Regent’s Park is once again home to a diverse array of installations, ranging from the surreal and mechanical to the historic and introspective. Among the most striking is Ella Fleck’s installation, where visitors stand on a vibrating platform as a male voice whispers sexual fantasies—a biting commentary on the industrial scale of modern sex work management. Nearby, Yuli Serfaty presents metallic, headless dog sculptures that blend a surreal aesthetic with sharp, aggressive imagery, evoking a hybrid of retro gaming and biological horror that critiques the devaluation of the female body. The raised platform in the middle of British artist Ella Fleck’s installation vibrates under your feet to the sound of a male voice. Intoning sexual fantasies, he’s whispering sweet nothings. Interacting with users, creating fictional relationships that horny guys spend thousands on, it’s all based on third-party agencies that manage OnlyFans accounts. A body devalued and exploited, it’s a surreal symbol of femininity pushed to an extreme. But with a nasty, satirical edge, the whole installation looks like HR Giger meets Wolfenstein 3D.
For those seeking a cynical look at contemporary existence, Rirkrit Tiravanija has installed a robotic arm that repeatedly offers ibuprofen to passersby; its futile, repetitive motion serves as a bleak reflection of modern life. A similarly grim observation is found in a collection of promotional pharmaceutical pens acquired from estate sales. Branded for various medications including ADHD treatments and Viagra, these items serve as a stark portrait of how corporate interests influence healthcare and commodify the human body. Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija’s sculpture here is a robotic arm that carefully hands visitors a little red-and-white ibuprofen pill. Over and over, regardless of if you’re there to receive it, the robot does its job. Given out as gifts to American medical professionals, but each one is a promotional item from a pharmaceutical company. Lazzard bought them in estate sales from real doctors. There are pens with branding for antidepressants, ADHD meds, Viagra: corporations are keeping you going, keeping you productive. It’s an incredibly grim conceptual vision of how our bodies are treated as commodities, when it clicks. Glistening lumps of odorous chemicals for you to wee on, they sort of look like little chastity devices. You can hear the anguished cry of thousands of artists wishing they’d thought of it first. Monstrous introspection, each one plumbs new depths of anxious.
Artistic interventions have even reached the facilities, with Gray Wielebinski transforming standard urinal cakes into sculptural pieces. Encased in metal cages and custom-scented, these objects function as weird, eroticized interventions. On the more contemplative side, Swiss artist Miriam Cahn occupies a booth with 26 years of self-portraiture. The collection offers a raw, psychologically intense journey through the artist’s own emotional landscape, displayed in blurred, expressive washes of color. And succeeding, a video shows the creature trying to escape the booth. Stands and falls, all in blurred, messy washes of colour, she grins and screams. Wood is splintered, the ropes that bind him have been snapped.
The Frieze Masters section provides a venue for historical discovery, including a rare, yellowed work by 19th-century French academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau. The piece, depicting a prostrate figure, captures the aftermath of violence with haunting precision. Visitors can also explore the work of Haitian modernist Luce Turnier, whose stark portraits and vitrines offer a glimpse into a forgotten period of international modernism that feels overdue for wider recognition. So finding this little gem among the Dutch flower paintings and Egyptian busts of Frieze Masters was a genuine thrill. The shocking silence after a traumatic event, here is the aftermath of violence.
For a dose of natural history, the David Aaron Gallery has brought a 150-million-year-old dinosaur display to the fair. The exhibit features a massive triceratops skull and a camarasaurus supremus specimen still bearing an allosaurus tooth embedded within it. Finally, Sohrab Hura addresses themes of fear and trauma through a series of expressionist paintings. These works depict everyday violence with a visceral, graphic intensity, drawing clear parallels to the psychological dread found in the works of Edvard Munch. Finally, something to help you get through Frieze. It just drops it on the floor, if you don’t reach out. The urinal cakes in the Frieze bogs this year aren’t just there to keep whiffs at bay – they’re art. There is such an overwhelming amount of (usually very bland) painting at Frieze that it really takes a special painter to stand out.
