T Magazine US | Online 14 October 2015 MUV: 1,631,672
Certain as ever — even as Europe continues to slide into economic uncertainty — the Frieze Art Fair and Frieze Masters, its sister event devoted to 20th-century art, opened to packed crowds today in Regents Park. They close on Saturday and Sunday, respectively, and between now and then, here are some highlights from the very big and busy tents. Cheers to hometown gallery Stuart Shave/Modern Art, which won the Stand Prize sponsored by Pommery Champagne. The two-person booth is lined with ambient, pixelated paintings by Mark Flood inspired by Booths on view at the Frieze Art Fair this week, from left: the meditative compositions of Mark Rothko. It also Stuart Shave/Modern Art; Kurimanzutto gallery; a work by Mary Weatherford on view at David Kordansky features a row of sculptures by Yngve Hollen Gallery. Credit Kevin McGarry combining models of commercial jetliners and melted plastic prints of infrared images taken from a Lufthansa factory — balanced upon washing machines, which seem to nod to the whole presentation’s spin-cycle logic. In keeping with latter-day abstract expressionism, Mary Weatherford’s outsize canvases accented with strokes of (actual, electrical) neon at the Los Angeles-based David Kordansky Gallery flew off their temporary walls within the first half-hour of yesterday’s V.I.P. preview. Mexico City’s Kurimanzutto gallery has a double bill of artists with prominent London museum shows coinciding with the art fair — the American-born sculptor Jimmie Durham, whose work is on view at the Serpentine Gallery, and Abraham Cruzvillegas, with a large-scale installation at the Tate Modern’s massive Turbine Hall — plus the Mexican master Gabriel Orozco. Durham and Orozco were in fact mentors to Cruzvillegas, and the interplay of the trio’s sculptures and paintings riffing on geometry and reappropriated materials demonstrate that it’s possible to make a miniature exhibition inside the zoo-like environment of an art fair. Another art the Brits are known to be gifted in is conversation. In reverse chronological order, the Frieze Talks series will conclude on Saturday with a keynote address by the legendary designer and bona fide activist (if driving an alabaster anti-fracking tank up to the prime minister’s home is credential enough) Vivienne Westwood. The talks kicked off earlier today with a chat between “Generation X” progenitor Douglas Coupland and Emily Segal of K-Hole, the collective best known for coining the term “normcore.” Aptly for a roundup of this nature, Coupland introduced their conversation on moment-defining buzzwords with a quote by the Canadian laureate Malcolm McLuhan: “The oversimplification of everything is always very exciting.”