Tapped to curate a new section of the fair, Yinka Shonibare, Zenib Sedira and Lubaina Himid discuss what has been lost, and gained, since Brexit hit the London art market.
By Farah Nayeri
Twenty-one years after it brashly burst onto the London cultural scene, the Frieze Art Fair is back with its annual jamboree — and ready to welcome tens of thousands to its mega-tents in Regent’s Park at Frieze London and Frieze Masters, running Oct. 10-13.
In 2003, when the fair began, London had Europe’s buzziest art scene. It boasted a museum that had opened three years before in a former power station (Tate Modern), a headline-grabbing generation of brash young artists and a contemporary-art market poised to become the world’s second largest. Today, in the aftermath of Brexit and the pandemic lockdowns, Britain has fallen from second place to third in its share of the global art market, scores of London galleries have closed and auction houses are laying off staff.Nonetheless, Britain still accounts for nearly a fifth of the international art market, and Frieze — its premier art fair — appears keen to show that it’s not just a place for deal-making.
In separate interviews, three of the selecting artists — Yinka Shonibare, Zineb Sedira and Lubaina Himid — commented on the fair, the London art scene and the artists they chose for a solo show.
For the second straight year, Frieze London is putting a number of established artists in charge of a new section of the event, asking each of these six creatives to choose a fellow artist to be given a solo show at the fair — in a program called Artist-to-Artist.
“In terms of the infrastructure of the art world, Frieze is absolutely essential,” said Shonibare, a British artist of Nigerian descent whose solo exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries in nearby Kensington Gardens recently closed, and who creates works in African wax-print fabric (a material that has come to define the African continent, though it’s a colonial-era Western import).
He recalled selling multiple works at Frieze over the years, and said that they had helped him pursue his career and maintain a thriving studio. “To actually have a proper contemporary fair in London” is “really a great thing for those of us artists living here,” he added. At the same time, “I don’t think the situation is that great” right now, Shonibare said. “Things are shifting away from London,” he added, saying that “it’s not as energetic as it was.”
He explained that while in the 1990s, when he began his art career, there were “alternative spaces” and “squats” in London where artists could work, their present-day peers had been completely priced out, and pushed away to coastal towns like Margate and Hastings. This was a threat to the entire art ecosystem, he said: “If you’re not bringing innovation and new ideas and challenging ideas, the sector becomes static.”
While Shonibare said he didn’t think “the center of the art world in Europe will leave London entirely,” he added: “We just need to do more to give artists more opportunities and spaces.”
Paris is doing just that, said Sedira, a French Algerian artist working mainly in film and photography, who moved to London in the 1980s and never left. She now spends part of her time in Paris. In London, she said, her 215-square-foot artist atelier cost her $660 a month. For twice that amount in Paris, she said that she had an atelier-cum-apartment 10 times as big: an artist space subsidized by Paris City Hall that she had obtained on application (as for social housing). “It’s booming in Paris right now,” Sedira said. “There are plenty of new art spaces and private foundations opening, and lots more going on.”
Brexit has compounded the blow. Ithas heaped on so much more paperwork and expense to art transactions that some European Union collectors and gallerists have stopped coming — and international artists are finding it harder to work or exhibit in Britain.
Brexit was “the worst idea that anybody ever had,” said Himid, a figurative painter who in 2017 won the Turner Prize, Britain’s top contemporary-art award. She described Britain’s vote in 2016 to leave the European Union as “absolutely stupid” and “disgraceful.”
For artists, though, there was a silver lining, Himid added: The present moment was an opportunity “to do something interesting at another level that actually isn’t about money, but that’s about thinking and about exploring and digging.”
“There’s an awful lot you can do when no one’s looking,” she said. “When everyone’s looking, you sort of have to dance to the tune.”
Yinka Shonibare: Nengi Omuku
Nengi Omuku is a Nigerian-born painter who studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and now lives and works in Lagos, Nigeria. Inspired both by European art history and by African crafts and traditions, she often paints on stitched-together strips of sanyan fabric, a traditional cloth used by the Yoruba people of West Africa. Shonibare said he first came across Omuku when he was a visiting professor at Slade and had followed her career ever since.
“For those of us who are from colonized nations, we have a kind of education that’s very Eurocentric,” he said. “So it takes courage to begin to find your own voice in relation to your own history and your own identity.”
Omuku was “dealing with identity issues” in her work, but not in a “didactic” way, he said, because it “didn’t compromise the poetic, the romantic, the beautiful.”
