Heat Pockets: What Frieze London's Opening Day Tells Us About the Market

Frieze London and Frieze Masters opened to invited guests in Regent’s Park yesterday, and the first sales reports are already in. The headline figure belongs to a painting that is more than four hundred years old. The more useful story is about what happened lower down the price ladder, and why an experienced collector walked the aisles muttering that “it’s hard to buy right now.”

A Brueghel steals the show

Late on Wednesday, Hauser & Wirth confirmed the sale of Jan Brueghel the Elder’s Still Life of Flowers in a Stoneware Vase, painted around 1607–08, for “in the region of” £5 million at Frieze Masters. It is classic Brueghel: a bouquet of blooms that could never have flowered at the same time, gathered into one impossible moment.

The painting has a long and complicated history. It once belonged to Baron Alphonse von Rothschild, and Artsy reports that it was seized by the Nazis and later restituted. It last appeared on the market in 2016, when it sold at Sotheby’s in London for £3.8 million. A rise of around £1.2 million over a decade is respectable rather than spectacular, but in a market that has spent two years contracting, an Old Master leading the opening day of a contemporary art week is a quiet reminder of where some wealth feels safest.

Hauser & Wirth reported more than twenty sales across its two booths, totalling over $11 million, including an Avery Singer at $800,000. Elsewhere, David Zwirner sold a Michaël Borremans for $1.5 million and Thaddaeus Ropac placed an Antony Gormley sculpture at around £500,000. The blue-chip galleries almost always sell at Frieze.

Where the heat was

The phrase doing the rounds was “heat pockets,” coined by the art adviser Nico Epstein in conversation with Artnet News. It describes a market in which excitement is no longer spread across the fair but concentrated on a small number of booths, while others wait for footfall that never quite arrives.

London dealer Pilar Corrias returned to Frieze after two years away and sold out her stand, which featured sprawling, dreamlike landscapes by the British painters Sholto Blissett and Georg Wilson alongside work by Rachel Rose. Modern Art’s solo presentation of the British abstract painter Francesca Mollett was so keenly anticipated that, according to one adviser, even access to the price list was tightly controlled. Her works were priced between £15,000 and £100,000, with several buyers competing for each.

That is the frustration behind the collector’s sigh. For the most sought-after artists, the question is not whether you can afford the work but whether the gallery will sell it to you. Dealers want work to go to collections that will keep it and lend it. For new collectors, a waiting list is often a test of relationship as much as money.

London looks outward

The most interesting thread in this year’s reports is geographic. Frieze says VIP bookings rose by 24 per cent from the Middle East and North Africa, 22 per cent from South Asia and 36 per cent from Brazil, compared with last year. With Art Basel Paris drawing much of the American money, one adviser summed it up neatly: Paris is for Americans, and “London is more for the rest of the world.”

The fair floor reflected this. São Paulo’s Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, back after several years away, sold all five paintings by the emerging artist Márcia Falcão for between $30,000 and $60,000 each. Mumbai’s Project 88, which has shown at Frieze since 2009, sold photographs by Munem Wasif, whose work is currently on display at Tate Modern. New Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery placed two Sunil Gupta photographs with an institution, timed nicely with his exhibition at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, which we covered last month.

At Masters, Casablanca’s Loft Art Gallery made its Frieze debut with paintings by Mohamed Melehi, the pioneer of Moroccan modernism, while Jeddah’s ATHR showed two founding figures of Saudi modern art. Frieze launches in Abu Dhabi next month, and these stands felt like an overture.

What this means for the rest of us

Frieze reports can read like lists of numbers with too many noughts, but the opening day says three useful things about the wider market.

First, demand is clustering around artists with institutional momentum. Many of the strongest sales were for artists with current or recent shows at Tate Modern, the Hayward or Kettle’s Yard. Following what museums are doing is still one of the best guides to whose work is about to become harder to find.

Second, the real movement happened in the £15,000 to £100,000 bracket, not the millions. Emerging and mid-career artists are where the energy is.

Third, if the heat pockets are crowded, the rest of the fair, and the rest of the country, is not. Things were noticeably quieter at Frieze Masters by mid-afternoon, and the dealers waiting for footfall at the back of the tent are often showing work just as thoughtful as the sold-out stands. The same is true of the independent galleries in our directory, where you can usually talk to the person who chose the work, and nobody is hiding the price list.

Frieze London and Frieze Masters run in Regent’s Park until Sunday 18 October.