Frieze London returns with 168 galleries reconfigured under a fresh layout. The fair’s organisers are doubling down on a bet: that the real energy now lies with the emerging spaces, not the marquee names. 

Under its revamped floor plan, galleries younger than 12 years old are ushered into prime positions at the fair’s entrance—a gesture designed to recalibrate the power dynamics between the audacious upstarts and the blue-chip establishment heavyweights. 

Across Regent’s Park, Frieze London’s sister fair Frieze Masters hosts more than 120 exhibitors from 26 countries. This year, the latter fair, which is dedicated to work from before the 20th century—sometimes going as far back as ancient Egyptian sarcophagi—will be run by a new director, Emanuela Tarizzo.

Here are seven standout booths (and one offsite exhibition) that capture the fair’s janus-faced spirit: the spaces where freshness, vision, curation and risk meet with the cool gaze of the international collector class.

Sadie Coles HQ (London, UK)


Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London

Sadie Coles HQ (D13) is the standard bearer for the London gallery scene and a cornerstone of Frieze London since its first edition in 2003. At first glance, the gallery’s stand at this year’s edition appears not dissimilar to fairs past. It’s a compendium of the gallery’s established roster, eschewing the chance to launch new names or take a risk on site-specific works. Yet it is underpinned by recent strategic moves. The gallery is opening a new space on 17 Savile Row in Mayfair during Frieze Week, its third London outpost—a gesture at a moment when many dealers are consolidating, jittery about the state of the city’s market. In a rare recent media round, the gallery’s namesake founder spoke of the decision not to open a space abroad—she has, instead, “always bet” on London. The timing of her latest expansion may recalibrate how the fair as a whole is read: this booth is a signal of confidence in London’s resilience. In the context of Frieze’s repositioning toward younger galleries near the entrance, Coles’s booth provides the counterpoint of a veteran gallery asserting its continuity.

Thomas Dane Gallery (London, UK) 


Image Credit: Photo: Tom Seymour

There is plenty of painting at the fair—and a lot of it looks pretty much the same. Yet Thomas Dane Gallery (A13) has found a painter who stands out from the vogue for blurry, figurative ‘phantom’ canvases. The gallery’s booth includes paintings by the American artist Dana Schutz, which coincides with her exhibition One Big Animal (October 14- December 20, 2025) across the gallery’s two Duke Street spaces. The work at the fair distills the psychological conflict and physical exuberance that runs through Schutz’s practice. Her figures—at once comic, grotesque and tragic—crowd into Hogarth-esque compositions. Each speaks to the sense of collective unease that characterizes the worst of contemporary life. In the compressed setting of the fair, her work achieves an unruly, theatrical and thoroughly unsettling tension.

i8 Gallery (Reykjavík, Iceland)


Image Credit: Courtesy of i8 Gallery, Reykjavík.

Reykjavík’s i8 Gallery (C3) is located downtown in the Icelandic capital, close to the harbor, where curious whales can often be spotted close to the fishing boats. The gallery is known for minimalist, spatial works that reflect Iceland’s singular landscape and meteorology. This year, its Frieze booth presents quiet, subtle works that foreground material precision, including carefully arranged cut‑lava sculptures by Ragna Róbertsdóttir, highly technical landscape photographs by Roni Horn and conceptually loaded readymade sculptures by Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir, who represented her country at last year’s Venice Biennale. Concurrently, i8 is staging The Brown Period, a year long exhibition by Ragnar Kjartansson at its Grandi space in Reykjavík (January 18 – December 18, 2025), featuring both new and existing works from his ongoing Santa Barbara series. An understated but exquisite booth.

Lehmann Maupin (New York, US)


Image Credit: Courtesy Lehmann Maupin, New York/ Studio Kukla

Lehmann Maupin’s stand (C13) at Frieze London is devoted to a solo presentation of the Korean artist Do Ho Suh, coinciding with his major survey “Do Ho Suh: Walk the House” at Tate Modern (through October 26). The booth, which complements the survey beautifully, includes works from the artist’s “Specimens”, “ScaledBehaviour” and “Spectators” series, as well as thread drawings and a large-scale fabric installation. Collectors are here to buy works for their homes, yet Suh reproduces the most mundane domestic fixtures—doorknobs, light switches, plug sockets and fuse boxes—in translucent fabric. Why buy parts of a home for a home? Well, the artist transforms utilitarian objects from his former abodes into sublime works of art. Each is a small, studied architecture that is at once deeply entwined with his own life and a metaphor for the rooms we all once inhabited; the beds, roofs, doors, walls and appliances that comprised our childhood or student space, the setting for memories that will last in the recesses of our brain for the rest of our lives. A calm environment amid the fair’s visual density and a collective space that could not be more personal.

