Frieze London 2022
GALERIA VERA CORTÊS
Booth G20
14 – 16 October

Daniel Blaufuks
Gabriela Albergaria
João Louro
John Wood and Paul Harrison
José Pedro Croft
Susanne S. D. Themlitz

Since spring 2018, Daniel Blaufuks has been creating each day a meticulous composition of instant photographs and text on an A4 sheet of paper, before stamping a number on the front and writing the date on the back. Some days, he adds documents or objects. Entitled The Days Are Numbered, this vast project is like an imprecise diary recording events from the author’s life, reflections on the world, literature and photography. Behind the melancholy punctuated by bouts of joy, anger, wonder and indignation, Daniel Blaufuks nurtures hope: by numbering each day, he counts the days that have passed and creates a kind of inverted countdown to his life.

The Days Are Numbered has Daniel Blaufuks’ obsessions as recurring visual motifs – photographs of two windows, flowers in his garden or rocks on the beach – and his words appear in the languages he uses in his life – Portuguese, German, English, French. The Days Are Numbered is like a lifeline for Daniel Blaufuks. By recording both the events and what separates them, The Days Are Numbered is the artist’s counterpart to Attempting Exhaustion, his other large-scale project for which, since 2009, he has photographed his two windows, reiterating in photography Georges Perec’s literary project in the text An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1975), from which the title of the series is taken: “My purpose (…) has been to describe the rest: what one generally does not note, what is not noticed, what is not important: what happens when nothing happens, except time, people, cars and clouds.” Because as Daniel Blaufuks says: we always photograph when something happens, never when nothing happens. What still happens then – that is the subject of Attempting Exhaustion. 

Daniel Blaufuks has been working on the relationship between public and private memory, one of the constant interrogations in his work as a visual artist. He has exhibited widely in museums, private galleries, and festivals and works mainly in photography and video, presenting his work through books, installations, and films.

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Gabriela Albergaria views gardens as elaborated constructs, representational systems and descriptive mechanisms that epitomize a set of fictional beliefs that are employed to represent the natural world.

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João Louro’s shapeshifting work – comprising paintings, sculptures, installations, objects, books – is infused with ideas and references sourced from art histories, film histories, literary histories, philosophical histories, linguistic histories, political histories, and scientific histories. Louro approaches art as a platform through which to explore that which exists beyond the realm of art. In this way, he participates in a long tradition of artists who have sought to reinvent the language of visual art by mining other cultural disciplines. For example, Louro’s longstanding fascination with cinema has provided him with a means of renegotiating the codes of painting, in an acknowledgement that as apparatuses of seeing, visualization, representation, abstraction, reproduction and perception, painting and cinema (as with photography) have been intersecting for well over a century.

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John Wood (b.1969, Hong Kong) and Paul Harrison (b.1966, Wolverhampton) make things that move and things that don’t, things that are flat and things that are not, things that are mildly amusing and things that are definitely not. They make works that form a kind of reference manual for how to do, make, build, or draw things that you probably never want to do, make, build, or draw. They do it for you. Even though you don’t need them to. This attempt to compile an encyclopaedia of the everyday, started in 1993 after they met at art college. John Wood and Paul Harrison are also part of Frieze Sculpture with the work “10 Signs for a Park” (2022).
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Through the accumulation of layers and plans, José Pedro Croft opens a set of possibilities of the surrounding, challenging the vision and perception of the space as well as our way to interact with and within it.

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Through the surrealizing narrative imagery of the figures inhabitating her pieces, Susanne S.D. Themlitz lets us dive into a world full of oneirism, fantasy, which is strange yet familiar.

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Frieze Sculpture 2022
Regent’s Park
13 September – 13 November 2022

John Wood and Paul Harrison

10 SIGNS FOR A PARK

The kind of signs you see in a park, but not the signs you see in a park.

They don’t point you anywhere, tell you anything or ask anything of you.

They point at themselves, tell you things you already know and only ask you to have a little think.

The kind of think you’d have in a park.

John Wood and Paul Harrison

Interactive Map + Audioguide

Photos: Luke Andrew Walker.
Courtesy by the artists and Galeria Vera Cortês.

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Current exhibition at the gallery:

Noite
André Romão

15 September – 29 October 2022
Online Viewing Room