Frieze London ´24 Report
After a fascinating few days at this year’s Frieze London and the outstanding exhibition “Francis Bacon: Human Presence” at the National Portrait Gallery, it is time to share our Frieze London ’24 Art Report with you. In this report, we explore trends crystallising across different artistic movements, introduce the emerging artists who made a name for themselves at the fair, and discuss the artists whose absence we found particularly notable. We also analyse the styles and movements currently shaping the contemporary art market, and share a few rediscoveries that surprised even us.
Female Narratives in Contemporary Art
Staging the Everyday: Young Artists Reimagining Daily Life
The New Romanticism: Rediscovering a Forgotten Longing
The Absence of Political Art in a Politicised Time
Established Artists We Can’t Get Enough Of
Female Narratives in Contemporary Art: Karoline Walker and Moka Lee as Examples of a New Generation
In recent years, contemporary art has undergone a remarkable shift—driven in no small part by the growing presence of young female artists. Their work does not simply bring fresh energy into the art world; it opens up new perspectives on social realities that have long been overlooked within a historically male-dominated landscape. Through a distinctly female lens, new forms of expression and narrative emerge—ones that engage in a critical, yet deeply intimate dialogue with societal structures. Two compelling examples of this development are Karoline Walker and Moka Lee, whose practices exemplify the strength and impact of the female gaze on today’s contemporary art market.
Karoline Walker: Female Subjectivity and Space
Karoline Walker is known for her atmospheric paintings depicting intimate—often domestic—scenes from women’s lives. Her works offer viewers an entry into the everyday, yet frequently isolated worlds of her protagonists. In an art context long shaped by male perspectives, Walker places women at the centre—making them visible both in their individuality and in their social invisibility. She portrays women in moments of stillness, reflection, and solitude, often within private interiors that would typically remain inaccessible to the outside gaze.
Walker’s paintings address not only the relationship between women and space, but also the emotional and social pressures that shape women’s lives. The quiet isolation of her scenes and the subtle tension she captures reflect the complexity of contemporary womanhood—without resorting to reductive stereotypes. Through her sensitive handling of light and colour, she creates an atmosphere that can feel both comforting and unsettling, translating inner conflict onto the canvas with restraint and precision.
Caroline Walker "Imaginative Play I", oil on linen, 190x245cm, 2024.
Moka Lee: Fragmented Identities and Body Politics
Moka Lee is an emerging artist whose work engages with questions of identity, body politics, and the fragmentation of the self. Her practice is often multimedia, combining painting, collage, and installation. Lee challenges traditional notions of femininity by placing the female body—and its mediated representation—at the centre of her work. She deliberately breaks with conventional beauty ideals, presenting women’s bodies in their full vulnerability and strength.
Particularly striking is Lee’s approach to bodily fragmentation. In her collages and installations, she reassembles body parts, breaks them apart, and repositions them within new—often unexpected—contexts. This deconstruction points to the ways in which women are frequently reduced to physical attributes within society. At the same time, it opens up alternative possibilities of self-representation that extend beyond traditional gender roles. Lee’s work thus becomes a space in which women can reclaim both identity and body on their own terms.
The Female Gaze in Contemporary Art
Karoline Walker and Moka Lee stand as representatives of a new generation of female artists whose presence in the art market continues to grow—bringing with it new themes and perspectives. The female gaze, long marginalised within the art world, is now increasingly being placed at the forefront. This gaze is not homogeneous; it is diverse, complex, and layered. It makes it possible to see society through women’s eyes—through voices that tell their own stories, articulate their own struggles, and project their own visions into the world.
A defining aspect of this renewed visibility is the engagement with femininity, body politics, and identity. Artists such as Walker and Lee address not only their own position within society, but also the broader ways in which women are perceived. Their works function as platforms for reflection and debate around gender roles, power structures, and social norms. Through their art, they create spaces in which these questions can be re-examined and renegotiated.
Moka Lee "Ego Function Error 05", oil on cotton, 157,5x193,9cm, 2024.
Female Artists Are Reshaping the Art Market
The growing success of artists such as Karoline Walker and Moka Lee signals a broader shift: the art market is becoming increasingly receptive to female voices. Galleries, museums, and collectors are showing stronger interest in works that place women’s perspectives at the centre. This is not only about engaging with questions of gender—it also reflects a wider recognition of the artistic and cultural potential embedded in women’s narratives. The female gaze opens new modes of perception and interpretation, enriching contemporary art both aesthetically and conceptually.
This development points not only to change within the market, but to a wider societal transformation. The work of artists such as Walker and Lee contributes to dismantling inherited role models and creating alternative forms of representation. Their practices form part of a larger discourse on the role of women in society and in art—one that ensures female voices are being heard today with greater clarity and force than ever before.
