Frieze London 2025 | Extended Highlights

Dayanita Singh uses photography to reflect and expand on the ways in which we relate to images. For Frieze 2025, we present two new photo-architectural pillar pieces consisting of 20 images that may be edited, sequenced, archived and displayed. 

Wildlife of India emerged from many hours spent selecting images from the artist’s vast archive of photographic contact sheets. The work, which presents animal specimens located across India, was first shown in the Natural History galleries of the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation in Mumbai, inaugurating the artist’s exhibition tour around India earlier in 2025. Itself a vitrine-like structure, the work highlights the history of anthropology and human curiosity, as well as the ethicalities behind both institutional and private collections.

Terragni Pillar reflects the artist’s singular relationship with Modernist architecture and interior spaces. The images here have been taken in the Italian city of Como, capturing the buildings of Giuseppe Terragni including the ‘Casa del Fascio’, a perfectly square construction adhering to the strict rules of rationalist geometry, completed in 1936; and Sant'Elia, a pre-school adopting an equally light-filled space.

Singh’s recent European and Indian exhibition tours were held at Gropius Bau Berlin, Villa Stuck Munich, Mudam Luxembourg and Serralves Porto; Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation Mumbai, Jaipur Centre for Art, Bengal Biennale and the Indian Museum Kolkata and Kanoria Centre for Arts Ahmedabad.

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s vibrant fabric collages address anti-Roma stereotypes and engage in building an affirmative iconography of Roma communities. The large wall-based works on show are from the series of portraits entitled Siukar Manusia (which can be translated from Romani as great, or wonderful people).

The images are of first-generation Romani inhabitants of the Nowa Huta district in eastern Kraków and are drawn from personal photographs shared with the artist by friends and family as well as the vast audiovisual archives of the USC Shoah Foundation. These are people who are personally important to Mirga-Tas, ranging from concentration camp survivors and Roma activists to eminent musicians. The portraits are realised using found and donated textiles, carefully selected and deconstructed by the artist.

Mirga-Tas is included in the Artists First commission at the National Portrait Gallery, London, on display until 3 August 2026. Her solo exhibition The Big Dipper Will Foretell the Future of the Roma at Collezione Maramotti opens on 12 October. Her travelling solo exhibition An Alternative Story is on show at Henie Onstad, Norway, until 2 November and then tours to Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg,  22 November until 15 March 2026.

Daniel Silver’s practice is influenced by the art of the ancient world, modernism, Sigmund Freud and psychoanalytic theories. In the works shown at Frieze the artist returns to the most traditional sculptural materials: bronze and marble. In these pieces he begins with the marble itself, treating it almost as a found object, sometimes lightly dressing the stone or carving onto it, but the marble remains essentially as it was discovered, its surface unique, marked by time and human interaction. The marble becomes a body and a plinth on top of which, and in response to, Silver creates a head, first in clay which is then cast as a unique bronze.

This body of work conveys a sense of timelessness, engaging with the qualities of history – natural, geological and human – as departure points for making. Bronze, like marble, is a seemingly elemental medium and the heads themselves impart a sense of the perpetual. Their faces are benign but somehow inscrutable and they are all, according to Silver ‘in action’ – they might be whistling or singing, they might be deep in thought or dreaming. Each sculpture is an individual presence, a celebration of its own materiality and reflects on what it is to be human, and in the world, both physically and psychologically.

Cornelia Parker’s newest series of paintings: seemingly abstract oil-on-canvas works, are inspired by historic newspaper covers and the colour analysis charts of American artist Emily Noyes Vanderpoel (1842-1939). Parker was drawn to Vanderpoel’s collection of coloured grids illustrated in her 1902 volume Color Problems: A Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color. These geometric expressions deconstructed the palettes of everyday, antique and natural objects – arranging them in 10 x 10 grids of coloured squares; a method of analysis that was revolutionary at its time.

A website dedicated to Vanderpoel includes a generating algorithm that allows one to take any image and break it down into a colour-grid. Using well-known newspaper headlines, covers from Time and Life magazine and iconic photographs as her source, she used this to create her own colour charts which are rendered in impasto oil on canvas, using a palette knife, an incongruous technique not readily associated with the precision of modernism.