Frankfurt-based Fabian Schöneich and Chicago-based Jacob Proctor have juggled their day jobs as curators with advising Frieze on which young galleries (founded in the past six years) to include in Frame, the fair’s section for the up-and-coming and newly emerged. Schöneich, the curator at Frankfurt’s Portikus institution for contemporary art, and Proctor, the curator at the University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, have also lent an expert hand and eye to help pull together the nearby 32-strong Focus section, which is just as international. “Young galleries are not what they were. They now start really well connected and are professional,” Schöneich says. Ahead of a hectic week of leading tours for patrons and collectors, he gave us an insight into six of the 18 solo artists’ shows in Frame.
Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel (Truth and Consequences, B32)
The British and French artists Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel work collaboratively but might realise works individually, Schöneich says. For Frame, their Geneva-based gallery has brought together two benches, an oversized anthropomorphic pitcher and a wall piece titled Stoneware Mural with Pipes n°4 (2016). “The works are based on the idea and the clichés of craftsmanship. They use traditional materials—clay, wood, metal and fabric—to create forms and ideas that you could almost use,” Schöneich says. The pipes, based on traditional Breton designs, are at head height (suitable for smoking), and the benches look as if visitors could sit on them but they are too fragile, the curator points out. The artists were awarded the 2012 Prix Marcel Duchamp.
Patricia L. Boyd (Jan Kaps, B36)
The San Francisco-based artist Patricia L. Boyd presents three floor-based sculptures from her Under Glass series (2015-16), which features blown-up, close-up images of the artist’s own back after cupping therapy, Schöneich says. The Cologne-based gallery has created a stand that is a foil to the art-fair experience, in which bodies circulate while engaged in the activity of consuming art, according to a statement from the gallery.
Cooper Jacoby (Mathew Gallery, B19)
“It’s a great installation that is site-specific. He has these fibreglass sculptures cast from street drains, so it is a trace image,” Schöneich says of Los Angeles-based artist Cooper Jacoby’s new series Stagnants (2016). On the guttering, there are markings based on acupuncturists’ charts of the body. The traditional Chinese therapy is all about unblocking the “sewer system of the body”, the artist says. The pieces are strikingly installed on a raised floor, Schöneich says, as if elevated from below the city street.
Liu Shiyuan (Leo Xu Projects, B35)
The young Chinese artist Liu Shiyuan studied at New York’s School of Visual Arts and now lives in Copenhagen. Her Shanghai-based gallery has covered its stand with floor-to-ceiling works, including the garish, tactile, customised carpet tiles that form This Way or That Way (2016). They create a visual flood of appropriated slogans from a variety of sources; some were originally political, others commercial. Beyond this installation is As Simple as Clay (2013), a grid of images culled from an internet search for the word “clay”, including stock shots of butter, soap, cheese and even chocolate. “There is no white space in a Leo Xu booth,” Schöneich says.
Nick Bastis (Regards, B29)
The Chicago-based gallery has installed works by Nick Bastis that together form a home from home for a team of snails. The Helix pomatia snails, which can be found on cardboard boxes used to transport refrigerators, are hibernating unless they are disturbed on their temporary tower blocks. The artist has previously employed the obliging creatures in other sculptural pieces. Works with snails on the gallery’s stand include When You Don’t Find What You’re Looking for, Sleep (2014-16).
Phillip Zach (Freedman Fitzpatrick, B26)
The German-born, Los Angeles-based artist Phillip Zach’s wall-based sculpture combines hard- and soft-edged elements. “I’m interested in the specific use of materials we are familiar with,” Schöneich says. Here, Zach combines fencing steel with “an unknown form that is fragile and pushes through the mesh”, the curator says, referring to the free-form shapes of coloured, expanded foam in this new work, Untitled Properties (2016).