The Best Booths at Frieze London 2026

Emma Stibbon engages directly with climate change through a site-specific installation that brings the rocky cliffs of the British coastline to the Frieze tent. Her nearly 10-foot-tall, mixed-media work, Rock Fall, Bideford Bay (2025), is stabilized by a collection of rocks gathered from Green Cliff in North Devon that have been spread across the floor. Using pigments ground from sandstone, clay, shale, and limestone found on the beaches of Norfolk, Dorset, and Sussex, Stibbon paints the landscape with its own materials, documenting the rapid coastal erosion along UK coastlines. The work links melting polar ice and rising sea levels to local habitats, showing that environmental collapse isn’t only a distant threat. This climate urgency continues across her other drawings on view, like Seaford Head, Sussex (2026) and Fallen Fence Happisburgh (2026). Stibbon transforms these vanishing geological archives into artwork that brings our ongoing climate crisis much closer to home.

At the center of Cecilia Brunson’s booth is Jun Martínez’s five-panel painting On Disturbed Land andAbandoned Pastures (Roble Blanco del Caribe) I-III (2026). Dominated by a vivid blue background with touches of purple, white, green, and brown, it depicts the leaves and flowers of the roble blanco tree. For Martínez, this tree serves as both an aesthetic subject and a symbol of Caribbean ecological survival and renewal. By framing his native Puerto Rico and its fragile biodiversity against the pressures of modern ecosystems and its relationship to the US, the artist treats the natural landscape as a living, active archive of resilience rather than a passive backdrop. Now based in London, Martínez often explores memory, perception, and landscape in his work, which act as sites where histories of colonialism can be remembered, balancing local observation with painterly traditions.

Afro-Dominican artist Eilen Itzel do Espírito Santo makes her Frieze debut in the Artist-to-Artist section, selected by Firelei Báez. Her immersive installation, which feature red flooring and soft pink walls, explores the cycle of life and death, bridging physical creation with the spiritual labor of the womb. Do Espírito Santo incorporates tropical Caribbean elements into her works, pairing vibrant paintings with sculptures crafted from cement, soil, clay, and twigs. Her project is rooted in communal memory and channels ancestral spirits, as well as her relationship with Obàtálá, the Yoruba deity of creation. The pieces draw a poetic parallel between the artist and the snail, an animal associated with Obàtálá as a natural mark-maker who leaves traces of its movements. Through her art, do Espírito Santo honors different ways of being within the African diaspora, highlighting the resilience needed to survive despite colonialism.

Indian artist Jayeeta Chatterjee presents an exploration of gendered labor and agency through an intricate multimedia textile installation. At the heart of her display is The InfiniteWeft (2026), a monumental tapestry made from woodcut prints on recycled saris, stitched using Nakshi Kantha, a traditional Bengali quilting and embroidery technique now facing extinction. Hand-sewn, the work reflects the complex, non-linear roles women navigate across work, family, and domestic life. During a residency in Hampi, on the southwestern coast of India, Chatterjee photographed the women who work at the Bonkai weaving center, capturing their historic step towards financial independence. By printing her compositions onto used saris sourced directly from her subjects, the artist embeds these women’s daily realities in the fabric itself. Chatterjee adds recording marks of the women’s voices, translating their conversations into embroidered audio waveforms. The work’s compositions reflect the repetition of domestic chores and the tight-knit, alternative social sanctuary these weavers create together, making their invisible histories visible.

Anal Intelligence is certainly a provocative title for this installation by Shanghai-born artist Payne Zhu, whose practice looks at AI through the visceral lens of the human digestive system. Featuring two paintings and an eight-channel, real-time-rendered video, the presentation tackles themes of overconsumption and digital gluttony. Zhu’s installation combines familiar, hyper-stimulating viral clips, such as those seen in YouTube mukbang eating videos, fashion hauls, and pop music videos, with drone footage and game-engine software. By editing this chaotic media stream, the artist creates a case that modern artificial intelligence is driven not by intelligence but by a gluttonous process of destruction and data digestion. In today’s often troubling digital landscape, human actions and emotions are reduced to “turbid matter” extracted to feed an insatiable, endless network. Through this technological mismatch, Zhu transforms the booth into an eerie, consumerist loop where production becomes digestion becomes production again, interrogating how our digital behavior consumes itself.

