Frieze London 2022: Regent's Park

Endless Coffee is one of Cornelia Parker’s installations that feature found, acquired, or modified objects. To achieve the effect in Endless Coffee, Parker laid out an arrangement of silver coffee pots and then crushed them in a 250-ton press, flattening the pots and transforming them into silhouetted reminders of what once was. The silver coffee pots used in this work, each with their own history, are no longer in fashion and are only now used on the most formal of occasions.

By crushing the objects, Parker breaches the decorum and deference we bring to what is valued as precious, rare or symbolic in our culture. Yet she resurrects the objects, giving them new life, as ghostly objects of contemplation. About her crushed silver works, Parker has commented, ‘I like the perversity of trying to make an act of destruction take on a formal quality, a deliberate symmetry.’

Cornelia Parker’s retrospective is at Tate Britain until 16 October.

Blue Dive depicts a pair of feet diving into and being subsumed by the stone itself. The stone is Brazilian sodalite, a rare rock-forming mineral, which caught the artist’s eye at Studio Carlo Nicoli, Carrara where she often works. Cross was attracted to both its colour and its patterns, an opulent royal blue with creamy white veins. The highly polished feet, cast from the artist’s own, emerge from the roughly hued block. Presented as a fragment, these feet also recall the broken statuary of past civilisations we are so familiar with from museums and the ancient sites. Blue Dive evokes a sculpture lost in time, a kind of future ruin.

This work is part of Indra's Net, curated by Sandhini Poddar at Frieze this year.

John Riddy’s practice is rooted in encounters with place. Blakeney (1), 2021 is the first in a new series of works taken from a single viewpoint on the Norfolk Coast Path looking towards Blakeney Point, not only a place visited by Riddy for over 30 years but a common walking path and an everyday experience for thousands of people. The horizon, which carefully divides the composition in two, indicates a shingle ridge that protects the marsh from the North Sea, disrupted by a single building silhouetted against the white-grey sky. 

While Blakeney (1), 2021 offers a new subject matter for Riddy, the series adopts earlier formal and thematic tropes. The half-and-half division between land and sky, for example, echoes the composition of the New York (Black Star) series (2016). Indeed, both bodies of work also capture a single viewpoint in meticulous detail as it changes over a period of time ­– for Black Star, a series of pictures over 24 hours; for Blakeney, the series was made over two years. Each resulting photograph is attached to a specific moment, tracing the effects of time, weather and shifting light, describing those temporal changes in silence and stillness.

Blakeney (1), 2021 is the first in a new series of works by John Riddy that will be exhibited as a solo presentation at Frith Street Gallery, Golden Square in November 2022. 

‘The Painted Photos reduce the images, pare them down to an essence, even a scent, if you will… they just become hints of the images.’ – Dayanita Singh

Included in the touring retrospective exhibition Dancing with My Camera, Dayanita Singh’s new series of Painted Photos demonstrates the artist’s ongoing experimentation in photography. The images, selected from the artist’s extensive archive, present indeterminate architectural settings obscured by a thin layer of white paint. The resulting works reference the withholding and blurring of memory while also evoking the museum practice of wrapping photographs in archival tissue paper, or the artist’s own method of shrouding her museum structures in muslin cloth while they surround her in her home. Singh has recently articulated this reduction of form in musical terms, referencing the raag in classical Indian music, which refers to an improvisational structure specific to a particular mood or tone. In the Painted Photos we see this made manifest in physical form, the specifics of time and place abandoned in favour of a reduced essence or faint sensation.

Dayanita Singh: Dancing with my Camera will tour to Villa Stuck Munich, MUDAM Luxemburg, and Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art Porto. Singh is the 2022 recipient of the prestigious Hasselblad Award which will be accompanied by a solo exhibition at the Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg 15 October 2022–20 January 2023.

Exploring contemporary ideas surrounding craft, gender and identity, Apfelbaum’s new ceramic work melds painting, ceramics and installation.  ‘The goal is to interpret the personal as political’, says Apfelbaum, citing her long history of working with materials associated with craft and everyday life, such as fabric and rugs. The exuberant colour palette of these wall-mounted ceramics, which read like abstract paintings, is derived from Apfelbaum’s memories of her early exposure to Pennsylvania German art. 

This work was included in Apfelbaum’s solo exhibition For the Love of Una Hale earlier this year at Spruance Gallery, Arcadia University, Glenside, Pennsylvania, USA. 

Polly Apfelbaum’s work is included in Fun Feminism until 19 March 2023 at Kunstmuseum Basel, and Imaginary Friends at Juan Miro Foundation Barcelona in 2023.

The materiality of language is central to the work of Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press. Her Full-Stop Seascapes start with a found painting of a romantic marine landscape, usually with a noble ship punctuating the horizon. She then paints over the boat or boats, replacing them with boulder-like full stops, or full stops that look like huge, geometrical formations. The conventions of landscape are as constrained as language itself, and with her Seascapes Banner disarms a range of cultural clichés.

In Consolas, Futurist, Didot and Harrington mysterious elongated full stops are positioned like clock hands against a pale blue, cloudy sky. Its intriguing title refers to the punctuation’s font, rather than the quinquennial exhibition. The familiar and nostalgic look of the found paintings is disrupted by the black chunks of language that interpolate the overall mood of romantic melancholy. 

Fiona Banner’s exhibition Pranayama Typhoon – Soft Parts Wing Flap Fin is on at HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund until 29 January 2023).