Frieze Sculpture returns to the English Gardens of Regent’s Park as a free, open-air exhibition curated for the third year by Fatoş Üstek. The 2025 edition (the 13th) carries the theme “In the Shadows,” inviting 14 international artists to think with light, darkness and what’s hidden — historically, socially and materially — across London’s most strollable lawns (opens 17 September , runs to 2 November ).
The lineup meshes sculptural heavyweights with socially engaged practices. Assemble , the London collective that won the 2015 Turner Prize for their community-driven Granby Four Streets project, extend their track record of treating public space as a site of repair and participation. Elmgreen & Dragset , Berlin-based since the 1990s, are known for queering and re-staging institutional display (think Prada Marfa ); their public projects sharpen Frieze Sculpture’s wit and political bite. Erwin Wurm , famed for the participatory “One Minute Sculptures,” collapses the line between viewer and artwork — exactly the kind of performative encounter a park setting encourages. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish/Kootenai) contributes an Indigenous perspective that reframes land, memory and sovereignty within a British parkland context. David Altmejd ’s metamorphic figures push at the edges of what the body can be in sculpture. Meanwhile, artists such as Reena Saini Kallat (whose sound-based works probe borders and listening), Lucía Pizzani (ecology, care and material transformation), Grace Schwindt and Andy Holden broaden the thematic field from geopolitics to personal mythologies.
Across the programme, Üstek’s “shadow” is treated not as absence but generative space — linking ecological loss, erased histories and the politics of visibility. Expect tours, performances and activations alongside the works, and a tie-in with London Sculpture Week (20–28 Sep) . For anyone tracking how public art can still feel urgent — and free — this is a must.
A compact, beautifully pitched group show (closing 20 September ) brings together Koak (US), Ding Shilun (China) and Cece Philips (UK) to test how domestic interiors double as psychological landscapes. Curated at Hauser & Wirth’s Savile Row space, the exhibition leans into painterly world-building: bodies sink into sofas and walls; light behaves like a feeling; rooms confess.
Koak (San Francisco; MFA in Comics, CCA, 2016) is known for lyrical, line-driven figuration — rubbery, elastic bodies whose agency and vulnerability are front and centre. Her work draws on comics and animation to rewire how the feminine appears in painting, making her a bellwether for post-figurative practice that refuses passivity. Ding Shilun (b. 1998, Guangzhou; MA Painting, RCA 2022) fuses mythic imagery with the banalities of day-to-day life, populating large canvases with avatars and symbols that read like personal folklore. Recent museum presentations (including ICA Miami) underscore his rapid emergence and deft control of scale and narrative. Cece Philips (b. 1996, London) builds film-noir atmospheres — luminous light, deep shadow — to stage spectatorship, desire and solitude; her training in history and recent RCA studies add archival rigor to the mood.
Why it matters: “Interior Motives” uses the home to talk identity, memory and belonging — not as cosy tropes but as unstable architectures we inhabit. A recent review flagged how the trio blurs boundaries between figures and rooms, letting interiors behave like states of mind. As large museums pivot back to figurative painting, this show is a sharp snapshot of how a younger generation complicates that turn: Koak reframes agency via comics line, Ding threads global art history into everyday absurdity, and Philips choreographs looking itself. Catch it before it closes.
Opening 20 September , the Royal Academy stages a landmark survey of Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955, Birmingham, Alabama), one of the most influential painters of the last half-century. Expect 70+ works spanning four decades — from foundational canvases to a new series engaging under-acknowledged African histories — alongside projects like Rythm Mastr , Marshall’s ongoing comic-based epic. The sweep is historical and contemporary at once: a re-centering of Black life within the grand traditions of Western painting.
Marshall’s biography is inseparable from his project. Educated at Otis in Los Angeles, shaped by civil-rights era geographies from Alabama to Watts, and long based in Chicago, he’s a MacArthur Fellow whose 2016–17 retrospective Mastry cemented his status. His signature, richly worked acrylics place Black protagonists in barbershops, housing projects, parks and salons — genres historically denying them presence — and make a case for painting’s civic, ethical reach.
Why it matters now: Few living artists have so comprehensively rewritten who gets to appear in history painting. Marshall’s influence flows across generations and media; his recent public commissions (from Chicago murals to stained-glass windows for Washington National Cathedral) show the work’s architectural scale and public address. The RA’s survey arrives as UK institutions widen the canon, and it meets the moment with intellectual weight and visual seduction. If you’ve followed the debates on representation, archives and the museum — or simply love virtuoso painting — this is an autumn essential. (On view 20 Sep 2025 – 18 Jan 2026 at Burlington House, Piccadilly.)
