I had the amazing opportunity to attend Frieze Art Fair on October 16th, thanks to the Artist Development programme (run by Turning Point West Midlands in partnership with the New Art Gallery Walsall)! My travel costs and ticket to the fair were all paid for, which was even more amazing, and although it has been a few weeks since attending the fair, I wanted to mull over the experience before posting about it. There was so much to see, each gallery had their displayed works set up like a mini exhibition, so it was akin to visiting over 160 small exhibitions in the space of several hours. It was a brilliant but exhausting experience, and it became clear very quickly that if you spent a lot of time looking at each artwork, you would never see it all. I found that I had to quickly look at the artworks before moving on, similar to how you skim-read a text; not to look at it in too much detail, but enough to get the general idea of what it’s doing.
Once popular trend I noticed quite quickly is ceramics. There was a lot of ceramic based artwork in many of the galleries, small to large. With the British Cermaics Biennial also taking place this year, and a lot of talk about ceramics in general, it seems to be ‘in vogue’ now (although I could not say if it ever fell out of popularity).
There was a lot of art there that I liked, and a lot more that I particularly didn’t like. The feeling many people have now of contemporary art being inaccessible I felt was embodied in some of the work there. Although there was also a lot of work there that I feel was very accessible, fun, and very interesting!
Here are some of the highlights from the fair (I took a lot of photographs!)