The works of Karoline Walker and Moka Lee demonstrate how a younger generation of women artists is actively shaping and redefining the contemporary landscape. Through female narration and an engagement with themes such as identity, space, and body politics, they develop new artistic languages that challenge—and expand—the traditionally male viewpoint. They represent a generation claiming its place in the art market while contributing meaningfully to a more nuanced understanding of gender roles and social structures. The female gaze is more present and more powerful today than ever—and it enriches art in countless ways.
Peter Uka "Lady May", oil on canvas, 140x140cm, 2024.
Exploring the Everyday: How Emerging Artists Stage Daily Life in Painting
In contemporary art, everyday life is increasingly moving to the foreground as a subject—offering intimate glimpses into lived reality and the seemingly insignificant moments of daily existence. These artists elevate the banal into something quietly monumental by directing the viewer’s attention to the ordinary, allowing subtle narratives and emotions to surface. Three notable artists who address this theme with particular force are Alex Gardner, Peter Uka, and Rob Davis. Their paintings examine the deeper dimensions of the everyday and offer viewers a distinctive—often highly intimate—access to the scenes depicted.
Alex Gardner: The Surreal Intimacy of the Everyday
Alex Gardner is known for minimalist, subtly surreal depictions of the human body within everyday scenarios. His anonymised figures—often without individual features such as faces—move through sparse yet emotionally charged spaces that grant the viewer access to universal human experience. Gardner uses reduction as a strategy, drawing attention to gesture and body language, and creating an intimate, almost silent form of communication.
Gardner’s scenes of daily life, though seemingly neutral, open up an emotional depth that is intensified precisely through the absence of detail. Viewers are invited to project their own interpretations and feelings into these moments. Whether depicting quiet stillness or inner dissonance, Gardner stages the intimacy of the everyday in a way that makes the unseen palpable. A close relationship forms between viewer and image—one that extends beyond the ordinary and prompts reflection on one’s own presence and existence.
Alex Gardner "Lying with each other", oil on canvas, 150x150cm, 2024.
Peter Uka: Memory and Identity in Everyday Life
Peter Uka, a Nigerian artist, often draws on memories of life in West Africa, engaging with themes such as identity, belonging, and the link between past and present. His paintings of everyday life frequently depict scenes from the 1970s and 1980s—a period closely connected to his own youth. By portraying ordinary moments—men getting ready for an evening out, or children playing in the street—Uka captures both the essence of human experience and the shared daily life of a particular time and culture.
What makes Uka’s work especially compelling is his attentive care for detail: clothing, furniture, and colour all point to specific moments that are both personal and historically rooted. These scenes function as a form of cultural memory, telling not only the story of an individual, but of an entire community. Viewers are drawn into an intimate world of recollection—at once familiar and foreign—prompting a more universal reflection on the significance of the everyday and the relationship between past and present.
Rob Davis: Isolation and Proximity in Modern Life Through Abstraction
Rob Davis often focuses on the conditions of contemporary life, marked by subtle tensions between closeness and isolation. In contrast to figurative approaches, his non-representational paintings use abstract form, colour, and composition to capture the emotional dimensions of everyday experience. Through geometric clarity and a reduced palette, his works create an atmosphere of calm that is simultaneously threaded with inner unease.
In Davis’s abstractions, there are no direct depictions of people or daily scenes, yet the emotional charge remains palpable. He uses sharp lines, soft transitions, and contrasting fields of colour to visualise the tension between intimacy and distance. His compositions—often defined by clear geometric structures—convey a sense of separation, as if the elements belong together while still existing apart. This visual distance can be read as a metaphor for modern life, in which physical proximity and emotional disconnection often coexist.
Despite their abstraction, Davis’s works invite viewers to enter the emotional world of the painting and to develop their own associations with the everyday. The intimacy of these images emerges through their formal language and their interplay of colour—quietly evoking feelings of loneliness, tension, or longing. By approaching daily life through abstraction, Davis offers the freedom to interpret what is seen on a deeply personal level—and to discover the invisible within what might otherwise appear banal.
Rob Davis, Artist-to-Artists Selected, via Frieze London 2024.
The works of Alex Gardner, Peter Uka, and Rob Davis offer intimate glimpses into everyday moments that are often overlooked or dismissed as banal. These artists demonstrate the depth contained within the ordinary—whether through Gardner’s anonymity and universal gesture, Uka’s historical grounding and work of memory, or Davis’s subtle emotional states of proximity and isolation. In their paintings, daily life is not merely staged, but examined in a way that allows the visible and the invisible, the mundane and the meaningful, to merge.
