JEMIMA JENKINS' BIG DAY OUT: FRIEZE EDITION
Writer and critic Jemima Jenkins keeps a diary of Frieze week’s busiest day, from an exceptionally good gallery breakfast to dinner in a napkin crown, with three art fairs and some top picks in between.
Tache Gallery, Alice Delhanty
Untitled (2026), Alice Delhanty, Tache Gallery
My day out begins disturbingly well at Tache for their breakfast event, visiting Alice Delhanty’s debut solo show Invented Fire. Alice gives us a tour of the show, which continues across two floors – I bring one of the pains au chocolat along and spend the rest of the day talking about how it is the best pastry I’ve ever eaten. These aren’t the flaking walls usually donning emerging artworks. The gallery is seriously nice. We chat with Lauren Fulcher, Tache’s director, who tells us about the gallery’s steadfast ambition to propel emerging and early-career artists. The accompanying publication, written by Anna Moss, aptly references Ezra Pound’s seminal Imagist poem In a Station of the Metro (1913); its stunning brevity clicks for me in the hyperfocused moments of colour, which Alice applies and manipulates with a squeegee across her giant canvases.
We subsequently seek out a caff in Fitzrovia to fuel up on fried eggs and coffee. I peer over a stack of thickly buttered toast, savouring these moments of seated bliss before they’re gobbled up as quickly as our full English breakfasts.
The Newman, Minor Attractions
I make my way to Minor Attractions as soon as it opens, a cool 12:00 noon opening time, where the monstrous queue on its opening night earned it the title ‘Major Attractions’ by the people behind us. It’s busy again today. In the lift up to the first floor of The Newman hotel, phones on tight leashes take a battering of frantic typing. The metal doors open onto 16 hotel bedrooms, where 75 contemporary galleries have occupied every room for its fourth edition.
Philip Steele’s Prada heels fountain in the en suite
S t a r c h / LAILA Room 102
S t a r c h occupies Room 102, shared with LAILA, showcasing collaborative work by Moses Tan and Philip Steele. I’m beckoned in by a dismembered hand, which waves eerily like a metronome; it emerges from a fur lined leather handbag that is perched oddly on the edge of the freshly made bed. A second protrudes from the wardrobe through velvet drapes. Tan’s You Had Me at Hello and Goodbye (2026) is constructed from stuffed and sewn pale-green nylon, giving the claws their gangrenous appearance. It’s both chilling and absurdly funny. This, and Léa Porre’s fleshy palette in 107 - exhibiting with Tache across the road incidentally - immediately bring Dorothea Tanning’s surreal spell at her Hôtel du Pavot (1970-73) to mind, the installation first shown in 1974. Like Tanning’s fabric beasts in Room 202, that burst from every seam of its wallpaper, presentations in Room 102 of The Newman respond back to the four hotel walls as a hauntingly liminal site.
In the en suite, LAILA shows brilliant fountains by Philip Steele that feel lonesome, recycling water through luxury receptacles of vacant Prada heels and discarded leather purses. I think of Sarah Kane’s play Blasted (1995), in which its central hotel room setting is described as ‘so expensive it could be anywhere in the world’: I watch the fountain piss out a streamlet of water over and over, an ode to the daily turnover, the ‘Spring rain’, ‘summer rain’, ‘autumn rain’, and eventually ‘heavy winter rain’, under which the corporeal and architectural structures of Kane’s hotel room sag and collapse.
Tala Room 113
More literary affinities continue down the corridor in Room 113 as Roland Knowlden draws on James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, where Chicago-based Tala gallery have deservingly won Best International Booth at the fair. Tala, and Harlesden High Street with whom they share the room, play not only with affordances of space but with its lighting, which is turned low and sultry, casting silhouettes over sculpted torsos that splay across the bed-turned-plinth.
Frieze London
We arrive with the herd storming towards Regent’s Park. It’s a big blue skied day.
Alice Amati Artist-to-Artist AA2
Paul Robas at Alice Amati
As I flop into the tent, I forget everything I wanted to see and turn instinctively to the Artist-to-Artist section in an attempt to ground myself. I start first at Alice Amati, showing a sweeping solo series of small-scale works by Paul Robas – selected by painter Louise Giovanelli. I was grateful for these small digestible chunks of composition, sinking my teeth into the grooves of Robas’ layered brushwork. His work is concerned with ‘how images travel and mutate across media’ — I think how his use of encaustic gives the paintings’ surfaces the sheen of glossy magazine paper, representing light in the same way it bounces off dark flicking pages and editorial images distort as you bend the spine. I am sufficiently resuscitated.
Hales Booth A24
Hales’ booth was one of my favourites last year, with rarely shown drawings by the inimitable Ken Kiff (despite what parents believe of their children’s abilities). This year, it pleases again. I am a fan of Hales’ programme across the board — namely Martyn Cross, Carole Gibbons, and most recently Ally Fallon from Giovanelli’s Apollo Painting School’s first cohort, who joined Hales in January this year.
Sun, Woodgrain, Journey (2000), Ken Kiff
Quieter moments of the fair, such as the stunning grain in Ken Kiff’s final editioned woodcut print titled Sun, Woodgrain, Journey (2000), might’ve been missed on me if not for attending the launch of Kiff’s complete series of prints published by Thames & Hudson — vigorous panel discussion chaired by the brilliant Louisa Buck last month. I learnt that Kiff would cart these heavy wooden blocks back with him on the bus home to South London, the material impressed with a sense of dailiness. And yet, transport us to a realm far more surreal as the image is peeled from the etching press.
