The Good The Bad The Ugly: Frieze London

Paris has the Eiffel Tower, New York has the Statue of Liberty and London has Frieze.

The UK’s signature art fair hasn’t reached quite such colossal levels of fame to be granted landmark or UNESCO World Heritage status – but it has changed the face of London’s artworld since its launch more than two decades ago.

But beyond the glamour, is anyone actually buying anything? It seems so. Anchoring first-day sales was the news Hauser & Wirth had sold Jan Brueghel the Elder’s Still Life of Flowers in a Stoneware Vase (1607–08) for ‘in the region of £5 million’. It may seem derivative to point out that Brexit and tax reforms have hurt the UK art market, but a £5 million sale does pale in comparison with the $20 million sales announced at last year’s Art Basel Paris, which opens next week. Still, the future of London’s art market may lie in the fresh young faces stepping onto the scene: the liveliest area of the fair was Focus, a section of 35 young galleries given prime real estate by the fair.

Yet art often sometimes feels like a minor part of the equation. An hour into the fair’s opening, I heard one attendee unashamedly say: “I don’t even like art.”

Luckily for them, there are also celebrities – Tilda Swinton! Andrew Garfield! Stormzy! (That’s as A-list as it gets for art.) There is fashion, including strollers carrying Birkin bags instead of babies. And there are great restaurants, Ruinart champagne carts and, this year, thanks to a Gray Wielebinski commission, artistic toilets.

Without further ado, here’s the Good, the Bad and the Ugly – the Frieze London edition.

Gagosian’s booth at Frieze London 2026, featuring artwork by Albert Oehlen. Artwork © Albert Oehlen. Photos: Maris Hutchinson. Courtesy Gagosian.

The Good

At Gagosian, Albert Oehlen solo booth

A hot take I know, but we loved Gagosian’s booth of six new, large-scale paintings by the German artist Albert Oehlen. Bursting with colour and melodic in their compositions, they made the fair’s harsh lighting easy to forgive. We seem to be in good company: all six oil paintings sold at an officially undisclosed price, though The Art Newspaper reported that they went for more than $1 million each.

At The Modern Institute, Rotating Toast by Andrew J. Greene

We are going to be controversial and say that Timeless Symbols (Toast Rack) (2026), by Andrew J. Greene at The Modern Institute, is actually good. It’s properly funny art, but nostalgic too: the silver swan display, the steel stanchion, the two slices of toast circling in harmony. So often with contemporary art, you hear, “But why?” And yes, while we may have initially thought that, as we watched the toast endlessly circle each other, we somehow felt we understood Greene’s ambition to ‘reverse engineer meaning’ and offer a meditation – however bizarre – on the precarious relationship between class, taste and aspiration.

Honourable mentions: Presentations from eleven India-based galleries across the two tents this year show how India has emerged as an unstoppable centre for art. Don’t miss the radical landscape depictions of Indian painter Ganesh Haloi at Akar Prakar in Masters. And who could forget the food? After six hours of work, three chicken tinga tacos for £16 never tasted so good. An added bonus of having many of London’s coolest restaurants under one roof – or tent, rather – is that you can tell your friends you’ve eaten at Rita’s, Jikoni and Nobu. Perhaps leave out that all you could afford was the miso soup. Oh, Frieze, when will we ever get to spend £28 on a flute of Ruinart again? Next year.

Ganesh Haloi's Untitled water colour on paper, 21.75 x 30 in. presented at Frieze Masters. Courtesy Akar Prakar.

The Bad

Feral Metaverse by Theo Triantafyldis, for the Frieze London Artist Award

Winner of the Frieze London Artist Award, Theo Triantafyllidis has treated us to Feral Metaverse, in which the Greek artist aims to bring together ‘AI technology, gameplay and a giant spider to explore social behaviour constructs’. While the interactive work is fun to engage with, Feral Metaverse seems unable to make any discursive observations about the life happening outside its eight legs. Could this be because one of the work’s co-commissioners for a piece about AI technology is Google? Hey, Google, how do you say ‘conflict of interest’?

Voyage Through the Diamond Realm, chapter 2. By De Beers, at Frieze Masters.

Speaking of brand commissions, De Beers is back with the next chapter of its Voyage Through the Diamond Realm installation. We have nothing against brands funding art, we just feel particularly strongly about the actual art this brand has produced. Visitors, we are told, will be taken ‘on a journey across billions of years.’ A bold claim. A diamond should last forever, but this film should have ended with part one.

Honourable mention: While we’re normally fans of Brazilian artist Marina Perez Simão’s colourful paintings, Pace’s selection of her new works is painfully dull. Destined for, and better suited to, the luxury apartment of the most boring person you’ve ever spoken to at a party. We expected more than lobby art from one of the world’s most famous galleries.

Marina Perez Simão, Untitled, 2026, oil on linen, 246 cm × 200 cm (8' 7/8" × 78-3/4"). Courtesy Pace Gallery.

The Ugly

At David Zwirner, Rirkrit Tiravanija's A Bitter Pill.

Rirkrit Tiravanija’s A Bitter Pill at David Zwirner is a tough pill to swallow (no pun intended). We wondered what Damien Hirst might make of this rehash of his Medicine Cabinet series, now with an added robot. Then we wondered whether the work might have been better put to use in an actual hospital.

At Frieze’s toilets, a site-specific commission Production by Gray Wielebinski and Dean’s Bottom

Finally, drop in to Frieze’s toilets, where you’ll find Production, a site-specific commission by Gray Wielebinski. From Duchamp’s urinal to this: a bathroom ‘transformed’ by ‘fragrant installations’. We commend the effort, but can nothing be left alone at this fair?

Honourable mention: All the pushchairs, this time filled with actual babies. It’s a weekday afternoon and most of the gallerinas are nursing mild hangovers under fluorescent lighting. Must we add infants’ cries to the mix? Surely most of these Loro Piana-clad visitors can afford a nanny? But perhaps these parents have brought their baby to soak up all the art on display. It’s never too early to sharpen those collecting skills.