Tabla de contenidos para Issue 254 - October 2025 en Frieze

IN 1966, JOHN GIORNO, the poet, performer, painter and star of Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1964), moved to 222 Bowery - an 1884 Romanesque former YMCA on New York City’s Lower East Side. The building’s artistic provenance was already potent by then Fernand Léger and Mark Rothko had come and gone - and continued as Lynda Benglis and John’s dear friend William Burroughs joined the roster. I was 18 when I started spending time in William’s windowless loft, known as ‘The Bunker'. I lived there on and off from 1981 to 1985, when I was in a relationship with William's amanuensis James Grauerholz. John was my auntie in this queer family. Our shared outer-boroughs roots and vernacular provided comfort and contrast to the Midwestern-ness of James and William. The magic and…

Canada Daniel Faria Gallery Toronto, 188 St Helens Avenue, M6H 4A1 Tel. +1 416 538 1880 www.danielfariagallery.com June Clark through 1 November MKG127 Toronto, 1445 Dundas Street West, M6J 1Y7 Tel. +1 647 435 7682 www.mkg127.com Instagram @mkg127 Dave Dyment & Roula Partheniou ‘A is for Apple’ through 11 October Micah Lexier ‘A Drawing and A Sculpture’ 18 October — 15 November Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA) Toronto, 158 Sterling Rd, ON M6R 2B7 www.moca.ca Contact the gallery for information. United States Almine Rech New York, 39 East 78th Street, 2nd Floor, 10075 www.alminerech.com Timothy Curtis ‘Face to the Sun’ through 25 October New York, Tribeca, 361 Broadway, 10013 Chloe Wise 'Myth Information' through 25 October Erik Lindman & Augustus Thompson through 25 October Galerie Buchholz New York, 17…

Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway Crude oil pools in the creases of palms and drips down wrists as the figures on-screen rub the brown substance into their skin. One remarks that she finds the scent oddly familiar, redolent of childhood and her father; the film transitions to archival footage of an offshore oil rig operator, a cigarette dangling from his mouth like an afterthought. ‘Oil is a dead material, but anything that is dead has been alive,’ says another voice. A shot of a model of Norway’s petroleum-rich continental shelf is overtaken by footage of plankton in motion, alluding to oil’s vegetal and animal origins. A focal point of Liv Bugge’s exhibition ‘Umbilical Fire’ at Kunsthall Trondheim, Goliat, Draugen & Maria (2021) grew out of a series of workshops conducted by the…

Various locations, Ljubljana, Slovenia In Ljubljana’s beautifully maintained Tivoli Park, the air always smells of freshly cut grass. This bucolic setting is a fitting central location for the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, where whimsy and fantasy are the predominant forms of expression. Curated by Chus Martinez, ‘The Oracle' comprises numerous new commissions, many of which feature cutesy, non-human actors - from mosquitoes and ghosts to angels and stingrays - and takes as its starting point the admirable idea that art offers a ‘tiny and meaningful spot' from which we can ‘dream and demand freedom'. The opening room of the Museum of Modern Art - centred on Ajša Pengov’s puppet Žogica Marogica (Speckles the Ball) - is an early standout. Žogica is a brightly coloured, spherical creature with absurdly long…

Sursock Museum, Beirut, Lebanon I have lived in Beirut for the past six years. In that relatively short time. I have witnessed the mass protests of the 2019 October Revolution, the impact of COVID-19, Lebanon’s inexorable slide into economic crisis, the Beirut Port blast of 2020 and, most recently, terrorism and war precipitated by Israel's war on Gaza Yet, despite the many challenges the country faces, acts of creative resistance against inaction, transgression and violence are deeply embedded in the local artistic landscape. This urge to respond to tire unsettling is a key element in the practice of artists Joana Hudjithomas and Khalil Joreige. ‘Remembering the Light' sees this professional and private partnership return to Beirut for their first solo show since 2012. Comprising a selection of some of their…

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA The centrepiece of ‘Indulge Me', Wafaa Bilal’s mid-career survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, is something of a formalist oxymoron: the museum has reconstructed his 2007 performance Domestic Tension without Bilal (or anyone) in the starring role. In the original, the Iraqi-American artist lived in a Chicago gallery for a month while subjected to remote-controlled paintball gunfire, The performance took a significant physical and psychic toll on him. making a faithful restaging undesirable. Domestic Tension is, furthermore, context-specific: made during the Second Gulf War (2003 11), after Bilal's brother was killed by a US missile, it reflects a particularly lawless internet culture of the period that amplified deep societal anti-Arab sentiment and indifference to civilian life. The reconstruction includes paint-spattered walls and…

Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, USA In Jürgen Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), the philosopher explores the limits of what he refers to as the technical knowledge of the natural world. 'No matter how far our power of technical control over nature is extended,’ he writes, ‘nature retains a substantial core that does not reveal itself to us.’ In the age of Donald Trump, a Newtonian worldview feels particularly inadequate; the microscope of the Enlightenment has been shattered by quantum and schizopolitical force. The more deeply we investigate the observable world, the less recognizable it becomes and the hotter the lithium-powered information swarm burns. Agnieszka Kurant’s ‘COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE’ at Marian Goodman Gallery reckons with the ceaseless copy-pasting of new forms while resisting simple conclusions. Building on her long-standing interest…

Modern Art, London, UK ‘Annual Honesty’, Francesca Mollett’s solo exhibition at Modern Art, London, is titled after the flower of the same name. Also known as the ‘money plant’, honesty bears purple blooms in the spring, followed by round, translucent seed pods, resembling a cascade of silvery coins or a cluster of pale, flat moons. It is an apt emblem for the young British painter’s work, which is concerned not only with the way certain forms echo across the living world, but also with what we might call material candour. While the canvases in this show are her most figurative to date, the insistent physicality other handling - with its layering and scraping, its creation of almost geological strata and fissures - never lets us forget that they are, first…

Cabinet, London, UK Setting: a contemporary art gallery, daytime. A bench, a bus stop sign and a waste bin sit on a floodlit wooden stage. A guillotine looms over them. Three open-fronted plywood boxes, each perforated with two diamond-shaped holes, hang on the wall; a sheet of wood with similar apertures covers a tall, narrow window. Diamond Stingily’s 'May 29', at London's Cabinet Gallery, is titled after the date it opened - a banal gesture in keeping with the aesthetic of the installation, which features versions of objects encountered by the artist in her ordinary surroundings. An image printed on the front of the gallery handout shows the exhibition's central referent: a bus stop photographed from inside a moving vehicle, the sign and bench advertisement made queasily indistinct by movement.…

THIS SUMMER I arrived in Williamstown, Massachusetts, for the opening of ‘Ground/work 2025’, the Clark Art Institute’s outdoor sculpture exhibition. Yet, before golf carts could whisk us across the Clark’s grounds, our first afternoon was spent indoors, immersed in two exceptional shows. 'Berenice Abbott’s Modern Lens', curated by Grace Hansclman, introduced me to the American photographer, known for her ‘Changing New York’ series (1935-39). Abbott began as assistant to Man Ray in Paris before an epic rupture - Gertrude Stein asked Abbott, rather than Ray, to photograph her. Downstairs, associate curator Alexis Goodin’s brilliant ‘A Room of Her Own: Women Artist-Activists in Britain, 1875-1945’ - rifling on Virginia Woolf - surveyed 25 women artists working during the writer’s lifetime. The next morning brought ‘Isamu Noguchi: Landscapes of Time’, a quietly…

I WAS 22 when I started to assist Alastair Mackinven. We had just met at St. John restaurant after seeing a performance. I was studying at the time, but I only wanted to paint. At Goldsmiths, my peers were preoccupied with questions about the trouble of painting and what it meant to be making art ‘now', but there weren't any conversations about the paintings themselves. One day, when venting about this to Alastair, he asked, ‘What’s stopping you painting?' One of my biggest problems was that I simply didn’t have the space to stretch a canvas, so he invited me to share his studio. I was shocked, but he was known for that sort of generosity. I had an instinct for painting but still needed to learn the practicalities. So,…

RICK LOWE When did we first meet? OTOBONG NKANGA Initially in December 2001, and again at Project Row Houses for FotoFest in 2002. I think you were returning from Harvard around that time. RL I was doing a fellowship there. ON I was staying at your house while researching for the festival, and one morning you came home surprised to find me there. RL In those days, I hosted all kinds of artists - Whitfield Lovell, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Fred Wilson who would leave behind artworks after they stayed. My home often felt like it belonged to someone else. ON It did when I was there. RL Because you had taken over. Before FotoFest brought you out to Houston, they told me they had invited this photographer, so I expected a…

