Frieze Viewing Room

Preview: 7-8 October 2020

Ben Brown Fine Arts presents a Frieze Masters viewing room dedicated to the legacy of major European artists who developed a radical approach to making art, stretching traditional notions of painting and representation to its physical and conceptual limits. We explore the ground-breaking practices and staggering imagery of artists Lucio Fontana and Alighiero Boetti in Italy, Frank Auerbach and Tony Bevan in the UK, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter in Germany, and Miquel Barceló in Spain. The works encompass a variety of media, including oil, embroidery, bronze, charcoal and glazed terracotta, illuminating each artist at his apex.

Our presentation traces the developments of Modern European Art and demonstrates the ways in which modern artists to work across a wide range of media, exploring ideas of light, space, movement, structure, technology, abstraction, colour and art’s experiential possibilities throughout 20th Century Western Art. The works in our presentation span from the 1950s-early 2000s, highlighting major currents that ran through each era and spread internationally, ultimately influencing myriad artists who followed. Despite their revolutionary aesthetic leaps, the great artists of the early twentieth century were nourished by traditional models and we will present works from different periods side by side, which will offer radical juxtapositions that cut across time to reveal the overwhelming coherence of the European painting tradition.