Sweating through your Miyake pleats? Craving the cool whip of air conditioning, cigarette smoke, and an iced latte for sub-six quid? Why not partake in a spot of Frieze Week gallery-hopping.
London’s most adored endurance test has arrived. As Frieze London and Frieze Masters arrive in Regent’s Park (15–19 October 2025), the lure of soft-power preview scrums and crisp champagne feels as strong as ever, even amid a market nursing its nerves.
But we’re doing just fine. New gallery spaces for Sadie Coles HQ and Maureen Paley signal a renewal of London’s institutional backbone, while the arrival of Ibraaz, Lina Lazaar’s platform for art from the Global South, suggests a widening of its cultural lens as the city reorients away from Europe.
Beyond the tents, the week also promises concurrent fairs—1-54, PAD, and the debut of Echo Soho, a female-led venture by Soho Revue’s India Rose James—alongside auxiliary exhibitions across the city’s young gallery circuit and a rather brilliant selection at London’s blue-chip behemoths this autumn. Here are Elephant’s highlights for those looking to escape the tent.
Helen Marten, Sadie Coles HQ (through 15 November)
Helen Marten’s ‘Treatise of a Coat’, on view at Sadie Coles HQ this October, presents six new wall-based works that embed drawing, painting, and sculptural framing into layered visual essays. Each composition contains a densely worked drawing—of animals and human figures, plainly titled Cow, Women, and Men—set within sandy sgraffito frames and surrounded by abstract nylon paintings. The exhibition’s title plays on the homonymic meanings of “coat” as skin, fur, covering, as well as the act of coating or building up, extending Marten’s fascination with language, surfaces, and the shifting value of boundaries. She uses the animal–human imagery as a metaphor for the messy, intertwined nature of existence; instinct, intellect, care, and destruction. The frames represent the structures we create—social, linguistic, and artistic—to contain that chaos, even as those structures start to crumble or blur. The result is a vivid, overwhelming theatre of marks that speak to both chaos and care.
Teresa Solar Abboud, Hayward Gallery
There’s a spirit of experimentation this year, particularly among sculptors working with new materials. On Thursday (16 Oct), Spanish artist Teresa Solar Abboud––who participated in the Hayward Gallery’s group show ‘When Forms Come Alive’ last year–– returns to the Southbank space to unveil her first UK public art commission. She is one of several artists debuting their first forays into bronze. Mother Tongue, a four by six metre tall bubblegum pink installation of a dicephalous tongue, stands as a testament to the artist’s multi-cultural upbringing. Raised by an Egyptian mother and a Spanish father, and now a mother herself, Solar Abboud draws on personal memory and heritage to explore belonging at a cultural crossroads of assimilation and translation. Intertwined, reaching upwards, the symbiotic entities appear as if joyfully walking or dancing together, grounded but transcendental.
Nicolas Party, Hauser & Wirth (through 20 December)
Step inside and wander the chromatic fairytale forests of Nicolas Party; sculptural, saturated, and strange. The Swiss artist’s bosky landscapes unfold in unearthly hues of acidic green, thermal red, and electric blue—the latter bleeding beyond the frame to stain the gallery walls. In dialogue with these treescapes hang two portraits that meditate on natural rhythm and cyclical transformation, a seasonal metaphor in flesh and bark. Each presents a youthful face suffocated by gnarled, moribund figures: beauty entwined with decay. Portrait with Camille (2025), a vibrant memento mori, takes its cue from Camille Claudel’s Clotho (1893), whose mythic namesake, one of the three Fates, spins the thread of human life.
In a first for Hauser & Wirth, Party extends his vision to Frieze Masters, curating a section of their booth. His selections include works by Arnold Böcklin, Hans Emmenegger, Ferdinand Hodler, and Félix Vallotton that have inspired his own imagination.
