The Eight Best Booths at Frieze London 2025 

Recently bought by L.A. entertainment mogul Ari Emanuel, the Frieze franchise is back in full swing in Regent’s Park and off-fair across the city. Alas, in this year’s Frieze London, art seems to come second to pseudo-VIP, ego-pleasing decorum and champagne bars in all shapes and sizes, art reduced to decorative prompts for staged wealth peppered across a highly uneven selection of gallerists and artists. Confession: I’ve never spent so little time strolling an art fair before. It was boring for the most part, due to too many shoehorned brand collabs and not enough curatorial vision lifting disparate parts into somewhat of something. Art served the brands, rather than the reverse—it shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it ought to be more subtle maybe—and I naively hope that Frieze can step up next year to justify its veneer of exclusivity and pretentious operation. The good news is that out of more than 150 presenting galleries, there was still room for some art. These are the booths and presentations not to miss.

Gagosian

• Booth D14

Gagosian chose to present a solo show, picking Los Angeles artist Lauren Halsey to headline its London fair presence. The result was sober yet bold, curatorially cohesive and seductively inviting. The booth included new works from Halsey, such as sculptures on gypsum lined up to form a sarcophagus. On these, Halsey’s familiar Afrofuturist motifs mixed with symbols of Black life in L.A., calls for social justice and Egyptophilia. A hand-painted board, LODA PLAZA (2025), convokes commercial and promotional aesthetics, like we’re meant to stumble across this roadside, with a cheeky reference to “affordable Black art.” A monumental fresco featuring collages of protests, community and dreams wraps Gagosian’s outside booth. All in all, a powerful homage to Halsey’s expressive ebullience.

Jane Lombard Gallery

• Booth D7

Jane Lombard’s booth was all about memory, violence, presence and representation. Featuring Michael Rakowitz’s ongoing series “The invisible enemy should not exist,” we enter an Iraq spanning from Assyrian times to the 2003 U.S. invasion. With the forensic rigor of an archaeologist, Rakowitz has documented and reconstructed stolen Iraqi artifacts using mundane materials such as the packaging of food products that were once seen with suspicion in that era of post-9/11 Islamophobic paranoia. Here, we observe how one looks at loss and symbols of national identity. Eva Struble reconstitutes eerie vistas using various media and collages to investigate the relation between humans and nature and what sings from these crevasses. Back to the body, Azita Moradkhani’s depiction of intimacy—lacy lingerie—is superimposed with images of protest. Together with Jane Bustin’s minimalist, geometrical sculptures, we meditate on the power of archives and embers of the past.

Southern Guild

• Booth C1

It’s a powerful return to the London scene for the South African and L.A. gallery, packing a punch with works elevating Black portraiture and figuration. The booth includes rising West African artist Roméo Mivekannin subverting the (white) Western canon by inserting himself—literally—into art historical paintings, this time after John Singer Sargent and his 1904 portrait of Lady Helen Vincent. Mivekannin’s face is added onto the woman’s body, painted on a rich black velvet fabric that makes the work “pop” at once. Manyaku Mashilo explores otherworldliness in a Surrealist painting saturated with red ochre hues. We also welcome a presentation of Zanele Muholi after the artist’s major show at Tate Modern in 2024. A visual activist from South Africa, Muholi’s photographs have documented with sensitivity the country’s sexual minorities, with characters challenging our gaze, which also finds resonance in American artist Chloe Chiasson’s works.

Lehmann Maupin

• Booth C13

Lehmann Maupin’s booth focuses on Do Ho Suh’s playful, bubbly sculptures and installations—a breath of fresh air among a saturated fair map. With in-your-face colors and quirky thread drawings, we fall head over heels for the wondrous, extravagant world of Do Ho Suh, which revisits the notion of home, inviting the viewer “in.” There’s a reconstructed bathroom you can walk in (yes!), and you can marvel at the thread sculpture of a yellow and red steam radiator like I did, which deepened my nostalgia of my former Harlem apartment and the radiator’s noisy wintertime companionship. The booth includes works from the artist’s Specimens, ScaledBehaviour and Spectators series. Do Ho Suh is also on show at the Tate Modern until October 26, so think of it as a sneak peek.

