Five Artist Discoveries at Frieze London 2024

Much has been said of Frieze London’s refreshed layout in Regent’s Park last week, which saw younger galleries positioned within the ‘Focus’ sector at the heart of the fair. Feedback was resoundingly positive, with Freddie Powell of London gallery Ginny on Frederick reporting a sold-out booth—a solo presentation by Charlotte Edey—on day one.

Many mid-tier galleries also showcased their latest discoveries. Ocula Advisors share the five artists that caught their eye at this year’s fair, from Scottish artist Moyna Flannigan at Ingleby Gallery to Royal Academy graduate Eva Gold at Rose Easton.

Eva Gold at Rose Easton

Rose Easton has been the talk of the town since she opened her eponymous gallery in 2021, adding to the throng of gallerists who’ve vetoed Mayfair and joined Maureen Paley in Bethnal Green. For her Frieze debut, Easton brought London-based artist Eva Gold whose multidisciplinary practice employs narrative as a way of disrupting commonly held assumptions surrounding sexuality and violence.

Gold was introduced to art through sculpture—a practice that diversified into film, drawing, and writing while a student at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, where Easton first encountered her work in the 2019 degree show and was ‘instantly enveloped’.

‘Her exhibitions are always quietly all-encompassing and, much like the auteurs she references, are entirely capable of manipulating your emotions,’ Easton told Ocula.

Five of Gold’s exquisitely framed drawings—four in charcoal and one in delicate, airy coloured pencil—were on view, with each depicting a wooden shed on fire. Little is known about the building’s location, its owner, or the fire’s cause. The feeling of suspense and intrigue these images generate owe to Gold’s understanding of film and the directorial approach she takes towards each work.

Moyna Flannigan at Ingleby Gallery

Amid the busy fair tent, we found sanctuary in the delights brought by the Edinburgh-based Ingleby Gallery. Hanging in a corner of their booth was a mobile by Scottish artist Moyna Flannigan, who studied at Edinburgh College of Art before receiving her MA at Yale School of Art in 1987.

Five such works were on view—all various editions of Flannigan’s ‘Space Shuffle’ series (2023–24)—which stood out for their delicacy within a tent where bigger is often deemed better. These mobiles were a recent move, although the artist sees them as a subsection of her collages, a medium she has worked with since around 2016. Cutouts of lips, high-heels, and planets made from ink and gouache on Japanese paper hang from a rotating wire frame.

Flannigan’s collages start by chance. The artist cuts up her drawings, which often feature abstract body parts, and creates a new order from the original components. This rearrangement is a means to process a world that is increasingly saturated with images.

Anderson Borba at The Approach

The Approach graced us with two sculptures by Brazilian artist Anderson Borba. The first, titled Selfie (2024), is a deft piece made from foraged driftwood resembling a phone at one end of a selfie stick. The second, Suspended Canon (2024), also made of wood, is more figurative with a hollowed horizontal block for a head.

Borba contests the coherence of traditional sculpture. He gathers wood from around construction sites, urban skips, or on street curbs, and burns, chisels, and assembles the pieces. He then incorporates cardboard, fabric, and lifestyle magazine pages to add elements of colour while retaining the sutures of workmanship.

‘What I love about Borba’s sculptures is how they reference modern European artists like [Constantin] Brâncuși,’ said Ocula Advisor Rory Mitchell. ‘In the same breath, they bring in contemporary elements by fixing pages of magazines on their surface.’

At Art Basel Paris (18–20 October 2024), Borba’s near two-metre-tall sculpture Farsa Verde (2024) is included in Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel‘s presentation.

Simone Kennedy Doig at Tanya Leighton

Simone Kennedy Doig paints what she knows. Her subjects range from her environment—local bars, crowded streets, and public restrooms in East London, where she was born—to carnival fetes and sunrise strolls in Port of Spain, Trinidad, where she was raised.

At Frieze, Tanya Leighton presented a full throng of these miscellaneous moments. A woman in an emerald coat leads two white poodles down an undisclosed corridor; a girl wearing a chequered kilt and puffer jacket walks through a bed of cacti; a third painting captures three nurses in uniform standing outside a hospital.

In her work, Kennedy Doig collapses experiences that are both immediate—through references to her archive of cellphone snapshots, for instance—and remembered.

Tanya Leighton hosted the artist’s first solo exhibition in Europe at its Berlin gallery last year. The presentation consisted of paintings in addition to her lesser-known drawing practice. The artist is likewise growing a presence in Los Angeles following a solo exhibition of her paintings at Baert Gallery in 2022.

Charlotte Edey at Ginny on Frederick

To sell out a booth on VIP day is no mean feat. Freddie Powell, however, went home skipping as the works in his solo presentation by Manchester-born artist Charlotte Edey—six framed tapestries and pastel drawings, each priced between £10,000–12,500—were all sold by Wednesday evening.

The presentation took the form of an austere interior, with a wine-red carpeted floor and two stained-glass windows flanking the booth. Housed in bespoke wooden frames, Edey’s works—populated with pearls, webs, pins, moons, and windows—evoked portals to spaces where the material world can coexist with selfhood.

‘We’re very happy to have been at Frieze, a highlight of the year for us,’ Powell told Ocula. ‘Charlotte’s new works are some of her most complex to date, combining her intricate beadwork and drawing in the same frame for the first time. Frieze felt like the perfect place for us to share them.’

This was Powell’s second showcase of Edey’s work in London, having hosted her solo exhibition in March 2023. Since then, Edey has had two exhibitions in Los Angeles: a solo show at Anat Ebgi (2024), and a two-person exhibition at Sea View Gallery (2023). —[O]

Main image: Eva Gold, No Vacancy (2024). Resin, fibreglass, perspex, fluorescent light, change. 19 x 50 x 13 cm. Courtesy the artist and Rose Easton, London. Photo: Jack Elliot Edwards.