Frieze London Diary: A dinner dance with a twist, Barbie gets the blues and Warhol’s feline showstoppers

Dinner includes a course of jeopardy

Art world glitterati descended on the Frieze London tent on Thursday evening for the lavish Collectors’ Dinner attended by gallerists, patrons and (some) journalists. Guests including the director of London’s Delfina Foundation, Aaron Cezar, and Ed Behrens, the editor of Apollo magazine, joined a throng of luminaries who dined on delectable dishes such as chicken, potato and minestra nera (leafy green brassica), along with coffee fudge and chocolate truffle. (Yum—thanks, Sessions Arts Club, for the menu.)

Tongues wagged about hot topics of the day—does anyone actually like the Tate Britain 90s art show?—while quaffing Fortnum’s wines. Attendees lapped up a top-notch performance from the UK choreographer Holly Blakey, whose troupe of brilliant dancers wound in and out of transfixed diners. One guest said he almost choked on his petits fours when Blakey’s crew built a human tower that collapsed—on purpose.

A room with an Unexpected View

Always one of the hottest tickets of Frieze week, Unexpected Views at the National Gallery, in which eight leading contemporary artists deliver a ten-minute talk in front of their favourite paintings, celebrated its tenth anniversary with a stellar lineup. Tschabalala Self, whose monumental Lady in Blue currently occupies Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, chose Bronzino’s An Allegory with Venus and Cupid (around 1545). Yinka Shonibare, meanwhile, talked in front of Thomas Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews (around 1750), which shares a gallery with his own subversive life-size sculpture that presents the aristocratic couple decapitated and with their clothes remade in Dutch wax fabric.

Not so pretty in pink: Barbie shows her dark side

Barbie is shedding her girly pink image for something altogether more subversive at Frieze London this week. Helen Chadwick’s photopiece Birth of Barbie (1993), on Richard Saltoun Gallery’s stand, finds the iconic dolly upside down, coloured deep scarlet and emerging out of labial folds of red meat, an image rendered all the more disconcerting by the fact that Chadwick used this image as her Christmas card for that year. Meanwhile, over at 1-54 on the Whitechapel Editions stand, Joy Gregory’s Explosive Barbie (2025) shows our favourite blonde having a very bad hair day, her splayed locks rendered in silhouette against a cyanotype blue background. Being a Barbie Girl in a Barbie World just got a whole lot less fantastic…

Grayson proves he’s one cool cat

Cats are all the rage at Frieze Masters; we’re talking mainly about the moggies on show at Shapero Modern gallery by none other than the Pop art maestro Andy Warhol. The 16 offset lithographs from the series 25 Cats Name(d) Sam and One Blue Pussy (around 1954) are stopping fairgoers in their tracks. The lettering was done by Warhol’s mother, Julia Warhola, who apparently is also responsible for the title’s missing “d”. Grayson Perry clearly thought they were purrrfect.

John Banting, the hedonist’s hedonist

John Banting was one of the most flamboyant and hedonistic figures of the 1920s and 1930s, but died in obscurity. Now, he is being spotlit this week with a solo show, Livid Cosmoramas, at John Swarbrooke Fine Art, as well as a new biography by Hugh St Claire. At the exhibition opening one veteran art journalist, no slouch in the hedonism stakes herself, revealed that she had taken the ultimate fangirl plunge of having his distinctive 1932 woodcut Siamese triplets tattooed into her leg. Devotion indeed.

In tune with her art

A talking point show on the Frieze art trail this week is at the Swiss Church in Covent Garden. The exhibition of works by US artist Maria Kreyn (The Dream Logic, until 19 October), organised by the Ministry of Nomads Art Foundation, is a swirl of absorbing storm paintings that draw on art historical giants such as JMW Turner. Kreyn tells us what inspired one of the head-spinning pieces. “I grew up doodling under a piano while my mom practised. It’s one of my most vivid childhood memories— that space, and the feeling and the sounds. The second concerto is a reference mainly to all of the Rachmaninoff I’ve heard her play over the years. The piano felt like the whole sky, and the whole sky now feels musical,” she says. Other works by Kreyn hang in a London landmark building—her depictions of Shakespearean scenes are dotted around Theatre Royal Drury Lane (the artist was commissioned by none other than the musicals supremo Andrew Lloyd Webber).

Love, letters and doodles (plus the tango)

The spotlight falls on the US-born, Bogotá-based artist Jim Amaral at Frieze Masters whose fantastical drawings on show at LAMB gallery explore the body, desire, and the subconscious. The fair presentation centres on Invisible Flowers (1979–80)—ink and watercolour drawings that “merge human reproductive anatomy with imaginary plants”, says the gallery. Amaral’s back story is explored meanwhile in a parallel show at LAMB’s gallery in Mayfair (Jim Amaral: A Study of Five Decades, until 21 November). Jim and his wife Olga met as students at Cranbrook in Michigan around 1954 when their romance apparently began “over a tango”. When she returned to Colombia and he left for naval service in the Philippines, they exchanged letters, doodles, and photographs for two years. The Love Letter drawings feature in the Mayfair show, tracing his works on paper from the 1960s to the 2010s. Oh l’amour.