With help from Lubaina Himid, Glenn Ligon and more, Frieze’s Artist-to-Artist initiative is supporting new talent

When looking for emerging artists making extraordinary work, there is often no better place to start than with the opinions of other more established artists. Frieze discovered this last year through the success of its Artist-to-Artist initiative, which saw six renowned artistic figures, including Tracey Emin and Simone Leigh, nominate the next generation of talent for solo exhibitions at the fair.

Frieze has brought Artist-to-Artist back this year, inviting another six leading artists—Hurvin Anderson, Lubaina Himid, Rashid Johnson, Glenn Ligon, Zineb Sedira and Yinka Shonibare—to put forward their selections. “All of our nominators have a longstanding commitment to supporting other artists in their own practice, through teaching, curating or setting up spaces to support artists,” says Frieze London’s director, Eva Langret, noting that for many this will be their fair debut. Here, the nominating artists tell The Art Newspaper about their choices.

Lubaina Himid on Magda Stawarska

I’ve known Magda Stawarska for over two decades. Although our work contrasts aesthetically and differs in subject matter, we’re both interested in revealing the hidden aspects of the memories and histories we explore. I selected her for Frieze because I greatly admire her and her gallery, Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix.

Magda is a person who layers things, and I find how she does this endlessly fascinating as it’s different from my practice. Artistically, I’m interested in the layers of history you can peel back, but that’s not how I paint. One of Magda’s pieces in Frieze, for example, is a 20m by 20m print made with 12 layers of patterns. Similarly, when she makes sound works, there could be a field, a voice, and an archive recording composed one on top of another.

Picking her for this project is also an opportunity to commemorate the many things I’ve learned from working with her in various ways. She was one of the first people to help me make prints. Then, in 2017, I was asked to restage my artwork Naming The Money, which, at the time, had a soundtrack that I made in 2004 in a shoddy way. She remade and recomposed the sound so it matched the quality of the artwork. I’ve also participated in some of her sound pieces. I think more people should know about her.

Rashid Johnson on Rob Davis

Rob Davis is from a fairly under-resourced background and his work explores images and signifiers from this. I first met the New York-based artist around 25 years ago when we were both in Chicago. He was in a curatorial collective with another painter, Michael Langlois, working on an exhibition that included me and a few others. I fell in love with Robert and Michael’s practice because it was out of step with the times. Their representational paintings spoke this candid language around pictures, exploring themes and concepts that were not de rigueur at the time. I became very intrigued by the sophistication of their approach.

Rob eventually began making work on his own, which carried on the sensibility of what he had been doing in the collaboration, but with more of a relation to nostalgia and the exploration of his own experiences. I’ve watched his practice mature and become more complicated, and I think he’s making some of the most interesting and honest pictures of any artist I know today. I’m in deep gratitude for the seat I’ve had in watching his work unfold and evolve.

Hurvin Anderson on Peter Uka

I came across Peter Uka’s paintings through a combination of general research and a friend’s recommendation. I have yet to meet Peter [in person], but we’ve had a few conversations and I’m particularly interested in his use of colour, especially its depth and boldness.

His work centres around the Black figure, which feels more important to me now than ever. While it’s fantastic that there have been many prominent exhibitions that have focused on the Black experience recently, I don’t think the momentum should change in that respect. So, if I get the chance to celebrate the work of a Black artist I admire, I take it.

There aren’t that many parallels between Peter’s work and mine, apart from maybe our ideas around memory and the fact that we are both trying to recapture the essence of something from the past. That said, like me and many others, Peter has painted the barbershop. It’s a culturally significant space, so that’s no surprise. But it’s always interesting to see another artist’s interpretation of it.

I hope that Peter’s display at Frieze will introduce many other people to his work and that visitors will see the skill he has with his palette and the refreshing perception in his storytelling and composition.

Yinka Shonibare on Nengi Omuku

I met the Nigerian artist Nengi Omuku just over ten years ago when she was a student at Slade School of Fine Art, and I’ve been watching her progress ever since. Instead of working on canvas, she paints on Sanyan cloth, a traditional Yoruba fabric, where she creates beautiful images that combine aspects of Nigerian and Western heritage.

Growing up, Nengi worked with her mother, a florist and horticulturist, during school holidays, and she has brought this experience into her work in a multifaceted way. In her paintings, you can see nature, landscapes and figuration, referencing her upbringing, as well as the climate. Her figures are also somewhat anonymous looking because she doesn’t want them to have any pronounced racial features, allowing them to be seen more as universal people.

Nengi’s pieces are sometimes displayed unconventionally, too, with some hung away from the wall so viewers can walk around them. This gives people the opportunity to see the skill that goes into making these fabrics, breaking the boundaries between art and craft while also championing women’s work. In 2022, she went on an artists’ residency in Senegal, where she worked with women who weave such fabrics.

It’s important for people to see alternative perspectives, different stories, and different people. And as someone with an African British background, she has a voice that needs to be heard.

Glenn Ligon on Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom

Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom’s work is multifaceted, using performance, photography, video and sound. I chose him because platforms like Frieze allow artists to get their work out to a wider audience. I think it’s hard to find institutional spaces to accommodate the variety of his practice, which Frieze will allow him to do.

We often imagine that artists are fully formed, and I like that his work is about the desire to learn and the process of learning in public, as well as the desire to collaborate. I’m also impressed with his ability to think through what it means to make in and with the public. The most important aspect of this is the risk. To learn in public is to fail in public, too, and I think that’s a generosity his practice offers—letting the artistic process be visible.

Over the years, his ambitions have become more complex. He’s diving into his works in many different forms and considering their implications. He is thinking deeply about how he wants to engage audiences and who he is collaborating with. We’re not simply watching him learn, we’re learning too because we get insight into how artists think and how they make work. That is what makes him stand out to me.

Zineb Sedira on Massinissa Selmani

I chose Massinissa Selmani because he’s an artist I respect. Like me, he is from Algeria, and his work deals with many aspects of the country’s politics and culture, which I can connect to.

There is only a small community of artists coming out of Algeria, so we tend to know each other, either physically or through each other’s art. His work took me aback because it was very witty and had a sense of humour specific to the country. I also did a big project on humour from the 1990s, and I remember having a very long conversation with him about the caricature, jokes and humour used to fight against what we call the “black decade” in Algeria. Massinissa and I are similar in that we are both interested in researching and pulling out histories from Algeria that could disappear if nobody mentions them.

In my decision, I also considered the space where the works would be shown. I see Frieze more as booths than exhibition spaces, and I felt he could do something interesting with that. He uses animations, drawings and installations. He shows drawings on the walls framed in a very classical manner but also goes beyond that by displaying objects and animations on small screens and tables. I wanted to choose an artist who wouldn’t just slap things on the walls like many galleries do.