Dinner includes a course of jeopardy
Art world glitterati descended on the Frieze London tent on Thursday evening for the lavish Collectors’ Dinner attended by gallerists, patrons and (some) journalists. Guests including the director of London’s Delfina Foundation, Aaron Cezar, and Ed Behrens, the editor of Apollo magazine, joined a throng of luminaries who dined on delectable dishes such as chicken, potato and minestra nera (leafy green brassica), along with coffee fudge and chocolate truffle. (Yum—thanks, Sessions Arts Club, for the menu.)
Tongues wagged about hot topics of the day—does anyone actually like the Tate Britain 90s art show?—while quaffing Fortnum’s wines. Attendees lapped up a top-notch performance from the UK choreographer Holly Blakey, whose troupe of brilliant dancers wound in and out of transfixed diners. One guest said he almost choked on his petits fours when Blakey’s crew built a human tower that collapsed—on purpose.
Tschabalala Self waxes lyrical about Bronzino
A room with an Unexpected View
Always one of the hottest tickets of Frieze week, Unexpected Views at the National Gallery, in which eight leading contemporary artists deliver a ten-minute talk in front of their favourite paintings, celebrated its tenth anniversary with a stellar lineup. Tschabalala Self, whose monumental Lady in Blue currently occupies Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, chose Bronzino’s An Allegory with Venus and Cupid (around 1545). Yinka Shonibare, meanwhile, talked in front of Thomas Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews (around 1750), which shares a gallery with his own subversive life-size sculpture that presents the aristocratic couple decapitated and with their clothes remade in Dutch wax fabric.
Feeling blue: Joy Gregory’s Explosive Barbie at 1-54 Courtesy of the artist and Whitechapel Gallery.
Not so pretty in pink: Barbie shows her dark side
Barbie is shedding her girly pink image for something altogether more subversive at Frieze London this week. Helen Chadwick’s photopiece Birth of Barbie (1993), on Richard Saltoun Gallery’s stand, finds the iconic dolly upside down, coloured deep scarlet and emerging out of labial folds of red meat, an image rendered all the more disconcerting by the fact that Chadwick used this image as her Christmas card for that year. Meanwhile, over at 1-54 on the Whitechapel Editions stand, Joy Gregory’s Explosive Barbie (2025) shows our favourite blonde having a very bad hair day, her splayed locks rendered in silhouette against a cyanotype blue background. Being a Barbie Girl in a Barbie World just got a whole lot less fantastic…
Feline groovy: Grayson Perry joins Andy Warhol’s kitty pals Photo: Silke Lohmann
Grayson proves he’s one cool cat
Cats are all the rage at Frieze Masters; we’re talking mainly about the moggies on show at Shapero Modern gallery by none other than the Pop art maestro Andy Warhol. The 16 offset lithographs from the series 25 Cats Name(d) Sam and One Blue Pussy (around 1954) are stopping fairgoers in their tracks. The lettering was done by Warhol’s mother, Julia Warhola, who apparently is also responsible for the title’s missing “d”. Grayson Perry clearly thought they were purrrfect.
John Banting, the hedonist’s hedonist
John Banting was one of the most flamboyant and hedonistic figures of the 1920s and 1930s, but died in obscurity. Now, he is being spotlit this week with a solo show, Livid Cosmoramas, at John Swarbrooke Fine Art, as well as a new biography by Hugh St Claire. At the exhibition opening one veteran art journalist, no slouch in the hedonism stakes herself, revealed that she had taken the ultimate fangirl plunge of having his distinctive 1932 woodcut Siamese triplets tattooed into her leg. Devotion indeed.
