Art and the city: The public installations presented during Frieze Sculpture 2022

Appreciating the consistency in the ever-reliable art fair calendar, we are currently witnessing the Frieze Week. As we bid a bittersweet goodbye to the summer weather in London, we also get to say hello to the 10th edition of Frieze Sculpture, a now-regular opportunity to feel a little less sad about the impending winter. The exhibition, curated by Yorkshire Park Director, Clare Lilley, features 19 international visual artists such as Ugo Rondinone, Beverly Pepper, Jordy Kerwick, Alicja Kwade, and Robert Indiana and more. Frieze Sculpture occurs along with two important public art initiatives: the 11th edition of Sculpture in the city, an annual exhibition of contemporary sculpture set among the city of London's spectacular architecture, which has 20 outdoor artworks by emerging and renowned artists on display around London's famous buildings and public spaces, and the Mayor of London's Fourth Plinth Programme in Trafalgar Square, an established icon for London, which brings out the art critic in everyone. They create Sculpture Week London, a city-wide festival of public sculpture that features the work of several artists.

Lilley stated, “This is my tenth year as curator of Frieze Sculpture. It’s been a wonderful decade of working with the Frieze teams, installation crews, galleries, and with a range of exceptional artists. Since 2012, Frieze Sculpture has gone from being a week-long display alongside the fair, to a substantial summer and now autumn exhibition for London. Each year I set out to make a show that serves one of the world’s leading art fairs, as well as those who might never before have considered looking at sculpture. No two Frieze Sculptures are the same but all are a paean to sculpture in the open air.”

The 2022 art exhibition explores a variety of issues; works by Robert Indiana, John Giorno, John Wood and Paul Harrison, and Tim Etchells are organised as texts that transmit messages that combine poetry and political statements. Space Mirrors Mind (2022), a previously unseen sculpture installation by John Giorno from the late series Stone Poems, is a recently discovered glacial granite onto which a poetic phrase is engraved, and is presented by the John Giorno Foundation and Almine Rech.

Marinella Senatore, Pablo Reinoso, and Ron Arad's works emphasise the significance of coming together as a community and a social voice. Ron Arad, born in 1951, exhibits Dubito Ergo Cogito. Arad's Dubito Ergo Cogito, or I Doubt Therefore I Think, is a fusion of two designs, one by the sculpture artist and the other by the renowned French sculptor François Auguste René Rodin. Arad envisioned the French artist's renowned Thinker sculpture sitting in his Thinker chair and began creating replicas and representations of it. Arad urged his friends to sit and pose on the chair, which resulted in additional design progress. Finally, he created a sculptural form featuring indentations of the Thinker's bottom and feet.

The poetic and political art theme continues in the work of Péju Alatise and Ro Robertson, whose gazes shift to female and non-binary healing in nature, and Shaikha al Mazrou, Beverly Pepper, and Ida Ekblad, who build grandiose sculptures infused with feminine sensibility. Ro Robertson's Drench presented by Maximillian William gallery, is one of the works on show that considers the installation artist's newest expression in the 'terrain of the queer body,' which welds the figure and landscape as one.

While our world looks forward with trepidation due to the pandemic, works by Alicja Kwade, George Rickey, Emma Hart, and NS Harsha conjure the global and spiritual, while Matthew Darbyshire and Jordy Kerwick delve into folklore and mythology. Desired for - Arrived at, 2021 by NS Harsha, presented by Victoria Miro & Vadehra Art Gallery, is built not on linearity or rationality, but the twisted, visceral movements of desire in our ever-changing positions in life.

The re-imagining of Greco-Roman figures in Matthew Darbyshire's Hercules Meets Galatea, 2022, presented by Herald St Gallery, allows us to analyse the dynamic language of sculptural themes including sign, symbol, material, structure, surface, source, and sexuality. Yellow blue monk (2020) by Ugo Rondinone is part of the artist's latest nuns + monks series. These works investigate the transcendence given by the natural environment and inspire an entirely contemporary interpretation of the sublime like colour, form, and mass.

This year's large-scale installation of public artworks is as robust as ever, and is open to all. The paintings are scattered around Regents Park, London, United Kingdom, and feature several major artists. Frieze London and Frieze Masters will be on display from October 12 to October 16; Frieze Sculpture is on display until November 13.