Our top picks of exhibitions together with cultural spaces and places, both online and in the real world.


All, Art, Auctions, Exhibitions, Travel & Hospitality, Initiatives

Viewing Frieze & Frieze Masters

It’s a bumper edition of The Wick List this week, as the biggest week in the contemporary art calendar kicks off. Of course, at the undisputed centre are Frieze London (for contemporary art) and Frieze Masters (where you’ll find everything from millennia back to the present). This year is especially exciting for visiting Frieze as it reveals a brand new layout, with natural light and a new flow around the booths.

Returning to the main fair is the recent popular recent addition, Artist-to-Artist, where well-established names select up-and-comings to exhibit at the fair: look out for our favourites, Nengi Omuku, selected by Yinka Shonibare, and Peter Uka, selected by Hurvin Anderson, both exceptional painters with a knack for group portraits and incredible storytelling. There’s also the curated section, this year titled Smoke and devoted to ceramic works from non-western practitioners of the ancient art form.

At Frieze Masters, we’re looking forward to seeing Sheen Wagstaff’s curated section Studio, returning for a second year, and in an expanded form, reflecting on the process of making with presentations by the likes of Nathalie Du Pasquier and Doris Salcedo. There are also solo presentations by radical 20th century masters in a showcase titled Spotlight, focused this year on artists from the 1950s – 1970s; Judy Chicago, Balraj Khanna, Kulim Kim, Donald Locke, Nabil Nahas and Nil Yalter. We can’t wait to see.

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Dates
09 October 2024 — 13 October 2024

Viewing Women in Art Fair at Mall Galleries

Women in Art Fair launched last year as an initiative designed to redress the gender imbalance in the commercial art industry and the art world at large. With a mission to create a positive global platform for women artists, curators and gallerists alike, the fair positions itself to stimulate and develop ideas around gender, sexuality and how these things affect the kind of art that is made, seen, and sold.

The fair takes over the three spaces at the Mall Galleries, with the East gallery being filled with a curated exhibition of work by leading 20th and 21st century artists, and the North gallery inhabited by an exhibition of contemporary artists – the West gallery, meanwhile, is where you’ll find the gallery booths, selected from an open call. Last year boasted 20 galleries showing more than 200 artists between them.

“We need radical innovation to addresses the glaring gender imbalance in the industry. We stand for diversity and inclusion in the arts and we’re here not just to encourage dialogue around gender and culture, but fundamentally to change the way art is exhibited”, the fair’s founder, Jacqueline Harvey. We couldn’t agree more.

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Dates
09 October 2024 — 12 October 2024

Viewing 1-54 Contemporary Art Fair

Of course, there’s so much else going on to coincide with Frieze week. One of the most popular satellite fairs is 1-54, the fair – led by Founding Director Touria El Glaoui – dedicated solely to contemporary art from the African continent and its broad diaspora. Bringing together galleries from around the world in a range of mediums at Somerset House, 1-54 continues to lead the way forward in an international market that is still weighted towards the west.

This year’s fair will see 37 international galleries from 17 countries showcase work by more than 110 artists – a significant representation of the very best contemporary African artists working today. This year’s courtyard installation has been created by none other than Slawn, the young London-based Nigerian artist also known as Olaolu Akeredolu-Ale. His project, Transition, involves two iconic London double-decker buses – over 10 metres long and 4 metres high.

Also worth visiting is a partnership between Somerset House and 1-54, a retrospective exhibition devoted to the late Leila Alaoui, the French-Moroccan artist, photographer and activist who died in 2016 while working on a women’s rights campaign with Amnesty International. Alaoui was caught in gunfire during a terrorist attack in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and three days later died of her wounds. Honouring Alaoui’s photographic practice, the exhibition includes three of Alaoui’s defining series of works – Les Marocains, No Pasara and Natreen, as well as Alaoui’s final unfinished video work L’Île du Diable (Devil’s Island), exploring the lives of a 1960s generation of dispossessed migrant workers in France.

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Dates
13 October 2024 — 16 October 2024
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