Frieze day two: Scotland’s moveable feast 19|10|09

By ArtReview

A short report from London Frieze week, prepared for you by ArtReview's editors. For full coverage of the fairs, parties, and museum and gallery openings, see details at the end of this email. You can also read the report online.

International art fairs of Frieze’s standard present the opportunity to see a snapshot of the global art market under one tented roof. You amble down the international corridors, freely passing from the Middle East to North America, Australia to Northern Europe. So why, in my challenge to pick the highlights from the fair’s main exhibitors, have I left just wanting to move to Scotland and spend a dotage wallowing in romanticised abstract painting and sparse sculptural assemblage?

Glasgow’s Modern Institute/Toby Webster presentation makes use of the enclaves within their stand to curate a series of diminutive exhibitions, the most effective being four landscapes in acrylic on newspaper of varying size, by Tony Swain. The work should be twee, but the material refutes this and gives it a juxtaposed urbanity that the formal subject matter does not necessarily welcome. A small unassuming work by Alexander and Susan Maris, in two parts on the walls of Edinburgh’s Ingleby Gallery, reveals a far more abstracted and conceptual take on painting, but with an equally romantic edge. The Truth in Painting (1990–3, revised 2006) at first glance seems to be a simple investigation into the painted flat surface. Both uniform grey, each of a slightly different pallor, they gain their difference of colouring from the origins of their paint pigment: the first is infused with the ashes of a cremated but read copy of Derrida’s The Truth in Painting (1978), the second with the ashes of an unread edition. There is again an opposition at work, formal simplicity vying with the conceptually clever process. Over at Glasgow’s Sorcha Dallas, the highlight is a set of collage works taken from fashion magazine imagery by Raphael Danke. Removing the figurative element, Danke heightens the sense of the body and its implied false representation in the images.

There is of course praiseworthy work to be found from outside Scotland. Staying, however, in the northern hemisphere, Standard (Oslo) demonstrates a certain aesthetic for the gallery with a stand of three artists who operate within the realm of low-fi construction. Oscar Tuazon’s IAAC, IAAP (2009), a large vertically chopped tree trunk supported by simple framing and complemented with a single fluorescent strip light, dominates the stand. It is a simple meditation on nature and man’s relationship with it that works rather neatly in this impermanent fair structure – and the market forces it represents – slammed into the heart of a London park. A series of paintings by Alex Hubbard that include fibreglass, oil and enamel paint has a certain organic feel and neatly questions its medium’s definition; something that feeds into Matias Faldbakken’s Brown Abstract #8 (2009), a geometric flat wall construct with brown tape.

Video is never a major concern at an art fair, but Hiromi Yoshii, Tokyo, have made multimedia central to their outing in London. Taro Izumi’s Steak House (2008) is an absurdist Beckett-like film in which two juvenile television puppets haphazardly paint the still-sleeping – or perhaps dead? we ask ourselves – face of the artist. Again, large architectural installations are never going to be a major presence, unless made by Monika Sosnowska, and especially if they have the utilitarian elegance of an untitled work by the artist currently taking up a large amount of Warsaw’s Foksal Gallery’s square footage. Painted green, the angular metal sculpture consists of a series of interconnected raised picnic benches, formally allowing the viewer to be seated, but actually presenting a distant and threatening air, distinctly refusing respite for any such tired fair-going feet.