David Aaron Gallery (London, UK)


Image Credit: Courtesy David Aaron Gallery, London

At Frieze Masters (C2), David Aaron Gallery’s collection of antiquities is anchored by a remarkable, ambient presence. In a dark corner of the booth, easy to miss, is a Late Period Egyptian sculpture, titled A Goddess by the Greywacke Master. The work, attributed to the reign of Amasis II (570–526 BCE), resurfaced at a Gloucestershire auction in 2022 and has since undergone technical analysis confirming its material as Egyptian metagreywacke, a dense, fine-grained sandstone reserved in ancient Egyptian sculpture for high-status or divine figures. Documentation displayed alongside the sculpture outlines its long restoration history and extensive provenance research. What might this woman have seen in her life, and how has this carefully carved stone survived for more than 2,000 years? The presentation highlights the capacity for specialist dealers to maintain an integral presence in such a contemporary-oriented fair.

Kó (Lagos, Nigeria)—Solo Booth of Prince Twins Seven-Seven


Image Credit: Courtesy of Kó, Lagos

Lagos-based gallery Kó (S16) brings a solo presentation of works by Yoruba artist Prince Twins Seven-Seven (1944–2011) to Frieze London. The display, which spans the 1950s to the 1970s, coincides with Tate Modern’s autumn exhibition Nigerian Modernism (8 October–10 May 2026), which similarly revisits under-recognized figures from the country’s post-independence era. Prince Twins Seven-Seven was a founding member of the Oshogbo Art Movement, which emerged from a series of workshops in western Nigeria in the early 1960s. Kó’s presentation brings together works on paper that illustrate the artist’s blend of traditional mythology and modern visual idioms. The booth provides a rare opportunity to view this body of work within a major international fair context, at a moment of institutional evolution of Nigerian modernism. For an ambitious collector, perhaps a good bet.

Artwin Gallery (Russia / Central Asia & Caucasus)


Image Credit: Courtesy of Artwin Gallery and the
artist

Artwin Gallery, found at Frieze’s London exhibition space No. 9 Cork Street, is based in Moscow, marking one of the first occasions that a Russian gallery has exhibited at Frieze London since the war in Ukraine. Artwin uses its Frieze presence to showcase artists from the Central Asian and Caucasus regions, including Georgia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Their work addresses themes of borders and rediscovered heritage in the post-Soviet transition. This presentation comes at a moment of renewed cultural investment in Kazakhstan: in September, two privately financed institutions—the Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture, housed in a repurposed Soviet cinema, and the Almaty Museum of Arts, designed by Chapman Taylor—opened with the backing from local oligarchs, while the Western artworld was also invited en masse to the Bukhara Biennial in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. In this light, Artwin’s booth can be seen within a shifting regional ecosystem and an art historical corrective: as national infrastructures are strengthened in Central Asia, a new region becomes part of the story at Frieze; its artists unknown, their work poised to disturb the canon.

Sfeir‑Semler Gallery (Beirut/Hamburg) – Solo booth of Samia Halaby


Image Credit: Courtesy Sfeir‑Semler Gallery, Beirut and Hamburg

On the Sfeir‑Semler Gallery stand (F11), one can find the full spectrum of abstract paintings from the US‑based Palestinian artist Samia Halaby, from works created during her time as an art student in the early 1960s through to Newness of Spring, created earlier this year. Halaby, whose retrospective at Indiana University’s Eskenazi Museum was cancelled last year over controversy regarding her public statements on the Israeli‑Gaza conflict, arrives in London with renewed visibility. Frieze Masters’ inclusion of Halaby, especially in the Studio section, where ephemera from her practice is presented alongside her finished canvases, signals the fair’s willingness to act as a platform for contested—perhaps even divisive—voices within the contemporary canon.