WE WERE FORTUNATE to have been given a couple of entry tickets to the Frieze art fair held every year in London’s Regents Park. The fair consists of the elaborate stalls (or booths) set up by commercial art galleries and dealers from London and all over the world. It is divided into two sections, each housed in enormous temporary structures. Frieze Masters displays artworks and other artefacts (many of them antiques) created before the year 2000 AD. Although many of the pieces on display are fabulously beautiful and for sale, walking around Frieze Masters is rather like exploring a large museum. The stall by Jonckheere was especially wonderful with its display of paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and others of his era.

South of the Frieze masters pavilion is the Frieze London pavilion which showcases mainly works created after 2000. I found this to be far more exciting than the Frieze Masters. Many of the exhibitors’ displays had a vibrancy that I found lacking at Frieze Masters. Many of the booths had works by the brilliant, versatile Nigerian British artist Yinka Shonibare, whose works I have seen recently in several other galleries around London. Many other well-known artists such as Grayson Perry had works on display. Three booths, operated by galleries based in India, exhibited works by artists from not only India but also Pakistan and Bangladesh. Amongst the many eye-catching exhibits, there was a collection of works by the artist Patrick Goddard (born 1984). What made this display most interesting was that both the walls of the booth and the artworks were covered by life-like models of snails (see photograph above).

Having seen several exhibitions of contemporary art by African artists during the three days before we visited Frieze, I was attracted to the booth set up by the Stephen Friedman Gallery (London). It contained paintings and sculptures by an artist, Leila Babirye, born in Kampala, Uganda in 1985. She studied art at Makerere University in Kampala, and then participated in the Fire Island Residency (New York State) in 2015. The Residency is a meeting place for visual artists who are (to quote the Residency’s website): “… lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, non-binary, intersex and queer …” Ms Babyre is a member of the LGBTQ+ community, which is frowned upon in her native land. Because of this, she received asylum in the USA in 2018, and now both lives and works in Brooklyn, New York City. On display at Frieze, is her collection of colourful portraits, which sre described as “queer identity cards”. A director of the gallery explained that these are a reaction to the formal format of official identity card photographs in which the subject has to remove spectacles, headwear, and tie back their hair. In addition to these, and more interesting visually, there were several sculptures by Ms Babirye. Beautifully crafted, most of them incorporate a variety of different materials – often discarded objects. The point of embellishing her sculptures with what is basically ‘trash’ is to illustrate the word used in the Luganda language to describe homosexuals – ‘ebisiyaga’ meaning ‘sugar cane husk’, in other words ‘it’s rubbish’.

There was plenty more that I found exciting at Frieze London, but the stalls exhibiting artists from the Indian Subcontinent and that showing Leila Babirye wer for me the most interesting. A visit to the Frieze art fair is both exhilarating and exhausting. Luckily, the prices of the artworks were way beyond our budget. Had they not been so costly, I am sure that we would have brought home quite a few of them.