Frieze New York 2026

This is one of several rare drawings on found, worn school slates that had been painted a pale green and through time have oxidised, establishing passages of powder; a patina of age.

 

Dean’s drawings consist of snaking contours in smoky chalk that spirals and twists around the smudged surface. The origin of the form relates to photos the artist took of a solar eclipse in central Texas. There she attempted to capture the phenomenon with a rotary lens and slow shutter pointed at the disappearing sun ( but never looking through the camera aperture). The resulting images with their lyrical and looping solar streaks are reminiscent of Cy Twombly’s gestures and images which she had in mind when making these drawings, pulling chalk playfully across the slates’ surfaces. This group of works in many ways pays homage to Twombly while expanding the idea of drawing, connecting it to the recurring themes in Dean’s own practice of blindness and chance.

Singh’s recent works take the form of large wall-mounted panels where the images can be endlessly rearranged. Described by the artist as constructed ‘contact sheets’, the form emerged while examining her archive of forty years of analogue contact sheets, a method she still uses even when photographing digitally.

 

Object of Mind is uniquely abstract, emphasising line and form to blur the boundaries between photography and drawing. The images Singh has selected in these works range dramatically in scale and perspective, removing any tangible sense of space.

The abstractions of Juan Uslé evoke a range of associations, from the cadence of human breath and the beat of a pulse to the environs and energy of his homes in northern Spain and New York City. The paintings and works on paper might resemble a landscape even as they present a manifestly abstract pattern of subtly controlled mark and colour, often evoking a piece of music or the rhythmic transcription of a recording device.

 

‘I move the brush and press down until the next heartbeat occurs’, says Uslé. ‘I try to follow a sequential rhythm, marked by the beating of my pulse … and in general it turns into a sequential field or territory of marks and routes reminiscent of the sea, a landscape, or a pentagram.’

 

A major retrospective of Uslé’s work is was recently staged at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid.

Two Identified Forms is part of a series started by the artist in 1990. Although the rivulets on the surface of the work appear random, they were created by coaxing turpentine with a fine brush and guiding it down the canvas. The process removes paint from the dark base layer, exposing the bare canvas beneath. Hovering in the dark, the ambiguous stains suggest something natural and elemental, a state between solid and void.

This diptych is part of an ongoing series exploring the ever-changing nature of shadows. The works are made from multiple layers; the drawing is created using graphite powder and overlaid with paper that has been dusted in powdered-pastel and dipped in molten wax.

 

In this case, Barriball renders the shadow in both positive and negative, applying a gradation of colour from sunshine yellow to a soft pink which evokes the shifting light of a sunrise or the colours used in film tinting in the early 20^th century. The works are intimate in scale, framed by a strip at the top and bottom suggesting photographic processes such as polaroid images or photochemical testing strips.