday contexts and the aesthetic of advertisements. Her visual vocabulary appears in the form of everyday 'truisms' and political texts often appearing in plaques, LED signs and granite benches. Both artists are united in their work by themes of political engagement, messages and questions that revolve around the individual in society, from a female perspective. Astrid Klein's work focuses on gender discourse and the influence of mass media on identity politics. The black and white collages on display in the Sprüth Magers presentation at Frieze date from the late 1970s. They address stereotypical depictions of womanhood and the commodification of the female body in advertisements and films. Also on view is a series of paintings by Pamela Rosenkranz in which she investigates the materiality of the body contained within images sourced from the Internet. These works demonstrate Rosenkranz's technique of using skin-tone acrylics to create a three- dimensional and porous 'skin' on the surface of images. Her intensive research into pigmentation analyses ethnic demographics in the human and animal world. Meanwhile, sculptures and drawings by Kaari Upson tackle the fraught physical and psychological relationships between the private and public sphere, the female body and consumer culture. In her works, intimate and mundane objects from the American household become bodily, uncanny, and multiple, whilst the body itself is abstracted into sculptural artefacts, and provocative illustrations of the human psyche caught in a web of collective desires and neuroses.
Opening Days
Invitation-only preview:
Wednesday 4 October
Open days:
Thursday 5 October (Premium Day) to Sunday 8 October