If you are wondering why you haven’t heard from us in the past…eh, 3 months it’s because artyculate has been smitten by the lively and engaging LadyOtt.com. Started by my friend Kate it demonstrates her enviable ability to turn mundane objects into meaningful, beautiful things. An art historian by training she manages to weave art, craft and design together while inspiring her readers’ own creative impulses as well as showcasing the work of great artists and designers. Relaxed but stimulating her website is a great quick reference, full of brilliant ideas! Check it out by clicking here.

Courtesy Camden Arts Centre

When my friend Nathalie wrote an incredibly positive review of the Camden Arts Centre months ago, I simply couldn’t believe it. ‘I was absolutely charmed’, she wrote ‘by the quietly welcoming atmosphere’. According to her it was not only incredibly nice, it was crowd-free and, well, free! Sounds too good to be true I always thought. So I finally had to go see for myself.

It was very early on into my visit that I was completely won over. The beauty of the building outside is only matched by how enjoyable the place is inside. It is not an incredibly large gallery yet they have used their space in the best way. Downstairs is a large reception area and an incredibly pleasant coffee shop overlooking a fabulous garden; there’s also a bookshop, toilet facilities, lockers. The place seems to say ‘this gallery was built for your enjoyment’ and even though I am always suspicious of any kind of shop in a gallery, here I actually thought the only reason these facilities existed was to make my stay better.

And then there were the wonderful galleries upstairs. Hanne Darboven and Raphael Hefti were the represented artists.

My favourite piece in the Darboven exhibition was Perforated Paper from 1966 which in fact consisted of three rectangular pieces of paper, coloured in white, pink and yellow respectively which have been perforated.

The paper looked like Braille writing and when you went closer it became obvious that the pieces of paper were not as precisely cut as it appeared from a distance. For me that made the work stronger. Was Daboven urging us to get closer and read  rather than merely look at the paper?

The Raphael Hefti exhibition entitled Launching Rockets Never Gets Old was a further testament that you don’t need explanatory leaflets in galleries to be able to produce meanings.

The exhibition was made up of two works – Replaying the mistake of a broken hammer from 2011 and Subtraction as Addition from the same year. The latter consisted of seven double-glazed glass units, or what I would have described as coloured mirrors – in lilac and pink, which made the glass look even more fragile. The former were three long corroded metal tubes. The result was quite powerful. I first started cringing at the thought that the tubes could smash the glass but then I wondered. The glass actually had seven layers and was quite tough despite its fragile appearance whereas the tough tubes had corroded. Moreover they were took long and possibly too heavy for any one person to be able to lift them up and actually smash the glass.

So while I was busy imagining different scenarios I realised something. I don’t know if ‘launching rockets never gets old’ but an artist playing tricks on us unassuming spectators continues to have an appeal not least for us, the unassuming spectators!

On opening times and how to get there click here

Today I am off to the Leighton House Museum in Kensington which has recently undergone extensive refurbishment. Its former owner – English painter and sculptor Sir Frederick Leighton will always have a special place in my heart…due to saving me from a fail in my Renaissance art class!

As an art history student I had naively chosen a topic (from a list of suggested topics) which I thought sounded intriguing: Representations of Old Masters as Children in 19-century academic painting. Yes, it was that specific and the downside was I couldn’t think of a single example. After spending hours at the National Gallery looking for representations of Michelangelo, Leonardo or Raphael I was ready to give up and change topic. And then as I was about to exit the gallery, there it was gracing the exit: Cimabue’s celebrated Madonna by Leighton. In the centre of the painting Cimabue is holding a young Giotto by the hand.

Ever since then I had wanted to pay my respects to the man who saved me. When I finally did I was richly rewarded.

Nothing, not even the photos I’d seen, could have prepared me for the stunning and opulent interior I was about to find myself in. The last thing you would expect in Kensington is a lavishly decorated ‘Arab Hall’ which, apart from everything else, features a fountain! The room reminded me of the best mosques I have seen and indeed the majority of the tiles and furnishings come from Syria and Egypt. And then when you bring yourself to gaze up, unwilling to put an end to this visual feast, you see the feature that fully completes the room: an Egyptian latticework window.

The window which overlooks the Arab Hall is also part of the Silk room. The two rooms are in an incredibly powerful dialogue and the visitor is privy to this exchange. Who would have thought that a fifteenth-century terracotta relief representing Madonna and the Child could look so appropriately placed across an Egyptian window overlooking an oriental room?

