For Frieze London 2024, Project Native Informant will present new and historical work by Anna Jung Seo, Antonia Kuo, Dozie Kanu, Hal Fischer, Juliana Huxtable, Morag Keil and Sean Steadman.

Dappled brushwork, delicate hues, and cloisonne-like textures dance across the surfaces of London based painter Anna Jung Seo's (b. 1964) portraits, still lives and landscapes. The London-based Korean painter creates transportive images sourced from her real life interactions on the city’s streets. A contemporary flâneur, Seo is an acute observer of everyday life. Seo will have her first solo exhibition in New York at Rachel Uffner Gallery in November, followed by our second solo exhibition in London in 2025. For Frieze London, we will be showing a curated group of new paintings made especially for the fair.

New York based Antonia Kuo (b. 1987)'s practice pushes the photographic medium to its logical limits. Kuo creates her own intensive processes by which images and materials can be alchemically transformed. In her unique “photochemical paintings” she utilizes light-sensitive paper and photochemistry to capture light, time and mark making, collapsing her drawing and painting practice with photographic materiality. We are showing examples of a new body of work which she presented in her two person show with the Martin Wong Estate at the Henry Museum, Seattle.

Appropriating found objects and refashioning them to new aesthetics, Dozie Kanu (b. 1993) creates sculptures and photography that are inherently disobedient and stubbornly slippery. They resist classification and exist instead as communicative or performative objects. Kanu’s ongoing investigation into the limits of form, functionality, materiality and usefulness are often filtered through a personal lens drawn from the artist’s lived experiences. For Frieze London, we will present one of Kanu's iconic headboards, an ongoing series of works that all utilise discarded headboards as their starting point. Marrying both sculptural elements and photography, Headboard (a tribe sleep), 2022 confronts the parameters of utility and ornament and provokes questions around material culture, objecthood and our seemingly complicit understanding of contemporary sculpture: What is use? What is an object? What is value? What is function? What is form? Kanu's work has been the subject of major institutional solo exhibitions at The Studio Museum, Harlem (2019) and Neuer Essener Kunstverein (2022). His work was recently included in Summer is Over, the celebrated group exhibition at Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2024).

Through an intense period of experimentation, San Francisco based photographer Hal Fischer (b. 1950) seized the cultural, political and visual style of a generation of San Francisco gay men between the legalisation of homosexuality in 1975 and the eruption of the AIDS pandemic in the early 1980s. A pioneer in the relationship between photography and language, Fischer’s seminal work Gay Semiotics applies the language of structuralism and linguistics, marrying image and text to create a body of work laced with humour and an intentional banality. Fischer has had solo exhibitions at Krannert Art Museum, Illinois, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Fotomuseum Wintherur, and in major museum collections in the USA including MoMA NY, SF MoMA, the Getty and LACMA. We will be showing a selection of single images of Gay Semiotics as well as the full portfolios of Gay Semiotics, Boy-Friends and 18th and Castro Street in the booth.

Artist, writer, musician and performer Juliana Huxtable (b. 1987) excels in probing dormant and marginalised histories, narratives and technologies to challenge discourses around contemporary perceptions of identity, futurity and politics. Through painting, photography, text and video, she has defined a singular aesthetics of language that often plays into a digital, Tumblr-ised visual identity, a kind of collaged rap and visual rapture. Huxtable’s practice offers a key critical voice on identity, as well as, specifically, her own identity as a black trans woman. Her works and performances have been presented internationally in solo and group exhibitions, including Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Hayward Gallery, London, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Brooklyn Museum, New York, Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston, MOMA PS1, New York and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her work can be found in the collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York and Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art, Stockholm. In 2017, Huxtable published Mucus in My Pineal Gland, a celebrated volume of poems, performance scripts and essays. Huxtable will present her third solo exhibition at Project Native Informant to coincide with Frieze London 2024. We will be showing new paintings as well as a historical self portrait photograph.

Morag Keil (b. 1985) ’s practice is self-referring, self-erasing, self-consuming, regurgitating. London based Scottish artist’s installations have the bald efficiency of something bargain-bucket but workable. This amateurish construction — of clunky papier-mâché houses downtrodden with office heels, of a low-fi camera’s glitchy rove over motorbikes — actualises her reflection of contemporaneity’s squashing and conditioning of subjectivity, as well as the interlocking of production and pleasure. Beneath the watermark of professionalism and propriety lies a cesspit of personal contradictions and anxiety-trimmed mediations. Through a wide variety of mediums including painting, photography, sculpture, installation and video, as well as collaborative projects with artists such as Georgie Nettell, Keil’s work often relieve the aestheticising cliché of post-financial crash and millennial precarity. In her gallery exhibition, Here We Go Again, the artist simulated in three dimensions an out of date video game mocking home automation: doors with peepholes open up to doors, walls painted in soft pink and green screen, and televisions playing a lush forest CGI animation from a BBC One ident, which then cut to a blue circle that wobbled as a voice-over asked in the half-droning tones of Amazon’s virtual assistant, Alexa. Behind Keil’s work is the demand to know why we live like this and the impulse to tear it all down; but, until that happens, we wander. Her celebrated solo institutional exhibition, Moarg Keil, presented a survey of a decade’s work at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, London in 2019. In 2022, Keil presented her third solo exhibition at Project Native Informant, Free Like Only Animals Can Be.

Sean Steadman (b.1989) is first and foremost a painter. He is invested in the medium’s specificities and its ability to draw out new visual forms. There are two major influences at play in Steadman’s practice: a deep understanding and respect for the history of art and an expanded view of nature, inclusive of both the biological world, and broader abstract concepts such as mathematics, culture and technology, that underpin existence. Steadman makes works that slow the viewer down and take time to unravel. His works are diametrically opposed to the culture of “reading” images and photographs so prevalent in the current image economy. His paintings take time to fully experience; they marshal space, even if their structures are utterly mercurial. They are dialectics of schisms, sediments, breakages, the pulverulent and protuberant of colour and composition. The forms that emerge warp and morph into one another, as if enmeshed in rhythmic (dis)symphony, ad infinitum. The resultant paintings act as portals into multiple dimensions and systems. They function as blackholes, teetering on the limit of cosmic space, born out of chaos and order. For Frieze London, we will show a selection of new mezzotints and paintings that were included in Steadman's first solo institutional show at Devonshire Collective, Eastbourne that opened earlier this year.