Frieze London 2026: artists that caught our eye

Frieze has returned to London for its annual art fair, bringing that fabulous white tent, plonked in the middle of Regent’s Park, back to the heart of the city. Every October, it draws some of the most exciting galleries and artists from around the world, reaffirming London’s place as one of the major art capitals.

There is certainly no shortage of things to see. Across the fair, galleries offer their own perspectives, bringing together a mix of talent, genres and mediums, from painting and sculpture to film and installation. Established names sit alongside emerging artists, with galleries making a case for both their biggest stars and the new voices they believe are ones to watch. For a pause from the bustle, this year the Frieze London section also includes the Reading Room, inviting visitors to browse publications by artists, independent publishers and non-profit organisations.

With thousands of works on display and galleries vying for attention, what really stayed with us at Frieze this year? Across the fair, we kept returning to a few recurring motifs: heightened colour, lush landscapes, otherworldly figures and dreamlike settings. There was a sense of looking beyond the everyday, towards worlds shaped by nature, mythology and folklore, where the familiar slips into the fantastical. Perhaps it speaks to a desire to find a little magic beyond our own reality at the moment? These were the presentations that caught our eye.

Victoria Miro, Booth D12

Recent paintings and sculpture by young Zimbabwean painter Kudzanai-Violet Hwami was the focus of Victoria Miro’s presentation, alongside works by bold-name artists like Chris Ofili. The gallery, a longtime champion of artists whose practices move between personal experience and wider cultural histories, offered a particularly strong setting for Hwami’s work.

Her works draw on photographs, archival imagery and digital sources to create bold, multidimensional collage and painting. She often places fragments of different times and places alongside one another, fusing ideas of race, migration, sexuality and belonging. At Frieze, a trio of paintings and a sculpture gave the artist room to establish her visual language. The saturated colours she uses gives her work real intensity, which stood out among the white booths. Sorbus Hymn II, the largest painting, was particularly exciting. The vibrant female nude looked like a collage of different natural landscapes layered atop one another.

Ofili's Frieze offering once again challenged how Black identity is represented in art. The two paintings on view wove in passages from Othello alongside dancing animal-like figures framing the text. There was something Blakean about the pieces, in the fusion of image and written word where text becomes part of the visual language. The paintings brought ideas of race, masculinity and identity into the booth through Shakespearean tragedy.

Maureen Paley, Booth D17

Paley has played a significant and powerful role in shaping London’s contemporary art scene since opening her east London gallery in 1984. Yet the gallery’s presentation at Frieze offered a quieter counterpoint to the chaos of the fair with the prominence of Chioma Ebinama and Jamila Isa. Both artists explore spirituality and inner life.

Raised in the United States by Nigerian Christian immigrant parents, Ebinama explores the possibilities of spirituality through delicate watercolours and ink drawings. Her works have a lightness to them, with a butterfly ascending above a water landscape. Painted on paper, the pieces felt vulnerable and intimate, the delicate surface becoming an extension of the imagery.

Isa, meanwhile, approaches the self through dreams, using otherworldly figures and imagined landscapes. The paintings here created a world that feels both familiar and strange, where thick, expressive brushstrokes built a colourful scene permeated by religion and myth.

Hauser & Wirth, Booth D20

An exciting group of established and newer artists — including Frank Bowling and Christina Kimeze — headlined Hauser & Wirth this season. The young Brit Kimeze worked in oil, pastel and oil sticks for these pieces she built up on the surfaces so they hold a particular richness and softness. Greens and yellows seemed to radiate from the painting — plants, butterflies and figures emerged from landscapes. The message was of movement, migration and the possibilities of freedom.

Guyana-born Bowling is known for his approach to abstraction in which colour, poured paint and layered washes. Watermelon Bight showcased bright, multilayered colour suggesting several things at once: a sunset, a shifting atmosphere, perhaps even a distant galaxy. There was a real movement between colour fields, and the light seemed to emerge from the layers rather than sit on top of them.

Bolanle Contemporary, Booth AA5

Nominated for Frieze’s Artist-to-Artist programme by Firelei Báez, Eilen Itzel do Espírito Santo works across painting, drawing, sculpture and installation. Her practice explores how people across the African diaspora and Latin America seek joy and purpose beyond colonial histories. This installation’s deep red floor and soft pink walls immediately drew something different from the other booths. The sculptures were made from air-dried clay; their rough, earthy material suggested vessels or fragments of a landscape, while their surfaces held the traces of their making. Birth and decay, construction and erosion, seemed to coexist within the same objects.

A recurring idea in do Espírito Santo’s practice is the parallel between the artist and the snail — both leave marks as they move through the world. Rather than treating spirituality as a subject to be illustrated, do Espírito Santo made it felt through colour, texture and the relationship between the works.

Carl Friedman Gallery, Booth A28

Margate-based Carl Friedman Gallery brought several standout young British artists to its booth this year. The paintings of Vanessa Raw brought a particular intensity of colour to the fair. Raw works with heightened palettes and imagined environments inspired by her home in Margate, and uses the female figure to explore the meeting point between mythology, the body and the natural world. Her paintings here drew on Greek and Mexican mythologies — greens and blues were especially luminous. Figures appeared within forests and gardens, their bodies often feeling inseparable from the vegetation around them. Raw’s landscapes are not quite pastoral idylls: their colour is too heightened, their atmosphere too strange, to feel entirely familiar. Instead, they suggest an alternative world that sits just beyond the everyday, where the natural environment carries a charge. Forms seem to emerge and dissolve into one another, with colour doing much of the work of describing space.

Another standout was from sculptor Emii Alrai, who installed seven ceramic forms made from unfired clay and patinated copper leaf. They had the appearance of archaeological vessels, objects that seemed to have been recovered. Each form was distinct, yet the group carried a shared sense of familiarity. Alrai’s practice engages with archaeology, memory and the ways objects carry the traces of cultural histories. The vessels drew on the romance of excavation.

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