The Sunday Painter B12
Play it or run from it (2026), Patrick H. Jones
At The Sunday Painter’s booth, the Lords and Ladies of Misrule have broken their way into Eden. Patrick H. Jones’ paintings are twitching tapestries of metaphor and mythological figures; like Kiff’s work, they teeter between realms. In Play it or run from it (2026), red devils serpent themselves amongst innocent daffodils like the bloody heads of tulips: it's a truly Miltonic scene, teeming with wide-eyed devils who spy greedily on man’s flaccid naivety.
South Parade F28
Tom Hardwick-Allen, Secrets of the Fruitfly, (2025–2026) Books, glassine, oil, iron paste.
South Parade presents a towering stairway to heaven, where the steps are books and the books are mottled with decay. I spotted Tom Hardwick-Allen’s arresting installation Secrets of the Fruitfly (2025-26) early into the fair and was my favourite work of the day by a mile. Associations slope from archiving for posterity, to the decaying physical media we see in boxes outside houses and piled like detritus in flea markets, to the devastation of book burning. I talk with South Parade’s founder Isaac Simon, who shows me intricate prints that further probe the foetus motif that looms large in the wall hanging. Hardwick-Allen’s body of work chews on the wordplay of ‘imprinting’: the material process in iron-casting, the imprinting of information and behavioural patterns on the pliable, spongy folds of the human brain.
Harlesden High Street F24 / Edel Assanti D17
I enjoy the booths where being in them feels like I’ve left the tent entirely, lending scenography to the bare bones of the booth partitions. Marcus Jefferson achieves this with his immersive installation, turning Harsleden High Street’s stand into a full-fledged Press office of the local Hampstead & Highgate (Ham & High) newspaper. The gallery’s founder, Jonny Tanna, mans the desk.
Edel Assanti’s booth has also been transformed by Marcin Dudek, whose innovative site-specific set design constructs the space around the idea of ‘home’. Entering the booth through a door, my feet meet a stained and dizzying red carpet (reminiscent of Tanning’s hotel once again), which sits in tension with the artwork, evoking the domestic tensions that arrive when lives and personalities are brought into intimate proximity.
Maureen Paley B17
Slow Dance (2026), Mary Stephenson
At Maureen Paley, oil on linen has never looked as sumptuous as in Mary Stephenson’s Slow Dance (2026). For Stephenson, oil paint ‘is a total witch’, which she told Frieze last year, ‘it’s a slippery thing that we try to take hold of, but can’t’. For me, Stephenson is undoubtedly the sorcerer in this equation- she harnesses paint with the lightest of touch, casting worlds on her canvases that levitate as if spellbound.
Pioneer of the East End’s burgeoning gallery scene, THE Maureen Paley, also sings her praises, telling us how excited she is to be showing this new work, having announced in February earlier this year that the gallery would be representing Stephenson. We offer our congratulations and swiftly scuttle out of her way.
Beer garden
Our pilgrimage winds up in the outside beer garden, where many of the fair’s exhibiting artists can be spotted. We chat to some familiar faces while waiting for our dear friend to join us. My boyfriend wanders back from the loo via the bar carrying three beers: we take a collective sip and do our usual of huddling like Macbeth’s three witches to exchange nasty words about some of the more questionable work. It is unsurprising, then, that from this point onwards, our path through the fair becomes more circuitous, and my thoughts on the work increasingly brief.
TINA S02
Karim Boumjimar
For the same reasons I enjoyed South Parade’s pencil titles, Karim Boumjimar’s line work at TINA, showing for the first time at Frieze London, makes me want to draw with a scratchy quill and ink pot, to feel clay between my fingers, to follow one mark after the next.
Sargent’s Daughters / G Gallery C11
My friend is extremely taken by Rachel Youn’s chained foliage, made from second-hand modified neck massagers, metal hardware that straddles the industrial and fetish variety, glass and artificial orchids and anthuriums. Insect-like metal arms assists the flowers’ automated, undulating movements. We stare for a while at its opening and closing, its staggered breath.
Grimm C20
Printhead (2026), Tommy Harrison
Printhead (2026) by Tommy Harrison at Grimm’s booth is understated yet utterly mesmerising. It depicts the cast shadow of a sunlit window on a tube map of rusting pipes. I’m drawn to the optical games of the paint itself: piles of neon orange impasto mimic reflections of light, while speckles and spills introduce abstract moments into what initially appears to be a faithfully realist painting. Harrison loosens his grip on realism just enough to remind me of the painting’s material construction.
Frieze Masters
We march over the hill — the hill being Regent’s Park’s well-trimmed gardens — towards the next supersized tent: Frieze Masters, the dazzling, aristocratic relative to Frieze London. Immaculately dressed children trot behind their mother in unison, while we, a battered bunch, fling ourselves from one booth to the next, making terrible impressions on passing acquaintances. It is just not advisable to do three fairs in one day. Alas, I have work the rest of the week, so I’ll be brief with my standouts, and sign off by way of a sunset.
Vendelmans F18
Sunset, Åre (1897), Pelle Swedlund at Vendelmans.
I literally shoot across the room to admire this miniature oil painting – albeit because I think I’ve spotted a whole booth of Felix Vallottons at Vendelmans. It is not Swiss, but in fact Swedish — the highly saturated, waxy oil landscapes of symbolist painter Pelle Swedlund.
We set off to the floating Feng Shang Princess restaurant, where we have just made a reservation in the Masters smoking area. We’re relieved to find no art, only a few other Frieze stragglers, besides from the napkin folded in origami on my plate. It resembles a crown. I place it on my head and indulge in my meal with animalistic enthusiasm.