China Almine Rech Shanghai, 27 Hitqiu Road, 2nd Floor, 200002 www.almtnerech.com Group Show 'Not Flat’ through 25 October Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong, G/F, 8 Queen's Road, Central www.hauserwirth.com Instagram @hauserwirth Facebook @hauserwirth Twitter @hauserwirth Maria Lassnig 'Self with Dragon' 26 September - 28 February 2026 MASSIMODECARLO Hong Kong, Shop 03-205A & 205B & 206, Second Floor, Barrack Block Tai Kwun, No. 10 Hollywood Road www.massimodecarlo.com Tomoo Gokita through 14 November Pace Gallery Hong Kong, 12/F H Queen's, 80 Queen's Road Central Tel, +852 2608 5065 www.pacegallery.com Alejandro Piñeiro Bello 'Solo Quiero Soñar (I Just Want to Dream)' through 18 October Galerie Urs Meile Beijing Beijing, D10, 798 East Street, 798 Art District, No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, 100015 Tel. +86 10 576 260 51 www.galerieursmeile.com Instagram @galerieursmeileofficial Facebook…

Various venues, Helsinki, Finland 08:05 I’ve just woken up in a large, empty hotel room in Helsinki. Last night, after I complained of being slightly ill, someone told me that whisky helps to clear congestion — then promptly ordered me a double. Any restorative effect has now worn off. I’m here for this year’s Helsinki Biennial, curated by Blanca de la Torre and Kati Kivinen, Titled ‘Shelter: Below and Beyond, Becoming and Belonging', its works are united by a concern with the relationship between humans and other forms of life. In their introductory statement, the curators outline a focus on ‘displacing the anthropocentric gaze’. It’s an intriguing, if characteristically vague, starting point for a biennial. 08:41 Having skipped breakfast, I arrive at the Helsinki Art Museum (HAM), one of the…

Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands To enter Ima-Abasi Okon's exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, visitors must pass beneath what looks like a bright blue inflatable arch. Similar structures fill each of the gallery’s subsequent passageways. In sports competitions, these objects often appear at the start and finish lines of a race, branded with company logos from sponsorship deals. In Okon's exhibition, they are blank. Beside them, however, are displayed certificates from food-testing labs, which examined Okon's home-made, dehydrated oxtail stew and reported on its nutritional value — the fuel it might provide for a body, such as that of an athlete. The connection between these elements is slender, with Okon relying on a slow accrual of meaning as visitors take in the seemingly disparate objects that make up her…

Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s hometown of Czarna Góra, a Roma village in southern Poland, is not a place most visitors to Kunsthaus Bregenz will have heard of. Yet over three floors of Peter Zumthor’s famously austere building, her exhibition 'Tele Ćerhenia Jekh Jag' (Under the Starry Heavens a Fire Burns) invites us into its reimagined version — one tightly constructed by the artist not as an ethnographic record but as a shifting constellation of tradition, memory, dream and utopia. Mirroring the museum’s architecture, Mirga-Tas’s storytelling unfolds in three ascending layers; a murmured sound piece by her uncle, Romani poet Jan Mirga, guides the climb up each staircase, introducing the exhibition's focus on Roma culture. Upon entering the first floor, Mirga-Tas evokes her home village with her signature elaborate textile…

Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico In a swamp, land cedes to water, forming an environment defined - fuelled - by a scrambled mixture of earth and liquid. In Oscar Murillo’s survey exhibition ‘Espíritus en el pantano’ (Spirits in the Swamp) at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO), Mexico, this biodiverse wetland ecosystem becomes a metaphor for the social, political and artistic collectivity that undergirds displaced communities whose stories are both similar to and removed from Murillo's own. Born in La Paila, Colombia, Murillo and his family emigrated in his youth from the small industrial town to London, joining a large group of La Paila natives in the UK. This relocation, and the impromptu gatherings that resulted from it, reverberate throughout Murillo's interdisciplinary, collaborative artwork, infusing his practice…

SITE Santa Fe International Santa Fe, USA Set under the crisp blue sky of a New Mexico summer, ‘Once Within a Time' - a show about storytelling with a storybook title - might at first appear whimsical. But the stories it shares pertain to issues that have fired public debate in the US since at least the beginning of the Cold War - from militarization to ecological crisis to technologization. The SITE Santa Fe International’s 12th edition, which features 98 participants and spans 14 venues with additional locations for special projects, treats local narratives as a metonym for humanity’s greatest struggles. It deftly interweaves past and present to explore how societies and individuals have sought - and created - meaning through fable, parable and myth. The exhibition compellingly engages with…

