When Frieze London invited Pablo José Ramírez to curate a themed section for its 2024 edition, he knew right away that he wanted to feature clay. He already had a list in his headbetfil, he said, of ceramic artists whose work he hoped to show together.
Some of them he knew through his current position as a curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, others from his previous job as curator of Indigenous and First Nations art at Tate Modern in London. Some were Indigenous, and some were not.
But all of the artists were thinking alike, in a way: they were reaching back into the past, and drawing upon pre-colonial traditions once commonly used to make everyday bowls, tools and totems, to create ceramics that addressed current topics of concern for many contemporary artists, like migration, human displacement and personal identity.
“It’s contemporary art, but at the same time it’s ancestral art, but at the same time it’s material culture,” said Ramírez during a recent video interview.
“Smoke,” as the section is now titled, will feature 11 artists, represented by eight galleries. The galleries will be lined up together within the fair, but separated by transparent fabrics so that they appear to connect into a single environment — a departure from the usual rows of walled-off dealers that visitors more often encounter at fairs like Frieze, Art Basel and the Armory Show.
“It will be a little more like an art exhibition and a little less like a booth situation with all these little white cubicles,” said Ramírez.
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