If you are visiting Regents Park to catch Frieze Sculpture 2023, it’s likely you’ll also catch sight of a half-naked man wandering around the sculpture site in a dazed state. Indeed, last week from afar it looked as if park security had finally cornered him and fenced him in! Russian Marriage Agency In Israel

Sleepwalker, 2014, Tony Matelli.

Well, we can confirm that rather than chasing him away they were actually escorting him in. The life-like and life-size sculptural piece titled Sleepwalker, 2014, is the work of New York-based artist Tony Matelli. His playful approach to the creation of resemblant sculptures and statues comes across as a statement about being lost in society and gives the social misfit in all of us a makeshift parkland plinth. Certainly, it’s a fear everyone can relate to. The piece exposes our most guarded, innermost concerns and presents a nonplussed, fragile figure starkly exposed to the uncompromising glare of the world. Your waking dream becomes a nightmare.

A giant Afro comb wedged into the turf also catches the eye. Hank Willis Thomas’, bronze sculptural piece All Power to All People, 2023, with its Black Power fist on the handle is a simple but powerful totem of Black identity and cultural pride.

All Power to All People, 2023, Hank Willis Thomas (The Mothership Connection, 2021 by Zak Ové, can be seen in the background)

And talking ot totems, the towering, brightly-coloured The Mothership Connection, 2021 by Zak Ové, sits in the park’s elegant English Gardens seemingly out of place in the genteel surrounds but for that very reason, getting most of the attention. Its jarring irreverence is layered with motifs of Afro-Futurism and sources cross-cultural totemic structures and Black slave history.

The Mothership Connection, 2021. Artist Zak Ové,

Robert Fields, international art dealer

The buzzing private view drew collectors and casual art lovers alike. Much discussion around the pictorial depths of the canvases and metaphors in the striking imagery.

Paige Ashley, Head of Press, Elizabeth Xi Bauer

The carefully curated tonal harmonies reflected the shared thematic references but each painting, drawing and video work imaginately addressed the health of the ecosystem in its own way. On some canvases the disclosure was stark and upfront on others nuanced and spectral.

Maria Thereza Alves’ canvas Rio doce: Sweet No More (2017) catches the eye as you enter the front gallery – at first glance because it is noticably larger than the other works. On closer inspection her depiction of Brazil’s 2015 Samarco dam disaster is a layered and dramatic exploration of the environmental disaster that saw millions of cubic metres of mine tailings released into the Doce River.

Head to the Elizabeth Xi Bauer Gallery to check out the É a lama, é a lama exhibition for yourself!

É a lama, é a lama  4th August to 16th September 2023

Elizabeth Xi Bauer Gallery
Fuel Tank, 8-12 Creekside
London SE8 3DX

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       The Other Art Fair, presented by Saatchi Art, kicked off with a packed private view at the Old Truman Brewery Shoreditch, with gallerists and artists alike presenting eye-catching displays of work. We interviewed some of this year’s exciting crop of emerging and established homegrown and international artists about their work and what sets them apart from the other talent on show. Oh…and questions about the particular appeal of art fairs.

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Latifah A. Stranack

My landscape paintings were inspired by Bathers by a River by Henri Matisse. I used that as a starting point to create my own series of works themed around the Garden of Eden, paradise from a female perspective and Eve’s story. The focus is usually Adam but as a woman I want to think about the narratives that affect my life, particuarly as regards the wider world, my body, how I am viewed and the politics of being a woman.

Latifah A. Stranack

I also incorporated the green spaces around London. During the lockdown so much of our life was spent outside in nature because it was the only option available. It made me have a greater appreciation and understanding of where I live in Ealing. I  used that landscape to inspire the work and also experiment with the colour palette. I started with acylic paints as the ground and layered it with oilbar, all the while thinking about texture and materiality.

I also have paintings inspired by Middle Eastern dance; so belly dancing and the hair-throwing dance. It’s just about the joy of life, feeling connected to that inner desire to just move and feel the rhythm. For me, dancing is a way of connecting to whatever is beyond this world, whether you believe in a higher power or not. It’s a way of celebrating my life, my female body and just being grateful for life.

Why an art fair?

I think it’s great to have this experience because it broadens your horizons. It gives you exposure and allows you to see your work in a different context because it’s a very different atmosphere compared to a gallery or studio and I think you just have more chance of having a natural dialogue with lots of random people that may have come to see other work. Also, The Other Art Fair has branding  and a history of doing fairs all over the world so you’re tapping into a network. I think, as an artist, networking is so important for making contacts and getting to know different types of work. It’s just  nice to see what else is going on in the art world in London, the UK and across Europe.

