Frieze London 2026 Highlights: From Lisson to Pace

Frieze London is returning once again to Regent’s Park. That means 176 galleries, 43 countries, one week, during which the London scene meets itself. Among the big names, there are indeed a handful of shows worth watching more closely. For instance, the anniversary of a gallery that once stood at the heart of Kippenberger’s wedding.

Or an intergenerational dialogue around Cao Fei and Kara Walker. Finally, a Paula Rego retrospective ahead of her own major show at the Courtauld. So this is a selection of what you’ll see on the stands as you walk past the loudest names.

V tomto článku:

• Lisson: The gallery that discovered half of the 20th century’s art stars
• Gagosian and the man who was friends with Kippenberger
• Pace Gallery and light over the landscape
• Sadie Coles HQ: a sculpture that stands 3.5 metres tall
• Hauser & Wirth: London’s generation, all together
• Galerie Gisela Capitain: 40 years later
• Sprüth Magers: two generations, one space
• Esther Schipper: three women artists at once
• Amanda Wilkinson: Jarman, Jonas, and queer history

Lisson: the gallery that discovered half of the 20th century’s art stars

Lisson Gallery is one of the most influential galleries in the world, and not by accident. Nicholas Logsdail founded it in London in 1967, and he went on to shape the global art scene for nearly six decades. He gave early space to Minimalists and Conceptualists like Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, and Carl Andre.

In the 1980s, it was behind the “New British Sculpture” wave, Anish Kapoor, Tony Cragg, Julian Opie. Today it represents Marina Abramović as well as Ai Weiwei. Fourteen Lisson artists have been nominated for the Turner Prize, five of them, including Richard Deacon, have gone on to win it.

At Frieze London 2026, Lisson will present new works by Dalton Paula. He draws on overlooked biographies and oral histories. In doing so, he restores visibility to Black historical figures from the 16th to the 19th century.

Gagosian and the man who was friends with Kippenberger

Gagosian brings similar weight to Frieze, albeit through a different name. The gallery will show six large-scale paintings by Albert Oehlen. They explore the still-rich possibilities of a long-established medium and format.

Oehlen, meanwhile, naturally connects to threads we’ve already developed in this series. He was part of the very same circle around Martin Kippenberger and the German art scene of the 1990s. We encountered that circle earlier with Elfie Semotan and her wedding album, as well as with von Bonin’s tribute to Kippenberger. In fact, they belonged to the same generation of Berlin and Cologne artists who gathered at the legendary Paris Bar.

Pace Gallery and light over the landscape

Pace Gallery will show new work by Marina Perez Simão. Her paintings draw on natural and geographical phenomena. Layers of paint capture shifting light over land and sea.

Sadie Coles HQ: a sculpture that stands 3.5 metres tall

Alex Da Corte will present a monumental sculpture, Princess Daffodil, standing over 3.5 metres tall. Alongside it comes a new series of his “matchbook” sculptures. Da Corte is a Venezuelan-American artist known for taking figures from popular culture, Eminem, the Pink Panther, Disney, and channeling them through his own body in brightly coloured installations.

Crossover: Da Corte doesn’t stop at galleries. He designed the Prada Galleria bag in collaboration with Scarlett Johansson. He also directed a video for GAP with Dev Hynes, better known as Blood Orange. Fashion found him long ago, precisely for the same reason the art world loves him: his ability to turn anything superficial into something disturbingly beautiful.

Hauser & Wirth: London’s generation, all together

Hauser & Wirth will present a group show spanning painting and sculpture, focused on London-based names, Frank Bowling, Sonia Boyce, Allison Katz, Christina Kimeze, Anj Smith, and Michaela Yearwood-Dan.

Crossover: In 2022, Sonia Boyce represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, with her own national pavilion, and won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation for her installation Feeling Her Way, the first Black woman artist to do so. Now she stands alongside a younger generation in Hauser & Wirth’s group show, exactly the kind of intergenerational encounter Frieze does well.

Galerie Gisela Capitain: 40 years later

Capitain is celebrating its 40th anniversary with a group show spanning its entire programme, featuring works by Liza Lacroix, Ximena Garrido-Lecca, and Isabella Ducrot.

Crossover: Gisela Capitain is one of the gallerists we’ve already mentioned, she was among the guests at Martin Kippenberger and Elfie Semotan’s wedding in 1996, documented in his self-published photo album. Forty years after founding her gallery, she now stands exactly where that whole generation once stood, on one of the most prestigious platforms in contemporary art.

Sprüth Magers: two generations, one space

Sprüth Magers has prepared an intergenerational show centred on Cao Fei and Kara Walker, joined by Anne Imhof, Mire Lee, Barbara Kruger, George Condo, Louise Lawler, and David Ostrowski.

Crossover: Kara Walker is one of the most distinctive American artists, celebrated for her large-scale silhouettes exploring race, violence, and slavery in American history. Cao Fei, meanwhile, is one of the most influential Chinese artists working with video and virtual reality.

What’s more, placing them side by side, together with Barbara Kruger and her iconic text-based works, creates exactly the kind of show that reveals how different generations and continents grapple with similar questions of power and visibility.

Esther Schipper: three women artists at once

Esther Schipper will bring together three distinct voices in contemporary art. There are sculptures by Camille Henrot, the French artist who won the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2013 for her video Grosse Fatigue and today makes sculptures inspired by ikebana and ancient artefacts.

Joining them are paintings by Sun Yitian, a Chinese artist working with hyperrealistic plastic and inflatable objects, and Karolina Jabłońska, a Polish painter known for her expressive, bodily canvases depicting the female body in grotesque yet comic situations.

Amanda Wilkinson: Jarman, Jonas, and queer history

Amanda Wilkinson will present work by Derek Jarman, Joan Jonas, and Ajamu X, including Jarman’s monochrome works from the early 1980s.

Crossover: Jarman wasn’t only a filmmaker and visual artist. He also designed costumes and collaborated with the music world, most famously with the Pet Shop Boys, for whom he directed visuals for their concert tour. His monochromes, black canvases with layered texture, were made at a time when he already knew of his HIV diagnosis. That’s the very same period at the centre of the Queering Modernism section at Frieze Masters this year.

When and Where

Frieze London, The Regent’s Park, 14.–18. október 2026.