East London Looks East

October 2009 Datebook

In Retrospect: Ed Ruscha

In Museums

Narrative Threads

East London Looks East

Neville Wakefield

From Good Stock

Family of Mann

Design Digest

Own the Dream

Sliced and Diced

Back to Art

Highly Polished

Movers & Shakers

Treasure Hunting

Heather Lemonedes

Digging In

A Match Made in Midtown

Star Ambitions

Also This Month

Neo Rauch German Parliament to Return Nazi-Looted Portrait Art Basel When in Basel for... Art Basel Laurence Sillars Leaves Tate Liverpool for Baltic Centre Rosette in Bloom Trial by Design The Armory Show

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LONDON—How is Britain’s premier event for contemporary art adapting to the market? "We’re being as playful and innovative and responsive to art as we can," says Amanda Sharp, irrepressible co-director, with Matthew Slotover, of Frieze.

When: October 15 to 18
Where: Regent’s Park
New this year: The independent curators Daniel Baumann and Sarah McCrory chose exhibitors for Frame, a 30-booth section devoted to solo shows of emerging artists by galleries less than six years old, such as London’s Ancient & Modern and Mumbai’s project88.

Participants: The exhibitor count in the main section is down to 135 from last year’s 151, but there are newcomers like Galerie Plan B of Cluj, Romania, and the Third Line, from Dubai. This fair is known for its unorthodox displays; look for Tokyo gallery Taka Ishii’s stand, which will sport a semitransparent skin by the young architect Akihisa Hirata.

Don’t miss: Aristarkh Chernyshev’s Newsbin (communication infosculpture), 2007, an led news ticker snaking out of a garbage pail, at Moscow’s XL Gallery, and Anna Parkina’s Untitled, 2009, a watercolor and collage incorporating photographic self-portraits, at London’s Wilkinson. For your higher-end fix, check out Sigmar Polke’s mixed-media With Potemkin Through the Villages, 2005, at New York’s Michael Werner Gallery.

Special bonus: Frieze is offering £10,000 (around $16,500) to the best booth.

Satellite fairs: The six-year-old emerging-art fair Zoo (October 16-19) and the three-year-old Pavilion of Art & Design London (formerly known as DesignArt London; October 14-18) are the two survivors from the plethora of fairs that used to dot the city. Displaced from its old digs in the Royal Academy by Haunch of Venison gallery, Zoo has relocated to a vast Victorian warehouse complex in the East End. Among the 25 galleries (down by half from last year) are new additions like London’s Arcade and Crisp, of London and L.A. Also included is a noncommercial exhibition exploring psychedelia in art, organized by the independent curator Rob Tufnell. The design fair, which returns to a tent in posh Berkeley Square, has upped its dealer count to 45 from 32, in part by adding fine art to the mix — from such galleries as Paris’s Hopkins-Custot and London’s Ben Brown — in a move to mimic its 13-year-old sister fair in Paris. Look for Scott Burton’s granite divan at newcomer Friedman Benda, from New York.

"Lean and Mean" originally appeared in the October 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's October 2009 Table of Contents.