Yasser Claud-Ennin

I am a self taught artist and I have been a full-time artist since 2017. I originally worked from Nigeria but moved to London in January last  year. This is my first art fair in London and I have another at the end of the month.

Yasser Claud-Ennin

Tell us about your work

I paint directly onto West African fabric because I am part Nigerian and Ghanian and the fabric draws on the cultures of both countries. I like to call myself a child of no tribe because I am from so many tribes – I can’t just name one. These tribes have different woven fabrics which feature in my artwork. I am working directly with a company who own dye pits in northern Nigeria

This body of work is a celebration of black love and the black family unit. We as Africans don’t always have that open expression of love. We know it’s there but it’s not overtly communicated. You know your parents, aunts and uncles love each other but you rarely see them embracing, holding hands or kissing.

I work from archival photographs sourced from family members. Often the photos are very old and a lot of the grain is lost so I had to piece them together and repurpose them. And I collect fabric from family members who have pass it down through the generations from grand parents and great-grand parents. Everything is directly handed down – from the photos to the fabric.

Fatima Mian

I have a background in graphic design but five years ago I decided to experiment with painting. There was a natural progression and I was soon creating work I’d like to see on my own walls – which is always a good sign. So I began to apply myself to my craft and creativity more seriously.

Fatima Mian

What inspired this body of work?

My art is inspired by Formula One racing  and is called the Chicane Series. I began watching Formula 1: Drive to Surivive on Netflix, which is a behind-the-scenes Formula 1 documentary and I drew inspiration from different elements of this viewing experience. I wouldn’t say I am a Formula 1 fan – I was more inspired by the energy, power and movement of Formula 1. That is, the gestures and speed that can be expressively interpreted. I noticed that Australian racing driver Daniel Ricciardo is a really charismatc individual and comes across as a very cheerful personality. That’s where my colour palette comes from.

By then he would make his mark as pre-eminent amongst 20th-century abstract artists with his geometric style and use of primary coloured grids, rectangles and squares. He termed this style neoplasticism and it evolved from his exposure to the Dutch De Stijl art movement and their non-representational tenets.

British artists Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson were fellow Associate members and among the earliest to show work at its annual Cahiers exhibition. When they moved to Hampstead, London, they invited Mondrian, as he had been both friend and mentor. They found him a studio at 60 Parkhill Rd, Belsize Park and he was based there from September 1938 to September 1940. It now bears a blue plaque marking his stay there. Mondrian didn’t need much encouraging to leave France; he had feared the rise of Hitler ever since discovering he was on a Nazi blacklist. In 1937 two Mondrian works were exhibited in Hitler’s Degenerative Art Exhibition.

Mondrian painted his studio-flat in the style of his paintings

Hepworth recalls how the artist transformed the drab looking flat into a stimulating work environment and home, buying cheap furniture from Camden Town and painting it all white. Visitors later commented on how he used his signature style on the walls, furniture, kitchen items – anything that needed a Mondrian-style revamp. Nicholson adds that its new decor emitted the energy and feel of the South of France. Situated at the bottom of his garden, it would help in the development of that inimitable style –  rigid lines decorated in the intuitive placings of boxed primary colours.

His artist neighbours Hepworth and Nicholson fled to St Ives as Germany invaded its European neighbours. They asked him to accompany them but he declined. Once the bombings began on September 7^th, 1940, he packed up his belongings once again and left for New York. According to Nicholson, it was reports of an unexploded bomb next to his studio that made Mondrian relocate so abruptly; first to a Hampstead hotel and then to the USA.

They would remain lifelong friends. In her memoirs Hepworth reminisces on her first meeting with him, recalling that his abstract style had caused such a reaction in London that it some commentators believed it would cause ‘the end of painting’. All publicity is good publicity and this air of rebellious celebrity soon had women flocking around him. He enjoyed London jazz clubs and danced there with Peggy Guggenheim. This glamour in the capital was interspersed with the harsh realities of having to sell paintings during a period of international war which drove him from city to city.

By the time of his death in 1944 aged 72, many of his London paintings were incomplete and some had been despatched to New York. Composition London was completed in 1942 and by the time of his first solo exhibition in New York it was simply titled No.11. The painting is now housed in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Trafalgar Square (1939–1943) is on display at Moma, New York.