Frieze London 2025 | Booth C15
Preview (invitation-only): October 15-16, 2025
Public Days: October 17-19, 2025
The Regent's Park, London NW1 4LL
Alexander Gray Associates presents work by Kamrooz Aram, Frank Bowling, Ricardo Brey, Harmony Hammond, Kang Seung Lee, Kerry James Marshall, Donald Moffett, Carrie Moyer, Joan Semmel, and Ruby Sky Stiler. These ten artists reveal how creative practices can function as both record and possibility—documenting lived experience while imagining alternate futures.
Highlights include Kamrooz Aram's paintings, which mark his debut with the Gallery. His evocative compositions challenge conventional art historical hierarchies that have placed fine art and decorative arts in separate categories. Building and destroying the image by layering patterns, geometric forms, delicate lines, and heavy brushwork, Aram creates complex surfaces that appear to be in a state of flux. Untitled (Arabesque Composition) (2025) exemplifies this approach as curvilinear forms drawn from Islamic decorative traditions emerge from Western abstract painting strategies. For Aram, these connections aren’t about fusion, but about recognition—acknowledging what has always been visible to those willing to see beyond art history's Eurocentric frameworks.
Further tracing how artists forge new languages from inherited forms, Joan Semmel's Self Portrait on the Couch (1983) presents a complex meditation on the competing forces within creative life. Last exhibited in the artist's 2021 retrospective, the painting presents Semmel holding paintbrushes and a sketch of her father in one hand. Behind her, a portrait of a nude man looms, revealing how artistic ambition, family expectations, and personal relationships vie for space within both the frame and the artist's consciousness. Semmel’s exploration of identity finds resonance in Kerry James Marshall's Woman with a Heart of Gold (1992), where the artist's saintly Black Madonna, surrounded by white romance novel heroines, synthesizes Christian iconography with Haitian Vodou symbols to forge a new visual vocabulary. Frank Bowling's Hide and Seek (1979-2012) extends these investigations across decades of development, employing his celebrated poured technique to allow personal and collective histories to flow together within abstract experimentation.
Together, the artists in the Gallery’s presentation demonstrate how artistic practice functions as both preservation and transformation, maintaining cultural knowledge while creating new possibilities for understanding identity, memory, and belonging.
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