Frieze London 2025

Andreas Eriksson lives in the Swedish countryside in an area characterised by wild and diverse landscapes. He has a genuine affinity to the nature in which he lives, and his works arise from this intimate connection – nature forms the conditions and provides the material for Eriksson’s work.

In the etchings the flickering graininess evokes a certain physicality and heightens the ambiguity about whether the composition depicts nature on a micro or macro scale. The composition is not necessarily a representation of a specific place but evokes a feeling of nature. As in his paintings, shaded fields of colour meet and coalesce. Eriksson works with textures printed from multiple plates to bring forth a play between ambiguous light and dark forms in the final print.

Tacita Dean’s Craneway Event, a portfolio of 6 prints, captures moments and auras from a rehearsal for one of the last events the choreographer Merce Cunningham would create for his dance company. Each print is drawn from stills of the film Dean made over the course of three days with the company in Albert Kahn’s 1930s Ford assembly plant in Richmond, California, overlooking San Francisco Bay.

The series forms a moving portrait of one of the most influential choreographers of the 20th century. It also reflects the special perspective which the artist brings to all her subjects. Dean’s unique treatment of the prints creates a dialogue between dancers, architecture, sunlight and passing ships, delicately moderated by the tranquil, yet forceful presence of Merce Cunningham, just months before his death.

In a series of prints, Emma Kohlmann transforms her figurative drawings into prints with a rich, textural vibrancy. By combining the fine grain of woodcut printing with the painterly brush strokes of sugar lift aquatint, and the element of chance with open bite etching, Kohlmann has created a new series of prints that have a tactile depth, enabling her quirky and highly recognisable motifs to jump from the paper.

Whimsical creatures grow from the stalks of a plant or appear as a multitude of petals; their smiling faces emerge as a tower from the base of a flower. Kohlmann’s playful imagery has a joyful spirit of togetherness, which is infectious. There is often a friendly intimacy among the figures and creatures, making them entirely relatable. Together, the series of prints forms a network of relations where figures are clustered together in companionship in forms that are both unique and universal.

The predominant motif of the series Birkin Rosso is inspired by the actress Jane Birkin (1946-2023) and her role in the 1976 film Je t’aime moi non plus. Birkin’s character, the androgynous waitress Johnny, has featured in several of Saunders’ previous works and continues to be a source of inspiration for him.

The 13 interconnected prints inform and enrich each other. Individually, the prints are enigmatic, self-contained mysteries. By repeating and yet varying the same subject, Saunders emphasises how still and moving images are linked; their seriality enhances the cinematic impression when viewed one after the other. In a particular scene from the film, Birkin’s character is lying in a bathtub. Saunders explores the experience of heightened sensation in the shifting space between submerging under water and emerging again, as he depicts the figure in this liminal moment.

When Saunders began the series, he was eager to experiment and test the boundaries of the traditional techniques. The series evolved through variations of the same elements, resembling the work of sculptor Medardo Rosso (1858-1928), who is another key source of inspiration in Saunders’ work. Rosso’s sculptures are characterised by the same ambiguity of matter and space that can be found in Saunders’ prints. The series combines photogravure with woodcut, two techniques rarely seen together. In each print, the figure materialises and erodes at the same time, giving a sense of being underwater or in a state of flux.

While becoming an artist, Kjartansson spent several years working in advertising. The large-scale woodcut Creative Space refers to this period in his life and is an homage to the people suffering under the tyranny of creativity. For him, the sign saying “Come in but only with fresh ideas or fresh coffee” is representative of the special, at times somewhat forced sense of humour, enthusiasm and creativity that often characterise this kind of workplace. Kjartansson himself perceived his workplace as joyous yet profoundly melancholic; and it was in this perception of this environment that he found the joy of freedom in his own art practice. The woodcut is related to his works on privileged 21st century uneasiness like “Scandinavian Pain” and “Scenes from Western Culture”. The use of the medium is a nod to the topic of suffering in Edward Munch’s woodcuts.

The everyday life of Tal R’s family members is the focus of a new series of prints. Finding inspiration in his close surroundings and relationships, Tal R extracts the essence of these experiences through his own distinct artistic vocabulary. Several of the motifs also appear in more recent paintings by the artist. In the process of repetition, they eventually become not just part of the artist’s retained private memory, but more universal motifs.

Similar to the accumulating memories we all keep in images on our phones, the prints by Tal R are extracts of the artist’s enormous image bank and personal life.Transformations of the artists’ experiences are extracted onto paper in a rich combination of brightly coloured areas of woodgrain and painted brushstrokes of sugar lift aquatint.

Stanley Whitney’s series of eight black-and-white etchings are composed of a myriad of lines which meander across the surface of the plates, activating his abstract compositions. Dark grids encapsulate some of the prints, reminiscent of stained-glass windows with light emanating through the spaces between.

Whitney brings his life experience to each, and every work he creates, and his focus is always on ‘how to keep this image alive, how do I feed it, how do I keep it energised’.

As a painter, coming to a print workshop offers a different mode of working. Rather than the solitary working space of the studio, a print workshop offers the opportunity to work with master printers to create images in a more indirect and explorative manner. From making marks utilising different printmaking techniques, the copper plates are then etched and inked, and the resulting images are reversed in the printing process; all of which create new and sometimes unexpected possibilities for compositions. Working with print workshops is an important part of Whitney’s practice, allowing him to experiment with line, texture and composition, thereby expanding on possibilities of what his paintings might become in the future.