FRIEZE LONDON 2024

BRIAN MAGUIRE’s Arizona series of paintings presents images based on events at the southern border of the USA. Working alongside the Chief Medical Officer of Pima County, Maguire casts a light on the unsettling number of migrants who die attempting to cross the border around Tucson, Arizona. The unforgiving desert landscape is rendered in urgent, expressionist sweeps – drawing the raw and visceral nature of Maguire’s subject matter into a tension with seductive, illusory nature of painting itself. Maguire is the subject of a major institutional solo exhibition at The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, 3 October 2024 – 23 March 2025.

Working in sculpture, film and photography, DOROTHY CROSS examines the relationship between living beings and the natural world. In a new sculpture presented at Frieze (left), the shell of a sea snail plants itself onto a religious figurine, swallowing up and entering a strange symbiosis with the Virgin Mary. Full of pathos, vulnerability and humour, such works demonstrate Cross’s ongoing engagement with the legacy of Surrealism and instinct for fostering a compelling dialogue between objects and creatures.

MERLIN JAMES’s Doorway and Stair(left) was painted c. 1984, during a formative period as a graduate student at the Royal College of Art, London. At that time, the school was located in the Victoria & Albert Museum, allowing the artist to nurture a deep engagement with art history that continues to shape and inform his practice to this day. With loose brushwork, a muted palette and an idiosyncratic take on its architectural subject matter, the painting shows the hallmarks of the artist’s distinct style.

LILIANE TOMASKO’s abstract paintings (right) employ a distinctive, bold lyricism and assertive sense of colour. Fusing material observation with intuition and association, the artist produces vigorous, imaginative expressions of familiar environments and psychological states. Intense colour, subtle tone, shadow, and painterly gesture allow space to come in and out of focus, oscillating between clarity and obscurity and emulating the atmospheric power of dreams and memories.

ELIZABETH MAGILL presents subjective and psychological takes on the landscape genre (left). Rich with kaleidoscopic patterning and fragmented forms, these vistas are embedded in place – usually rural settings on the edges of settlements – but transported through the artist’s imagination, memories, photographs or moods to be presented as something other: lush, visionary recollections of hills, lakes, hedges and skies glowing with ambient light. The term ‘inscape’ has been used to describe Magill’s practice: landscapes not based on direct observation, but imbued with a sense of interiority and reflection.

AILBHE NÍ BHRIAIN is an Irish artist working with film, computer-generated imagery, collage, tapestry, print and installation. Her Jacquard tapestry The Muses I(right) is a photographic collage fusing early colonial or ‘Orientalist’ photographs with images of damaged quarry walls. The colonial archive is considered here in its strange duality as both cultural record and cultural disruption – its surface intent of preservation belying a deeper act of destruction. Ní Bhriain’s current and forthcoming exhibitions include An Experiment With Time, Kunsthal Gent (solo exhibition until 31 December); Lahore Biennale (5 October – 8 November); The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin and Lismore Castle Arts, Co Waterford (both solo exhibitions forthcoming in 2025).

PAUL WINSTANLEY is a painter who uses the genres of landscape, interior, still life and figure painting to create works of conceptual rigour. The relationship of the viewer to the painting is often seen as central to the content of the work. In Landscape with Clouds (left),Winstanley looks towards early 19th-century painting of mountainous landscapes, and their exploration of the aesthetics of the sublime. Revisiting and reinventing this genre, the artist articulates the ways in which pictures mythologise reality.

ALEANA EGAN engenders psychological states through enigmatic arrangements of objects and forms. A meandering, sensuous line is carried from her sculptures into her paintings, populated by fragmentary shapes that hint at solid forms or gesture towards movement. Creating atmospheric shifts that feel open-ended, or in a state of flux, Egan articulates a distinct worldview infused by literary, cinematic, and architectural references as well as memories imprinted deep in the psychic landscape.

SABEL NOLAN’s work responds to big, often abstract, ideas with intimacy and materiality. The artist’s practice is expansive, matching the scope and scale of her varied interests, encompassing architectural, steel sculptures, handmade objects, tapestries, water-based oil paintings, pencil drawings or texts. Working thus, Nolan looks for ways to sidestep the, often arbitrary, nature of authority, to like, or even love, the difficult and complex human world we’ve made. For elsewhere(left) is a painted steel sculpture first made for Material Flux, a recent two-person exhibition with Aleana Egan at Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda and responds to the architecture of the gallery, a former Franciscan church.

JUSTIN FITZPATRICK works with painting, sculpture, text and, most recently, video to explore human consciousness through the prism of biology. He presents us with elaborate and fantastical paintings of mysterious figures and mutating forms; sinewy lines evoke art nouveau detailing, fused with gothic and macabre elements. Fitzpatrick’s work (below) is informed by the science around cellular structures (in particular, mitochondria), metaphysical poetry, mythologies, and an array of archetypal figures, often viewed through a lens of class and sexuality. Fitzpatrick’s first solo exhibition at Kerlin Gallery will take place from 24 October – 23 November 2024.