The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, USA Vivian Browne navigated the intersection of identity, politics and paint in deft, surprising and tender ways. In lieu of overt symbols of Black liberation, her ‘Little Men’ (1966-69) paintings, made during the Black Arts Movement in the US, depict large, self-important white guys in moaning, defensive postures. Later in her career, she rarely worked in an explicitly figurative mode. When she did portray people, as in this early series, she tended to craft sketchy works that juxtaposed negative space with oozing rainbows. There’s a curious ambivalence to these watery portraits, which seem to teeter between rage and sympathy. The ‘Little Men' feature prominently in Browne’s first major museum retrospective, ‘My Kind of Protest' at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. The artist, who died…

Various venues, Boston, USA Once the heart of Boston’s maritime economy, Long Wharf pier served as a major gateway for the transatlantic slave trade. Today, just a few hundred metres west of that historic site stands Faneuil Hall Marketplace, which houses shops and restaurants: a digestible version of American capitalism, saturated with foot traffic and historical amnesia. Nestled in its outdoor plaza is New Red Order's large-scale installation Material Monument to Thomas Morton (Playing Indian) (2025) -one of the most quietly radical interventions in the inaugural Boston Public Art Triennial, ‘The Exchange’, curated by Pedro Alonzo and Tess Lukey. Morton - a colonial dissenter, Puritan defector and leader of the ill-fated Merrymount Colony (a scandalous settlement that promoted integration with Indigenous communities and orgiastic festivities) - has long been celebrated…

ShugoArts, Tokyo, Japan I mean this in the best sense possible: Masaya Chiba is an eggheaded painter whose works are arch. For example, in ‘Sideward Exhibition', his 2023 show at ShugoArts, the artist ‘rotated’ the gallery space 90 degrees by hanging his paintings on the ceiling, wall and floor. His current exhibition at the same gallery. 'Painting and iPS-derived cardiac muscle sheet’, hinges on nine small, enigmatic and deftly executed still life paintings combined with sundry objects, text and sound. The paintings revisit surrealism and pop’s tactic of 'deliberately us[ing] academic means to illustrate unconventional things’, as Clement Greenberg put it in the 1972 documentary Painters Painting. Approximating the muted palette employed by Italian still life master Giorgio Morandi, each canvas depicts a shallow space in which sculptural objects rest…

Marshall renders the sensorial nature of Black intimacy through its felt memory. ON A PICNIC BLANKET, eight limbs tangle with the rivulet shadows of tree branches - the lovers’ souls grown deep. Light breaks through the shade, towards the man’s hand, pressed against his lover's back as she rests on the hill of his thigh. Their legs bloom into a compass rose; the bodies stretch against a canvas of their own making. Before them, there were others - who, like Baby Suggs in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), met in patches of sunlight, escaped to the clearing and found moments of surrender. Rich ebony pigment fills the centre of Kerry James Marshall’s 2014 painting Untitled (Blanket Couple). The figures’ skin spills into diagonal rivers, carrying the gaze across the work and…

I MET EDI RAMA when I was about ten years old, through our parents. He was a student at the Academy of Arts in Tirana and a decade older than me. My interest in painting was perhaps deeper than was typical for a child, and this caught his attention. I began painting alongside Edi using his oil paints. At that time, under Albania's communist regime, oil colours were distributed in limited rations exclusively to art students and those officially recognized as artists. Having Edi's attention and working with a type of paint not usually available to me, I felt like I was entering an unconventional, grown-up, even slightly transgressive world. What made Edi’s mentorship particularly meaningful was the shared sense of equality, inquisitiveness and wonder, despite my youth and our…

Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland For “The Trompe I’oeil Cleavage’, Monster Chetwynd transformed the rooms of Kunsthaus Zürich into a dramatically lit sequence of spaces inspired by accounts of the ancient Via Appia, the Roman thoroughfare that doubled as a burial ground. Set against a backdrop of sprawling wallpaper collages and dotted with sculptural structures of wood, cardboard, papiermâché and latex, the exhibition brings together a constellation of objects, paintings and films celebrating over two decades of the artist’s idiosyncratic practice. The result is evocative of a walk through the set of Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (1969) combined with remnants of a DIY session involving psychedelic substances. Passing through Hell Mouth (2025) an enormous portal in the shape of an open jaw with gaping nostrils - visitors find themselves looking at an equally…

Nicolctta Fiorucci Foundation, Venice, Italy The morning after the night before: a line of precariously stacked, mismatched glasses stand to attention along a rough ledge (house of mending, 2024-25). In one, a plastic toy or broken ornament - resembling the wings of a fairy appears to have been dropped. Behind them, the white cistern of a toilet peeps out from behind another low wall. The scene reads like the debris of a bougie party - the kind Venice excels at - albeit set in a sort of tasteful building site. It’s the hand of Tolia Astakhishvili, who has a knack for imbuing even the most unremarkable objects with a delicate sense of reverence - by combining, concealing and curating them In unorthodox ways. The exhibition, ‘to love and devour' unfolds…