New York–based artist Cynthia Talmadge’s immersive installation, Mitford/Soong, examines two prominent 20th century socialite dynasties, the British Mitfords and the Chinese Soongs. At first glance, her four paintings evoke an Art Deco aesthetic, but on closer inspection they reveal detailed, grainy pointillist brushwork. Rendered in a dark, vignetted palette, these works mimic vintage film stills, incorporating dramatic Dutch angles and hard shadows to create a cinematic horror narrative. Drawing on German Expressionism and early Chinese film, Talmadge links these two groups of women through historical trauma, gender, and soft power. Surrounded by custom wallpaper and eight trompe l’œil pinboard paintings that function as psychological self-portraits, the booth collapses domestic intimacy and historical cruelty into a theatrical study with complex, interwoven themes.

Two large-scale oil paintings by Denzil Forrester radiate liveliness and movement that immediately catch the eye. They present the nightclub as a space for joy, music, and spiritual fulfillment, while also reflecting underlying political friction and nostalgia. In Professor Version (2025), Forrester captures the dancehall’s vibrant energy, depicting four figures in motion across the floor, with two DJs commanding the decks in the background. By contrast, Yard (2025) illustrates a scene where uniformed police with pointed helmets disrupt a yard party, circling the DJ who spins the deck at the center of the room. Both works display jewel-shaped geometry, with strobe lights fracturing the details into diamond-like shapes that create a dreamlike ambiguity. Influenced by his current home in Cornwall and memories of Grenada and Rome, Forrester uses a color palette of purples, warm ambers, and icy blues. By remixing figures from his own archive, much like a reggae dub DJ remixes tracks, Forrester conveys gesture, action, and the lasting tension of city life.

Contemporary Bosnian artist Selma Selman showcases a melancholic collection of paintings and texts created on discarded metal objects, car parts, and a bathtub. As a member of the Roma community in Bosnia and Herzegovina, she repurposes these materials to challenge how modern society assigns value to physical objects, labor, and marginalized communities. When she was 26 years old, she founded an organization dedicated to the education and empowerment of young Roma girls. Through her expressive brushwork, she turns scrap metal into a canvas for personal and political expression, infusing industrial waste with emotional depth. Her artistic practice spans performance, painting, and social activism, elevating recycled materials into art. Featured in the new curated section “The Code Universe, led by Carol Yinghua Lu, Selman’s installation critiques capitalist and cultural hierarchies at the fair, highlighting the tension between economic survival and artistic value.

Between Steps, an immersive, room-size display by Spanish painter Juan Uslé, showcases a rhythmic, personal evolution in his work. This project invites viewers into an interactive environment that interweaves 12 paintings with 210 photographs, arranged above and below a two-tone wall in deep purple and white. The exhibit is designed to be experienced as a visual poem, with the sequenced imagery echoing the steady rhythm of a beating pulse, human breath, or a leisurely walk. Captured in locations such as London, New York, and his hometown of Saro in northern Spain, Uslé’s photographs document fleeting, everyday urban encounters with a touch of abstraction. Rather than translating images onto the painted canvas, he creates a dialogue between the two mediums to narrow the gap between reality and fiction. By combining these photographic impressions with his painterly style, Uslé encourages us to slow down and appreciate the subtle, hidden meanings within our ever-changing modern surroundings.

Presenting a captivating series of five paintings, Senegalese artist Arébénor Basséne combines Dogon (an Indigenous ethnic group in Mali) cosmology with human history. The works move between microscopic details and broad bird’s-eye views, as Basséne uses natural pigments, gum arabic, wood shavings, and sand to explore the cosmos. His paintings resemble celestial constellations and archaeological maps, inspired by historical cartographers such as the Greco-Roman Ptolemy and 12th century cartographer al-Idrisi, representing both real and fictional worlds. While one painting is reminiscent of an ancient map, using swirling compositions that highlight movement, like the eye of an approaching storm on a modern-day weather forecast, another has underwater scenes. Through this layering, Basséne looks to the spiritual and astronomical knowledge of the Sahel, a biogeographical region in Africa that references the star Sirius as an ancestral guide. After recently exhibiting with the Pinault Collection, his Frieze London debut of textured topographies blurs the boundaries between spirit and science, analyzing how ancient African calendars and star charts confront Western anthropological biases.