Sean Kelly

• Booth D24

Laurent Grasso’s neon work says it all: future archaeology. Sean Kelly summarizes here its curatorial proposition, which comes together seamlessly through the combined works of Grasso of course, but also Julian Charrière and Sam Moyer. Mixing media, we discover the booth with the curiosity of a child parachuted onto some prehistoric site, except more post-human than Jurassic Park. Moyer’s impressions of fossils rendered in marble are breathtaking in their ability to convey fragility and strength at the same time. Charrière’s deep-sea photography channels our collective drive (and fear) toward the unknown. These uncharted territories are exalted in Grasso’s fake fossils that suggest other civilizations, an ecology of possibilities at the border between geology and speculation. The booth brings these artists in conversation about our future ancestry in a convincing, thought-provoking way that lingers and stays with you past the fair fatigue.

James Cohan

• Booth C7

James Cohan’s booth was a delight for the eyes. Let’s start with the sparkles (no, not champagne…). Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s mirror sculptures bring a disco fever vibe to illuminate grayish London. Disco balls are diffracted into mosaics, and on them, the towering Iranian artist confesses a love for traditional Persian motifs and poetry through drawings and inserts. It’s kitsch-meets-romantic in the best way possible and very boudoir-like. Through a connecting passageway, we enter Naudline Pierre’s images of esoteric and symbolic characters. The scenography offers a great change of atmosphere, a rare feat given the usual white cube blandness. I love Pierre’s body of work, but in all honesty, I’m not sure these were her best. Still, they’re solid and there’s an interesting roughness to them. In another part of the booth, I fell in love with more scintillating, multidimensional gems in Josiah Mcelheny’s glass sculptures. Tricking our sight with optical illusions and incredible mastery of material, I was glued to them like a toddler to an iPad.

Frith Street Gallery

• Booth C8

It’s all about storytelling and telling those stories on people’s own terms. Gathering works from Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Dayanita Singh and Daniel Silver, Frith Street Gallery is staging the power of images in mythmaking, and conversely, their potential to heal from prejudices. Mirga-Tas’s large-scale collages on fabric celebrate the visibility and empowerment of Roma people through bold portraits of first-generation Roma people settled in eastern Kraków, Poland. Juxtaposed next to Dayanita Singh’s freestanding pillars of monochromatic photography and Daniel Silver’s bronze busts on marble pillars, we are navigating the physical excavation of voices and people who want to be seen and heard.

“Echoes in the Present”

• Curated section

Not a booth per se, but a curated section of Frieze London showcasing Brazil and Africa’s transatlantic and diasporic connections, “Echoes in the Present” presents artists Bunmi Agusto (Tafeta), Serigne Mbaye Camara (Galerie Atiss Dakar), Diambe (Simões de Assis), Mélinda Fourn and Naomi Lulendo (Selebe Yoon), Lilianne Kiame and Sandra Poulson (Jahmek Contemporary), Aline Motta (Mitre Galeria), Alberto Pitta (Nara Roesler) and Tadáskía (Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel). There’s a heavy focus on entanglements and dialogue here through materials (wood, cardboard, bronze), and themes of loss, memory, as well as the contemporaneity of traditions. Brazilian Mitre Galeria, which won a distinction at Frieze New York in the spring, is presenting a stunning booth filled with matrilineal intensity, and it’s absolutely one not to miss.

The honorable mentions

• Various

Lastly, I can’t close this roundup without acknowledging Dastan, Sullivan + Strumpf and Selma Feriani, which each played on their strong regional anchoring to offer a vision that felt true to their values. That’s the key and what ultimately felt missing from Frieze London overall: gallerists committed to the growth of their artists and fairs matching those efforts, playing a critical role in driving commercial interest to significant and emerging contemporary artists, rather than having those commercial appetites set the agenda for what gets to be shown. We’re all better for it when art stays at the center.