REDCAT, Los Angeles, USA As a child in the 1990s. not yet able to distinguish fact from fiction, Abigail Raphael Collins thought that her father was a military officer. The reasoning was sound in her mind: her grandfather had been in the navy, and her father often came home in uniform. It wasn’t until later that Collins learned he was a method actor. His longest-running role was playing the truculent Alexander Nelson, a former navy secretary propelled by paranoia, on the court martial serial JAG (1995-2005). Collins was, in essence, a foil to those children who were told that their parents in the CIA were civilian paper-pushers. Her video BLACKOUT(2017-25) queries whether her father's tendency to play military roles stems from the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) he developed after experiencing…

Aspen Art Museum, USA In 1977, Sherrie Levine participated in 'Pictures', a group exhibition at Artists Space in New York organized by Douglas Crimp. Destabilizing the supposed authority of photography, the show examined the status of the image as the postmodern site of discourse. It set out a radical position that Levine would explore over the next two decades of her practice through the reproduction, remaking and pastiche of works that had shaped modern art. Currently on view at the Aspen Art Museum, the exhibition ‘Sherrie Levine: 1977-1988' presents upwards of 150 of these early works. Many are executed on paper, though silver gelatin prints and c-prints also feature alongside paintings on lead, mahogany and plywood. Displacing the locus of the artwork beyond temporal boundaries, the works on view engage…

SAC Gallery, Bangkok, Thailand As countries unravel, stories of displacement become ubiquitous. For the young Burmese artists in ‘If only it is seen, thus, from afar’, curated by Sid Kaung Sett Lin, national turmoil has rendered them emigres. Shuttling between temporary homes and bureaucratic institutions, they navigate a world that tends to callously politicize their trauma - and risks trivializing it. Featuring diverse mediums, including photography, film, installation and fiction. SAC Gallery’s lyrical exhibition invites audiences into a world of deferred dreams and uncertain hopes. In a show that prioritizes self-expression over representation, several artists adopt an intimate approach. Zieky Le’s ‘Where I was, where I'm going’ (2025-ongoing) documents his search for belonging beyond borders, whether in nondescript landscapes or in candid shots of loved ones. The photographs are interspersed…

The Perimeter, London, UK Walking through Alexandra Metcalf's first solo institutional exhibition, ‘Gaaaaaaasp’, at The Perimeter, London, I was reminded of my most prized possession as a child: a two-storey doll’s house whose rooms - bathed in lurid colours with brazen geometric patterns - set the scene for countless miniature melodramas. Since the house came unfurnished, I struggled to curate its interior. The plastic furniture I found was always out of proportion; ginormous beds pushed clumsily against towering lamps and garish chairs. The rooms became congested, gradually stifling doll life. Metcalf’s work summons a comparable tension. Though her paintings and sculptures frequently present settings that connote domesticity and care, a sinister layer of institutional confinement and unease lingers beneath the surface. The exhibition opens in a space that imitates an…

MASSIMODECARLO, London, UK What does it mean to truly be 'wanted'? For some, the word may conjure notions of carnal lust; for others, bittersweet romantic love. For artist Yan Pei-Ming, however, the dynamics of desire can also centre around friendship - and, in the case of his current exhibition at MASSIMODECARLO, London, a notorious one at that: the tumultuous friendship between Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. Yan Pei-Ming’s ‘Wanted’ is inspired by one of the art world’s great unsolved mysteries: the theft of Freud's 1952 portrait of Bacon, stolen from Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie in 1988. At just 13 centimetres wide, the pocket-sized copper painting has been celebrated by critics as one of Freud’s finest early works. Whilst researching in Tate’s archives, Yan Pei-Ming was struck by a Wild West-style ‘wanted’…

Tramway, Glasgow, UK A spell of intense, oppressive heat descended on Glasgow during the week I visited Sarah Rose’s exhibition, ‘Torpor’, at the city’s Tramway. The weather served as a fitting backdrop to Rose’s exhibition, which is named after the state of dormancy or slowed activity entered into by animals during periods of high temperature or resource scarcity. This sprawling installation of nocturnal sounds and prototype animal environments revolves around ideas of symbiotic, care-focused relationships, inviting visitors to slow down and shift away from the constant desire for productivity. Concerned with what is left over from our daily lives, Rose works with found materials, retaining their previous histories while using them to shape new, collective narratives. In Roadside Flowers (2025), crushed industrial glass has been refired and extruded into lengths…