By focusing on scenes of everyday existence, these artists create a particular form of intimacy between artwork and viewer. A connection emerges that touches not only what is depicted, but also the viewer’s own life. Anyone can recognise themselves in the small gestures and moments these artists capture with such care and emotional precision. The gaze directed at daily life becomes a gaze toward what is essential—toward what defines being human, and what quietly accompanies us through our routines.
The exploration of the everyday in the work of Alex Gardner, Peter Uka, and Rob Davis shows how depicting seemingly ordinary moments can lead to profound reflections on human life. Their works offer intimate access to lived experience and emotional undercurrents, inviting viewers to reconsider their own relationship to the everyday. Through these stagings of daily life, the banal becomes elevated—an artistic inquiry that enriches both art and life.
Rob Davis "Quilt", oil on linen, 50x30cm, 2024.
The New Romanticism: Rediscovering a Forgotten Longing
A notable shift is unfolding in contemporary art as artists increasingly return to themes of Romanticism—reframing them within a distinctly modern context. Often described as “New Romanticism,” this movement revisits emotions such as longing, the sublime, and a renewed sense of connection to nature. While it echoes the spirit of 19th-century Romanticism, it also becomes a critical reflection on the pressures and contradictions of the present. The works of Gordon Cheung and Sholto Blissett are exemplary in this regard. Both artists employ romantic motifs to stage complex reflections on humanity, nature, and society, while placing a yearning for the unattainable at the centre of their practice.
Gordon Cheung: The Illusion of Paradise in Digital Worlds
Gordon Cheung’s works articulate a post-digital form of Romanticism, in which the desire for an ideal world collides with the alienation produced by contemporary life. Combining digital technologies with traditional painterly techniques, Cheung creates images that are both seductive and unsettling. His compositions often feature imposing landscapes reminiscent of Romantic painting, yet they are disrupted by digital interference, artificial textures, and visual glitches. This distortion underscores the fragility—and constructedness—of a world increasingly shaped by virtuality and hyperreality.
Cheung reconsiders the Romantic longing for the sublime under new conditions. Where nature was once understood as an infinite, awe-inspiring realm, it appears in Cheung’s work as technologically overwritten or threatened by capitalist systems. His landscapes, idyllic at first glance, point to realities dominated by material and digital forces. The desire for a “better” world becomes an illusion—a warped reflection of a lost utopia. Cheung explores the human tendency, in times of uncertainty, to look back toward an idealised past, while also asking how authentic or tangible such longings can remain within a hyper-connected, consumption-driven culture.
Gordon Cheung "Magnanimous World", Financial newspaper, acrylic and sand on linen, 150x200cm, 2024.
Sholto Blissett: The Return of the Untouched in Sublime Landscapes
Sholto Blissett’s paintings draw on Romantic traditions—especially the idea of the sublime and of nature as an untamed force. In his work, Blissett creates monumental landscapes marked by an almost otherworldly sense of beauty and scale. These seemingly pristine worlds evoke a deep longing for what remains untouched and ungoverned—for a space not yet fully claimed by human presence. Unlike Cheung’s digitally distorted environments, Blissett’s landscapes read as escapes into another time—past or future—where nature still retains its original power.
Blissett presents nature as a vast, unpredictable force capable of overwhelming the viewer. The human figure—if present at all—appears small and insignificant against towering rock formations, endless forests, and deep oceans. This vision strongly recalls the Romantics, for whom nature functioned as a mirror of human emotion—a place where longing, fear, and awe could find expression. Blissett updates this tradition by staging nature as both refuge and threat. His landscapes feel like remnants of a lost—or imagined—world, inviting viewers into a more introspective reflection on the relationship between humanity and the natural realm.
Longing for the Unattainable
In the work of Gordon Cheung and Sholto Blissett, a shared yearning emerges—for something ultimately unreachable, an idealised world that now exists primarily within art. Cheung filters this longing through digital alienation, examining the growing distance between real and virtual experience. Blissett, by contrast, frames sublime nature as a final refuge—something that resists total access and assimilation. Both artists return to Romanticism’s central motif of Sehnsucht, yet they do so with a contemporary, often critical lens that questions the human need for an “elsewhere.” In a time shaped by environmental destruction, technological dominance, and pervasive existential anxiety, New Romanticism can appear to offer an escape—though never a simple one. Rather, it becomes a way to explore a lost connection to nature, spirituality, and deeper emotional registers, while simultaneously reflecting on the traps of modern life. The longing remains, but it is tempered by the recognition that what we seek may no longer exist—or may never have existed at all.
