The Best Booths at Frieze New York, Where Stately Abstraction and Sophisticated Fiber Art Reign

This young Balinese artist, a rising star of the biennial circuit, has produced a stunner for what effectively counts as her New York debut: a grouping of works that revisit traditional Kamasan scroll paintings, which have been used for centuries to communicate Hindu mythologies and have long been made by men. Sasmita told ARTnews earlier this year that her goal is to “position women as central figures” of these paintings, so that they are no longer “relegated to mere decoration and reproductive roles.” She does so at Frieze in works such as Vortex in the Land of Liberation (2025), whose central element is a cowhide bejeweled with strings of beads. Painted onto that cowhide is a woman whose detached head grows a tree, as though she had fully fused with nature. Surrounded by a forest of hanging velvet strips, this woman is provided sanctuary and shielded from the gazes of passersby. This is the best booth at Frieze—and a sure sign that this artist really is one to watch.

Esther Mahlangu has worked prolifically, producing painting after painting while also taking on the occasional commission for brands such as BMW and Commes de Garçons, and so it takes some good curation to get to the heart of what makes her great. Fortunately, this booth, staged on the heels of a retrospective in her native South Africa and an appearance at the Venice Biennale, does just that. It provides a solid sampler of Mahlangu’s recent output, much of which takes the form of paintings that translate patterns from the Ndebele culture to canvas. Several feature starburst-like forms outlined in black and set against sharp white backgrounds; some areas are filled in using crimson, cerulean, and sandy brown. Then, in a work called Homestead VI (2021), Mahlangu situates these patterns in a landscape with people and cattle, translating them onto the walls and roofs of squat huts. She’s showing that abstraction is, in fact, compatible with everyday life.

These two artists don’t make a natural pairing: Judy Ledgerwood is known for paintings that overlay abstractions with scrawled flowers; Leon Polk Smith was associated with the hard-edge tendency of the postwar era and died in 1990. But this booth shows that they make quite a nice duo. Smith’s method for doing so was to create shaped canvases in clashing colors rendered so that they appear machine-applied, with evidence of his hand nowhere to be found. Ledgerwood takes a different approach, making pretty her grids and monochromes with conventional signifiers of girlishness. Both are persuasive means for needling the conventions of modernism and tainting the purity associated with European abstraction of the early 20th century.

With fiber art fast emerging as the medium of the season here in New York, it can be no surprise that weavings and textile art abound at Frieze. Some of the most compelling examples can be found at Tina Kim’s booth, which is devoted mainly to artists hailing from South Korea. The stand functions as a memorial of sorts to Suki Seokyeong Kang, who died last month at 48; she was known for utilizing hwamunseok mats, one of which appears here as the unlikely background to an abstraction formed from steel bars. Lee ShinJa, a nonagenarian soon to be the subject of her first US survey at the Berkeley Art Museum, is also here, represented by the glorious Growth (1980s), a hanging tapestry in which planes of brown and beige refract through each other. Kang and Lee are joined by a much younger artist, the sculptor Mire Lee, who is showing pieces of soft fabric made hard and crusty via clay slip. Hung in frames, Lee’s tattered fabrics look as though they are being worn by ghosts.

It takes true talent to shine in multi-artist booths, which often lack cohesive themes or aesthetics, and Ximena Garrido-Lecca has it aplenty, which is why this Peruvian-born artist stands head and shoulders above the rest of her colleagues at Vermelho’s booth. Based in Lima and Mexico City, she has two works here, both of them made from copper, a metal whose mining has generated a booming industry in Peru, along with environmental disruption and harm to Indigenous communities. What would a reparative use of copper look like? Garrido-Lecca seeks to find one with Realignments X (from the series Aleaciones con Memoria de Forma), 2025, in which copper tubes are woven together using traditional Andean techniques. The work’s name implies that Garrido-Lecca has wielded her metal in a less exploitative way than the corporations that trade in it.

This Parisian gallery’s stand includes one Prix Marcel Duchamp nominee (Benoît Piéron) and one Turner Prize winner (Jesse Darling), and that should qualify it as one of the hottest booths at the fair. Instead, Sultana has gone in a more subdued direction, offering a cohesive quartet of artists pondering frustrated desire. There’s a tiny still life showing a vase stuffed with carnations—from an admirer, perhaps—by Jean Claracq, but the piece comes with a frame so big it trumps the painting itself. Similarly, there’s a small Darling photograph showing the marks of a rosary pressed into a patch of human skin, but that work, too, contains more frame than art. The standout work here is one that cannot be entirely seen: a P. Staff piece called On My Death Bed / An Opus On Love / On Venus (telephone), 2025, which here takes the form of a semi-transparent pane of glass with a phone number written in marker onto it. Dial that number, and you can hear Staff intoning texts about the mysteries of love.

Gordon Robichaux has routinely proven itself one of New York’s most adventurous galleries, and it does so once more with its Frieze booth, a tribute to Jenni Crain, who died in 2021 at age 30. Crain, too, was much-loved here as an adventurous dealer, having founded an offbeat gallery in Rockaway Beach and worked as a director at spaces such as Kaufmann Repetto and Miguel Abreu. Yet as this booth makes clear, she was quite a talented artist, too, with the ability to breathe new life into Minimalism. Her sculptures were likewise sleek and spare, and similarly resemble unusable decorative objects. But whereas the Minimalists were primarily men who crafted heavy objects that exerted a strong presence, Crain seems to have been more interested in lightness and states of near-invisibility. Gesture 2 (2015), a pane of tempered glass bolted into a steel element on the ground, is arguably the piece least easily viewed at this fair. It could be taken as a heartbreaking metaphor for being overlooked, even when you are there in plain sight.