Frieze New York 2025, held from May 7–11 at The Shed in Manhattan, featured over 65 galleries from more than 25 countries, showcasing a diverse array of contemporary art.
Fall of the Jade Kingdom I – Paradise Lost Chapter II (2014–2023) is a monumental painting by Raqib Shaw, a Kashmiri-born, London-based contemporary artist known for his fantastical, opulent, and densely detailed visual style. This work is part of his larger body of mythologically infused paintings that often draw on personal narrative, literature, and global art history.
Raqib Shaw’s opulent, intricately detailed paintings depict fantasias of wonder, sexuality, violence, and beauty; the artist achieves his spectacular, glittering surfaces with inlaid gems, rhinestones, glitter, enamel, and metallic paints. Shaw’s textured, orgiastic landscapes draw on a wide array of influences including Hindu mythology, Renaissance compositions, Baroque design, Hokusai prints, and Persian miniatures. The resulting works offer ironic commentaries on excess.
Sherrie Levine’s work engages many of the core tenets of postmodern art, in particular challenging notions of originality, authenticity, and identity. At this year’s fair in New York, a new series of paintings that question abstraction through modes of appropriation were presented.
After Piet Mondrian Inverted (2024), to which this work belongs, Levine alters the colors of modernist masterworks. This series relates to After Piet Mondrian, a suite of chromogenic prints from 1983. She photographed plates of Mondrian’s grid paintings from books, rejecting the typical model of copying from original artworks at museums.
Artur Lescher’s works attest to his constant experimentation with materials, their physical qualities and objectual characteristics. Through his works, the artist makes reference to natural elements, which when reproduced impeccably by means of industrial processes, reveal and deny these real allusions. A key component in his body of work is architecture, both in synthesis and context.
In an abstraction exercise of in-situ installations, the artist adopts the spatial situations of the exhibition space to transform corners, walls and doors into large-scale installations. His works emerge subtly as poetic gestures in space transmitting force and instability, balance and movement, tension and silence.
In the recent series of textile collages, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas brings to life scenes from her family archive, capturing several generations of the the artist’s Mirga family pictured in the familial embrace of daily life in their hometown during the 1960s and 70s, set against the backdrop of the communist regime in Poland.
The textiles and materials she employs are genuine relics of history, having frequently been possessions of or used by the very subjects of her artworks.
Since the 1960s, Lynda Benglis has been celebrated for the free, ecstatic forms she has made that are simultaneously playful and visceral, organic and abstract. Emerging amid the rise of Postminimalism, she has consistently pushed the boundaries of painting and sculpture, expanding their possibilities over the course of her career.
Composed of a variety of materials – from beeswax, latex, and polyurethane foam to later innovations with plaster, gold, vaporized metals, glass, ceramics, and paper – her works demonstrate an enduring fascination with process.
The embrace of flowing forms, color, and sensual surfaces attests to her inventive and radical spirit. Through her multifarious practice, Benglis continues a long-running investigation of the proprioceptive, sensory experiences of making and viewing her works, and explores themes of physical presence, narcissism, sexuality, and gendered identity.
The gestures, woven throughout Felipe Baeza’s work, compose a visual lexicon that calls forth traces on the verge of erasure. Artist focuses on the gestures, that happen in the hands, a sequence of bodily displacements that begins in the palm and flows through the rest of the body, and emotions that flow through them. A half-open hand, the shifting tension of fingers poised on the threshold of movement, clear eyes, gazes held. The yet-to-come is an opening toward the unpredictable.
"A self that is not quite here but always in process" is Baeza’s work that offers clues to this openness to the unpredictable, shifting entities, and the diverse forms of life that resist a fixed sense of belonging. The material processes, like collage, have allowed him to explore visual languages rich in nuance and texture, yielding depths that are difficult to achieve through other means.