Saris, steel and goat hide: young galleries take charge in Frieze London's Focus
Goat hide stretched over an office chair, pictures printed on secondhand saris and steel beams rolling on wheels are among the sights greeting visitors at Frieze London this week.
They sit in Focus, the fair's section for solo stands by galleries less than 12 years old, according to The Art Newspaper. Frieze London and Frieze Masters run from 14 to 18 October 2026 at The Regent's Park in London, according to Frieze.
One of the most talked-about stands comes from Chemould CoLab in Mumbai, which presents Jayeeta Chatterjee. Chatterjee is based in Bengaluru but grew up in West Bengal. She combines printmaking with nakshi kantha, a quilting and embroidery technique from the region, printing figurative images of women at work onto used saris once owned by the people pictured.
Her 2026 work The Infinite Weft adds sound to cloth. Printed waveforms run across the textile, evoking her recorded conversations with her subjects. It is intimate work. It asks you to lean in close.
Across the section, King's Leap in New York presents three welded-steel works by Isaiah Davis centred on the Black body. The largest, Undertow (2026), is built from triangulated I-beams set on wheels. The words "Token gets spent" are cut into the steel alongside the names Don, Jeff and Sean.
The stand also includes Vesselhood (2026) and Gayer Secrets (2026). The latter is described as part chastity belt, part sacred heart, a combination of restraint and devotion rendered in hard metal.
London gallery Rose Easton presents Amanda Moström's installation Bikini Bottom. Moström starts with ordinary objects bought at market, including an umbrella, a tissue box, an office chair and a glitter ball. She then covers them in goat hide.
Nothing stays fixed for long. The arrangement changes each day, so repeat visitors see a different layout.
Xxijra Hii in London presents Yuli Serfaty's Who's a Good Girl? The installation includes two sculptures of a headless hybrid creature with multiple breasts, part dog. The forms are strange and tender at once, drawing on ideas of care, control and domestic animals.
Focus sits inside a much larger week. Frieze London is devoted to contemporary art, while its sister fair Frieze Masters stretches from antiquities to the twentieth century. The 2026 curated sections bring together 50 presentations from young global galleries and experimental voices, and the Focus Fund has already acquired three works by London artist Okiki Akinfe at this year's fair.
What makes this stand out is the use of everyday material. Saris with a previous owner, market-stall furniture, industrial steel. In a tent full of new art, these are things that have already lived a little.
