Frieze London: Booth C16

Frieze London 2026 | Booth C16
Preview (invitation-only): October 14 – 15, 2026
Public Days: October 16 – 18, 2026
The Regent’s Park, NW1 4LL

Alexander Gray Associates presents work by Kamrooz Aram, Ricardo Brey, Bethany Collins, Márcia Falcão, Harmony Hammond, Kang Seung Lee, Joan Semmel, Ruby Sky Stiler, Steve Locke, and Dyani White Hawk. These ten artists alchemize diverse lived experiences into multifaceted artistic practices that exemplify the complex, intersectional realities of our world.

Highlights include Márcia Falcão’s paintings, which mark her debut with the Gallery. Falcão’s work pushes the limits of figuration through gestural brushwork, dense layers of impasto, and chimerical anatomical study, treating the Black female body as a site where painterly experimentation and lived experience converge. In Namoradeira em janela cinza, da série
Camufladas [Loveseat in a Gray Window, from the Camouflaged series] (2026), the artist uses stark contrasts of light and shadow to introduce a tension between visibility and concealment. For Falcão, disrupting the legibility of her figures probes how exposure might coexist with protection in a climate of escalating violence against women.

In keeping with Falcão’s approach, the presentation also features new and historical works by feminist stalwarts of the program, Joan Semmel and Harmony Hammond. In Knee Up (2017), Semmel’s decades-long project of wresting the female nude away from the objectifying lens of popular culture comes to the fore through a close-cropped painting of
the artist’s aging body. Meanwhile, Hammond’s work Conch (1977) from her foundational series of Wrapped Sculptures, imbues post-minimal abstraction with the latent content of gender and queer sexuality.

This expansion of the history and discourse around abstraction finds resonance in Dyani White Hawk’s painting To Be Held (2026), in which acrylic paint mimics the shimmering luminosity and geometry of Indigenous beadwork. Similarly, Kamrooz Aram’s new paintings propose the ornamental as a foundational representational strategy, rather than an oppositional force, within the history of Modernist painterly abstraction. Both artist’s inclusion follows recent institutional presentations at the Walker Art Center and Whitney Museum of American Art, respectively.

Adopting a similar yet distinct decolonial approach, Ricardo Brey’s rhizomatic drawings and sculptural assemblages embrace the syncretic traditions of Afro-Cuban culture, combining disparate cultural forms from Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean to create something entirely new. In landscape drawings like Fall (2025-2026), Brey expands his palette, which has been rooted entirely in shades of blue since 2020, to include vibrant hues of marigold yellow and green. In each case, Brey’s natural pigments draw upon the artist’s Afro-Caribbean religious upbringing, in which materials from the earth have the power to evoke their place of origin wherever they are transported.

Together, the artists in the Gallery’s presentation demonstrate how artistic practice can expand and enrich our understanding of art history, while pointing to new avenues for formal and conceptual invention.