As expressed in the works of Gordon Cheung and Sholto Blissett, New Romanticism is an artistic engagement with the desire for a lost, idealised world. It connects historical Romantic themes with the complex realities of contemporary society. The pursuit of the sublime and the untouched is reframed through digital distortion and the pressures of civilisation. Yet the art of these new Romantics remains rooted in the emotional force of longing—still searching for expression in a fragmented world.
Sholto Blissett "Heigh Vision", oil and acrylic on canvas, 200x160cm, 2024.
The Absence of Political Art in a Politicised Time
In a period shaped by political instability, global crises, and deep social polarisation, one might expect art at major international fairs to function as a mirror of these turbulent realities. Conflicts such as the war in Ukraine, the escalating crisis in the Middle East, and the upcoming U.S. elections dominate the media and increasingly shape everyday life for people around the world. Yet, strikingly, overtly political or activist art remains largely invisible at many art fairs. Instead of direct engagement with the defining questions of our time, an aesthetic of harmony and abstraction often prevails—as if the art world, faced with mounting pressure, is seeking refuge rather than confrontation.
The absence of political art in a politicised moment
Given the current global situation, it can feel difficult to understand why so little art openly addresses the depth of today’s political and social crises. The conflict in the Middle East has seen a dramatic escalation in recent months, while the war in Ukraine continues to intensify geopolitical tensions and affect the lives of millions across Europe and beyond. At the same time, the approaching U.S. elections are further dividing the country, with issues such as racism, gun violence, and the future of democracy at the centre of public debate.
Platforms such as Art Basel, Frieze, or the Venice Biennale are often considered cultural seismographs—places where artists can articulate responses to the present and make them visible to an international audience. And yet it is noticeable how many works on view focus primarily on formal and aesthetic concerns rather than on social and political realities. It can seem as though the art world is retreating into a space of escapism—and perhaps not without reason.
Jim Lambie "Double Love", potato sacks, automotive paint on canvas, 167x125cm, 2024.
A key reason for the relative absence of overtly political art at major art fairs lies in the economic structure of the art market. These fairs are not only showcases of artistic positions—they are, above all, sales platforms. The primary objective is to place works with collectors and institutions, and the pressure for commercial success inevitably shapes what is presented. Political art, often uncomfortable by nature, inclined toward confrontation and frequently perceived as provocative, risks being less attractive to buyers. This may explain why artists and galleries sometimes approach political statements with caution, wary of alienating potential collectors.
In times of social upheaval, when divisions within society deepen, a desire for harmony and reconciliation can also dominate within the art world. Buyers expanding their collections may be more inclined toward works that emphasise beauty, abstraction, or universal themes rather than those that directly engage with the darker realities of the present. A longing for calm—for a moment of contemplation—can therefore contribute to political art remaining marginal at many fairs.
The limits of activism within the art world
This does not mean that political art does not exist, or that artists are not processing these issues. Many artists engage deeply with political conflict—often in galleries, independent exhibitions, or on social media, away from the commercially driven context of major fairs. But on the largest international platforms, it can be difficult to find works that explicitly address the war in Ukraine, the Middle East, or political tensions in the United States.
This restraint can also be explained by the complexity of these subjects. Art that responds to conflicts such as the Middle East crisis or the war in Ukraine requires nuance—and carries the risk of being misunderstood or instrumentalised. Work that makes clear political statements can easily be pulled into ideological battles. Many artists therefore hesitate to take explicit positions in such polarised times, particularly when their work is shown internationally and received across very different political and cultural contexts.
A space for contemplation in a loud world?
While the absence of politically engaged art at major fairs may feel disappointing, it can also be understood as a symptom of a different kind of longing: the desire for a space of reflection and contemplation—set apart from a world that feels increasingly loud and polarised. In a time dominated by news of violence, crisis, and uncertainty, people often seek places—also within art—where they can slow down and regain a sense of stillness.
The question remains whether this is a temporary trend or whether the art world will experience a renewed return to political statements and engaged practices. Conflicts such as the war in Ukraine, the situation in the Middle East, and social tensions in the U.S. will continue to shape global discourse. And while political art may currently be less visible at fairs, that could shift as these challenges press more insistently into the collective consciousness of artists and audiences alike.
In an era of profound political crisis, it is striking how little overt political art is visible at major international fairs. A desire for harmony, commercial imperatives, and fear of ideological appropriation may all contribute to the hesitation of artists and galleries to engage openly with the most sensitive issues of our time. Yet the question persists: how long can the art world afford to remain politically detached? The defining questions of the present demand artistic responses—even when they are uncomfortable, complex, or confrontational.