A Day at Frieze London and Masters 2025: Too Much, Too Fast.

I spent a few hours at Frieze this year, and as always there was a tremendous amount of art to see. If you try to cram everything into one day (which I did), you’ll walk away with a sense of exhilaration and exhaustion. I know for myself I can’t spend a whole day inside a fair and, to be honest, I don’t want another full-overwhelm experience. Drawing boundaries between work and passion felt important this time.

This year, the young galleries were placed right at the front of the tent, which is excellent. I noticed more textile-based art than usual (which made me very happy) and a stronger presence of Asian / South Asian galleries. On the flip side, I missed seeing much from Eastern Europe or some parts of Europe in general, a gap I felt keenly. Yet the overall experience still felt like a masquerade market. Abstract works proliferated, booths designed to be wildly Instagrammable, and the buzz of commerce very much in the air. I’ve always had a complicated relationship with art fairs, and this one confirmed it: yes I’m learning to appreciate them, simply because I’m there for the art itself, but no, they don’t feel like the reflection spaces I prefer. And, I must say, I liked Masters more.

A fair like Frieze raises fascinating questions: the tension between art as culture and art as commerce; how “display” changes when you’re standing in a tent among thousands of visitors; and how notions like permanence and curatorial depth are challenged in the fair context. The tent itself is huge but despite its scale, not everything fits, not everything will be seen, and many works remain invisible in the crush of presentation. This mirrors what I often observe: scale doesn’t always equal access or depth. So yes, plenty of art, as usual, and yes, I came away with some meaningful impressions.