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<\/p>\nWatching crowds come through the door, greeted by the younger, more experimental galleries of the Focus section, Fran\u00e7ois Chantala, a partner at the London-based Thomas Dane Gallery, observes an energy in London this week: \u201cPeople are coming to London, young galleries are springing up\u2026someone was saying earlier that it feels a little bit like the 90s again.\u201d The UK\u2019s post-Brexit art market may face headwinds in the form of a faltering economy and wealth-deterring tax reforms, alongside broader geopolitical turbulence, but Londoners do well in adversity, Chantala thinks. \u201cThat\u2019s what London does\u2014it grows back from the rubble every time, it\u2019s that Blitz spirit,\u201d he says. The gallery\u2019s first-day sales included Michael Landy\u2019s Multi-Saint (2013)\u2014which was bought by the Contemporary Art Society\u2019s Collections Fund for the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool\u2014with an asking price in the region of \u20ac125,000.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a confidence-based game,\u201d says the London-based gallerist Josh Lilley. \u201cThe difference for me is pre-sales\u2014there would have been more in years gone by, there was more urgency.\u201d This year\u2019s fair, he adds, \u201cfeels very much more localised, these [buyers] are people either in London or thinking about London\u201d. But we must not mistake a lack of urgency for the lack of a market, he thinks. \u201cA speculative market needs urgency because the notion is that prices are always rising,\u201d Lilley says. \u201cThat\u2019s what speculation is.\u201d Now he notes a more considered approach: \u201cYou can call that patience, or perhaps realism\u2026for quality, prices are still going up.\u201d Lilley\u2019s first-day sales included Egg, a crystalline painting by Gareth Cadwallader, for \u00a385,000, and a Rebecca Manson porcelain wall sculpture for $85,000.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Thomas Dane Gallery sold Michael Landy\u2019s Multi-Saint (2013) to the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool through the Contemporary Art Society. Photo \u00a9 David Owens<\/p>\n
Magritte and M\u00fcnter<\/p>\n
By 5pm, Hauser & Wirth had sold around 17 works at Frieze London and another 16 at Frieze Masters, with higher prices for blue-chip Modern works at Masters\u2014among them Ren\u00e9 Magritte\u2019s Le domaine enchant\u00e9 (1953) for $1.6m and Gabriele M\u00fcnter\u2019s The Blue Garden (My Garden Gate) from 1909, which sold for SFr2.4m ($3m), the highest reported sale at the time of writing. Sales at Frieze London included George Rouy\u2019s gargantuan DESIRELINE II\u00a0(2025) with an asking price of \u00a3275,000, and Avery Singer\u2019s Lost Boccioni\u00a0(2025), priced at $800,000.<\/p>\n
Neil Wenman, Hauser & Wirth\u2019s creative director, says the sales \u201ctalk for themselves\u2026people have been asking \u2018has Frieze Week changed?\u2019, but actually, loads of people are here.\u201d There has been some correction, he acknowledges: \u201cArtists that were a bit overly commercial have faltered. But, ultimately, quality always rules, and if the work\u2019s good, there\u2019s never a problem in selling it,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Wenman agrees with Lilley that collectors are taking longer to make decisions. At the market\u2019s high point a few years ago, it was, Wenman says, a \u201cfrenzy of people just saying, \u2018I want that\u2019, without interest in even knowing who the work was by. So, I think that\u2019s actually quite good, that sense of actually learning a bit more about the work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tax changes in the UK and the curtailment of non-dom status have reportedly caused some wealthy individuals to move out of London. So, is the Frieze collector pool poorer for it? Wenman surveys the stand: \u201cI\u2019m looking at two who\u2019ve left because of non-dom changes, and they\u2019re on this booth now, they\u2019re buying\u2026the fair gives them a reason to come back. Yes, it is different when the non-doms leave, of course, but they\u2019re still collecting.\u201d<\/p>\n
Weaving some magic<\/p>\n
Cecilia Brunson Projects, exhibiting for the first time in the main section of the fair, had sold six of the eight woven works by the Indigenous Wich\u00ed collective Claudia Alarc\u00f3n & Sil\u00e4t it was exhibiting before the first hour of the fair was up. Prices for textiles, woven by the Argentinian collective of more than 100 women, ranged from $19,000 to $55,000. \u201cThe reception has been amazing,\u201d Brunson says, adding that all works were sold to new clients, from Italy, Singapore and San Francisco.<\/p>\n
Brunson adds that, against a backdrop of a \u201ccomplicated\u201d market globally, the work\u2019s reception was \u201ca positive surprise. I think it\u2019s important that artwork has meaning, and in this case it\u2019s about a community. It\u2019s incredibly deep\u2014socially, politically and spiritually. When all those things are combined, collectors are attracted to it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shortly after opening, Lisson Gallery sold two paintings by Sarah Cunningham, the young artist who died last year aged 31. \u201cOne\u2019s been placed with a very wonderful collector in the US, and the other one he\u2019s buying as a gift for a museum in the US,\u201d says Louise Hayward, a partner at Lisson Gallery. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t think of anything better\u2014he and the museum had done a studio visit with Sarah very shortly before her death, so it\u2019s very meaningful to the collector and the museum curator.\u201d The works were priced at $26,000 and $30,000.<\/p>\n
On the broader art market, Hayward is sanguine: \u201cWhere there are bubbles in a market, things are corrected, then things plateau for a while, and then we\u2019ll see bubbles in different parts of the world\u2026it\u2019s just cyclical.\u201d Hayward adds that yesterday\u2019s audience was more \u201cbusiness-focused\u201d than in recent years: \u201cIt feels like they may have done a bit of an edit of the VIP list.\u201d<\/p>\n
Elsewhere, Thaddaeus Ropac sold a Robert Rauschenberg, Polls (1987), for $850,000, citing increased interest in the artist\u2019s work due to the centennial of his birth this year. Ropac noted in a statement that the \u201cmarket is starting to pick up somewhat after the past slow months\u201d. Roshini Vadehra, the director of New Delhi\u2019s Vadehra Gallery, also noted an unexpected uptick\u2014the New Delhi-based gallery sold around half its stand at Frieze London and its almost entire stand at Frieze Masters. \u201cWe\u2019ve had a better year than last, which is surprising, considering the news that\u2019s coming out from this part of the world,\u201d Vadehra says.<\/p>\n
While much discussion has focused on gallery closures and the poor state of the art market, some younger galleries have only known leaner times. \u201cI opened in Covid, so I\u2019ve never known any different,\u201d says Freddie Powell, the founder of London-based Ginny on Frederick, which is exhibiting in the Focus section. \u201cWe\u2019re still young and nimble, so there hasn\u2019t been this doomsday situation occurring for us.\u201d On the opening morning, Ginny on Frederick sold Accounts (2025) by Alex Margo Arden, a roped cluster of decommissioned mannequins of industrial workers from the National Motor Museum, to the Arts Council Collection (works in the booth ranged between \u00a320,000 and \u00a330,000).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Watching crowds come through the door, greeted by the younger, more experimental galleries of the Focus section, Fran\u00e7ois…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":228689,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[1736,6185,228,226,227,229,88,127890],"class_list":{"0":"post-228688","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-art-fairs","9":"tag-art-market","10":"tag-arts","11":"tag-arts-and-design","12":"tag-artsanddesign","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-frieze-london-2025"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228688\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/228689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}