Claire Fontaine, Mimosa House (through 6 December)
At Mimosa House, conceptual artist Claire Fontaine examines, with customary provocation, how words and images are policed to invoke socio-political disorientation. The neon Fatherfucker in the street-facing vitrine inverts a familiar insult, exposing the gendered violence embedded in language. Inside, Guardian newspaper headlines carpet the floor, forming accidental yet enlightening dialogues with surrounding works. The exhibition’s title ‘Show Less’—a phrase sometimes used to police women’s bodies—here also alludes to the global contraction of free expression and the self-censorship it breeds. Since 2004, Fontaine has exhibited her Brickbats. These bricks wrapped in dust jackets like Flowers of Palestine, evoke both resistance and the silencing of critical thought. Upstairs, twelve reproductions of Courbet’s controversial L’Origine du monde bear bruised and luminous spray-painted interventions, turning vandalism into a feminist gesture that probes at our oft misplaced moral outrage. These powerful collisions confront the weaponisation of language and the imbalance between the protection of art and the neglect of human life.
Andreas Gursky, White Cube Mason’s Yard (through 8 November)
Andreas Gursky’s vast panoramas have a way of making you feel infinitesimally small. Following a focused presentation at Gagosian’s rue de Castiglione gallery in Paris this summer, the German photographer will show new work at White Cube Mason’s Yard during Frieze. Whether capturing the façade of a post-war housing estate, the foot of an Alpine pass, or the backstage of a Harry Styles concert, Gursky distills layers of globalisation, consumerism, and social exchange into precise, monumental compositions.
Alongside new images of domestic interiors and steel plants—each exploring different scales of industrial structure—Gursky will debut his Chrono Capsule series, revisiting sites first photographed in the 1980s and ’90s to trace ecological and sociopolitical change. Paris, Montparnasse II (2025) reimagines his iconic 1993 photograph of Jean Dubuisson’s Immeuble d’habitation Maine-Montparnasse II, using advanced digital techniques to render the façade with forensic clarity and transform its figurative density into an almost abstract geometry.
Sonia Gomes, Pace (through 15 November)
After leaving a legal career in her mid-forties to pursue art full-time, Sonia Gomes—now seventy-seven—is finally enjoying long-overdue recognition. Her sculptural practice, on view at Pace this autumn, is tactile and inherently memory-laden. Discarded materials such as wire, driftwood, and bird cages are webbed in second-hand textiles and shaped into carnivalesque torsions that gently sway and gyrate overhead or else are surgically flayed against the wall.
Oftentimes, Gomes begins with a single line—a wire or thread—intestinally mapped, as if mimicking the winding afterlife of the very materials she redeems. During a visit to a London market in 2019, she discovered a shibori-dyed raw cotton made by Bai artisans near Tibet’s border. It has remained in her studio ever since, and she now presents three works incorporating it. At Pace, Gomes further extends her visual lexicon with bronze casts of textile-wrapped tree burls and branches, and wall-mounted lumber pieces consecrated with gold leaf and fragments of a nineteenth-century liturgical vestment.
Rember Yahuarcani Here Lives the Origin, Josh Lilley
Remember Yahuarcani paints richly detailed, oneiric worlds that beckon us into dream. In his first UK show at Josh Lilley opening on Thursday, a series of chimeric characters collide, skip, float and glide across the canvas, illuminating a sacred kind of darkness in their wake. Yahuarcani, belonging to the Aimenɨ (White Heron) clan in the Uitoto nation of northern Peru, drinks deep from a well of spiritual and ecological tradition and storytelling, his paintings brought to life by the symbols, stories, and elemental forces of the Uitoto rainforest. These pieces, alive and viscerally transportative, seek not to resign mythology to the past but to embrace the symbiotic nature of all living elements as an ancestral future. Across this new body of work, the artist explores the theme of gods at the beating heart of Indigenous nations, such as Jitoma, the sun god, depicted as a strident, colourful harpy, or Nokaido, the toucan god, clasping the crescent moon in one fist, his plumage glinting like fireflies.
Written by Millen Brown-Ewens
