Frieze Art Sculpture

I’m definitely up for art taking over public spaces and what was the best plan for the weekend? Visit Frieze Sculpture 2023.

I’m showing you my top 3 from the amazing curation of Fatos Sustek:

1. Just entering at the park you find this fabric sculpture billowing in the breeze from the artist Yinka Shonibare describing himself as a post-colonial hybrid artist, the British-Nigerian artist explores issues of race and class. ‘Material (SG) V’ commands alternative to conventional monuments of personal power, instead exploring universal experience of historical change. The sculpture was born out of the artist’s Fourth Plinth commission ‘Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle’. Shonibare felt that the ship’s sails, emblazoned with his signature Dutch wax batik fabric, could stand alone. The fabric was originally inspired by Indonesian designs, mass-produced by the Dutch and eventually sold to colonies in West Africa. In the 1960s the material became a signifier of African identity and independence and, in Shonibare’s hands, the ‘perfect metaphor for multi-layered identities’. Adorned with this iconic design, the sculpture becomes a powerful symbol of the movement of people and global interconnectivity over time.

2. With the title ‘All Power to All People’ you can tell how I was. Hank Willis Thomas‘s artwork combines the Afro pick and the Black Power salute, both icons of Black identity and empowerment. He wanted to make an object that spoke specifically to African Americans, illustrative of the artist’s long-standing investigation into public art’s role in shaping collective discourse and societal values. I mean…

3. Im that kind of person that says the bigger, the better. ‘The Mothership Connection’ by Zak Ové reinterprets old-world artisan culture, interweaving elements of Pacific Northwest Totem making with architectural features that reference buildings where the contribution of slaves and indentured labour to their creation is remembered and honoured as part of an important multi-racial interlacing of histories that make up modern-day society.

After all that artsy intake, a good nap under the trees is well deserved.