At Frieze London, We Asked Dealers, ‘What’s On Your A Wall?’

At Hauser & Wirth, the gravitational center of the booth was a single painting by George Rouy, an artist in his early thirties who has quietly emerged as one of London’s most watched talents. “It became the centerpiece of the booth,” Neil Wenman, the gallery’s global creative director and partner told me, “which is so fab for someone that young.” The canvas, positioned dead-center, had already sold within the opening hours of the fair’s VIP preview for £275,000 ($369,000). Rouy’s inclusion was part of a conscious push to foreground the gallery’s London artists, six in total, in a booth split evenly between contemporary and historical works. The timing was fortuitous: on Sunday Rouy opens an exhibition of eight new paintings at Picasso’s former hunting estate in Normandy, a link that lent his Frieze debut an extra charge of anticipation.

Across the tent at David Zwirner, another back-wall knockout drew steady crowds: Lifted Away (2024) by Portia Zvavahera, priced at $450,000, was put on reserve during the VIP preview. Rodolphe von Hofmannsthal, a senior director at the gallery, described it as the “victory painting” of Zvavahera’s recent dream cycle—a term the Zimbabwean artist uses for the moment when a recurring vision resolves itself. “It’s the end of the dream,” he said. “The angels surround a family, there’s protection, calm…it breathes.” Zvavahera’s process is both devotional and technical: beeswax flicked and scraped from the surface leaves a delicate negative space that glows like light through fabric. The result, equal parts ecstasy and exorcism, radiated a serenity rare on a fair floor buzzing with buyers.

A few aisles away, Lauren Halsey turned Gagosian’s booth into something closer to a plaza. Her installation mixed engraved relief panels with a six-foot-tall sign honoring South Central Los Angeles businesses—“Bling Tax and Things,” “Affordable Black Art”—rendered in the hieroglyphic style she’s made her own. The relief panels recall the same world-building she’s been developing since her Serpentine show and her Met Rooftop commission. But the sign, with its electric colors and punchy messaging is impossible to ignore. 

White Cube took a quieter approach. At the center of its stand stood Marguerite Humeau’s Coeur de Marie (2022), a bronze sculpture inspired by the bleeding-heart plant once prescribed to the broken-hearted. Part creature, part relic, it gave form to an emotion for which we have no name—a mythical love that refuses to die. Humeau calls each of her sculptures “a screenshot of one moment in mutation,” and here the mutation was almost literal: the work seemed to hover between botanical and human, scientific and spiritual, its surface catching the fair’s fluorescent light like skin. By opening day the gallery had sold sold 2 of the 5 editions available for £200,000 ($268,000) apiece.

At Thaddaeus Ropac, the counterpoint was Georg Baselitz’s Exotenremix (Exotic Remix), part of his ongoing Remixseries begun in 2005. Revisiting his 1960s Heroes paintings—the inverted soldiers and broken figures that once scandalized postwar Germany—Baselitz turns old bravado inside out. Here, in vigorous streaks of yellow and inky blacks, the painter is both subject and survivor, reworking his own myths with the urgency of someone refusing to age quietly. Priced at €950,000 ($1.3M), the painting is a strong reminder that spectacle need not always be new.

The best walls at Frieze don’t have to be the biggest or the most expensive. But they absolutely must pull you up short. When a works so confident it makes everything else around them look better, you know you’ve hit your mark. In a tent full of noise, a true banger doesn’t just stop traffic. It creates its own gravity.