Frieze Masters: Advisory Selections

Lucio Fontana at Ben Brown Fine Arts

Ben Brown Fine Arts brings a selection of 20^th-century modern masterpieces to Frieze Masters, including Lucio Fontana's Concetto Spaziale (1958).

Fontana's iconic work marks the beginning of his renowned 'tagli' (cut) series of paintings, which represent a fascination with canvas and its sculptural possibilities.

In Concetto Spaziale, the large, unpainted paper canvas is pierced with small diagonal incisions that appear to have been made with vigorous movement—a contrast to Fontana's later tagli works, where the slashes appear more considered and defined.

Concetto Spaziale was recently presented in Fontana's major survey exhibition, On the Threshold (2019) at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Frank Auerbach at Ben Brown Fine Arts

Frank Auerbach's Head of J.Y.M. III (1981) is a dark impasto portrait of Julia Yardley Mills, a model who sat regularly for the German-born British painter.

The visceral, expressionistic image is rendered in Auerbach's characteristic moody palette, in thick, textural layers of oil paint. Abstracted from its context, Head of J.Y.M. III reveals little of the personal relationship Auerbach maintained with Mills over decades of sittings.

Auerbach represented Great Britain at the 1986 Venice Biennale, where he was awarded the Golden Lion prize along with his contemporary Sigmar Polke.

Auerbach's paintings will be featured in Gagosian's forthcoming group exhibition at Grosvenor Hill, Friends and Relations (17 November 2022–28 January 2023), alongside Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and Michael Andrews.

Eleonore Koch at Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte

At this year's Frieze Masters, Almeida & Dale present paintings by the late German-born Brazilian artist Eleonore Koch, alongside a variety of influential Brazilian artists.

Koch became known for her remarkable paintings of still life, landscapes, and portraits, often exploring themes of domesticity or the everyday. Her sparse compositions, coupled with a refined, subdued colour palette, beautifully translate the artist's attentiveness to her surroundings.

Park in the Evening (1969) exemplifies Koch's ability to render figures through reduced form and restricted colour.

Koch's work was included in the 34^th São Paulo Biennale in 2021.

Hans Arp at Hauser & Wirth

Jean (Hans) Arp's Musentorso / Torse de muse (Torso of a Muse) showing with Hauser & Wirth is a top work from the sculpture series he embarked on around the 1930s, which dominated his oeuvre for the next 30 years.

Arp's sensuous, biomorphic bronze and marble forms came to define his artistic career, and are recognised as pivotal developments in modernist sculpture.

On these forms, Arp noted, 'I only have to move my hands . . . The forms that then take shape offer access to mysteries and reveal to us the profound sources of life.'

Arp's works continue to fetch high prices at auction, with his white marble bust Déméter (1961) selling for 5,825,000 USD at Christie's in 2018.

An exhibition of Arp's plaster works opens from 6 November at Gerhard Marcks House in Bremen.

Alberto Giacometti at Hauser & Wirth

Giacometti once stated, 'I certainly paint . . . to better defend myself, to better attack, to hang on, to advance as much as possible on all levels, in all directions, to defend myself against hunger, against the cold, against death.'

This sentiment is echoed in Buste (1948), a haunting portrait in oil on canvas. Rendered in the Swiss artist's signature monochromatic palette of browns, Buste depicts the subtle contours of a figure silhouetted against an ambiguous background.

Over the summer, Hauser & Wirth Zurich celebrated Giacometti and Pablo Picasso in Facing Infinity. The exhibition brought together later works by the 20^th-century artists, exploring the relationship between figure and space.

Rasheed Araeen at Grosvenor Gallery

Karachi-born, London-based artist Rasheed Araeen contemplates the different frameworks of social institutions while challenging Eurocentric modernist discourse.

Aflatoon (So you think you are Plato) (1994) is a significant piece by Araeen, whose geometric forms are recognised for their contribution to the development of British minimalist sculpture in the latter half of the 20^th-century.

Composed of vertical and horizontal lines supported by interlaced diagonal lines, Aflatoon contains subtle symbolic inferences: bearing the weight of a singular white structure is a black grid, serving as the sculpture's foundation.

Aflatoon will be featured in Grosvenor Gallery's booth alongside Araeen's politically-charged works, The Golden Series (1974) and For Oluwale (1988).