Even more unexpected is the effect that the interior has on the visitor. Always anticipating visual overload, I was half expecting that after a while the elaborate gilded surfaces and  vibrant colours would take their toll on my eyesight. On the contrary, the richness of the rooms was somehow combined with a sense of peacefulness and relaxation and if I could I would have spent days on end there.

The only thing I regretted was not going there earlier. Don’t repeat my mistake!

Leighton House Museum

Going to a gallery over the weekend is a tradition if you live in London. Yet precisely for this reason it can easily become an unenjoyable tale of how you went to a gallery with the best of intentions, only to find the space was packed full of people, most of them as exasperated as you that they can’t actually see the works. Then, when the crowd suddenly seemed to begin to disappear, you found that you couldn’t care less about the art and headed for the coffee shop for a great selection of overpriced beverages.

To avoid this all too familiar scenario this weekend I chose 3 galleries which had great-sounding exhibitions yet I had the suspicion they would be relatively crowd-free. It turned out not only did I escape the crowds, I also found art heaven.

First on my itinerary was Hauser & Wirth just off Piccadilly Circus. They might be a powerful international gallery (with offices in Zurich, London and New York) yet their space could not feel friendlier and more accessible. When I went in a woman was taking photographs of the displayed works and I thought I’do the same incredulous that photography was OK. After all I am mainly used to non-commercial galleries where rarely anything is OK so to be allowed that freedom felt great.

The exhibition was The Last Paintings created between 1985 and 1992 by American Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell. Mitchell herself says her paintings ‘have to do with feelings’ yet they ‘aren’t about the person who makes them’. If that sounds puzzling now, once you are looking at her paintings it makes perfect sense.

If the works are about feelings then the drips of paint on her canvases where one colour starts permeating others suggests how non-compartmentalised feelings can be: one feeling, generated in one area of one’s life permeates another area, another feeling. These canvases then cease to be abstract and become a minutely defined emotional landscape – not of Mitchell necessarily and that’s their strength and beauty. The artist has included enough detail and information to help you start your reading yet by ‘leaving the picture’ she allows the viewer to make it their own, to project whatever reading they are capable of producing.

Joan Mitchell, Hauser and Wirth

Once I started my ‘reading’ there was no stopping me and suddenly the simple interior of the gallery became replete with meaning. A beautiful wooden clock had stopped on 8 o’clock (it was the afternoon) and I took that to be a reference to the eight canvases in the gallery. The windows started looking like the eye-shaped lightbulb in Guernica. At this point I start wondering if I shouldn’t begin to frequent places other than galleries.

Then I reach the second floor of the gallery where another three canvases are displayed and this is where I fell in love with Mitchell. The abstract paintings which are round instead of the usual rectangle made me think of a long history of such images – medallions, religious paintings representing Madonna and the Child…I could have thought of more examples had I not been so taken in by the sheer beauty of her works. Although these were not created for the gallery, the most incredible thing was that they looked site-specific in the best sense – on the ceiling was a lovely ceiling rose feature whose round shape echoed the paintings’ shape and created a powerful dialogue.

Once I had thought of European art history the canvases downstairs started looking different – four of the five paintings downstairs were in fact composed of two separate canvases which were joined together, diptychs in other words. Having a link with the art of the past, however slim it might be, somehow always makes contemporary art better for me.

Whether or not the meanings I found were intended doesn’t even matter as this was one of the best viewing experiences I have ever had. It made me think what makes an exhibition/gallery space great and Hauser & Wirth presented me with the answer. It’s providing the visitor with enough information to help them begin to explore, enjoy and define the works for themselves. I have rediscovered the pleasure of going to commercial galleries where you can get as close to the paintings as you like and enjoy them without the gallery patrol stopping you.

© 2011 Sanja Iveković

Glamour and domestic violence are worlds apart. That, at least, is what I thought before seeing the exhibition Sweet Violence by artist Sanja Iveković on show at the MoMA until March 26.

The exhibition starts with a bang. Or rather with a very tall sculpture of the

– Luxemburg’s national symbol, with one detail you can’t overlook: the represented woman is heavily pregnant. What’s so radical about that? If you think about famous sculptures of females, can you think of a single one which is pregnant? Let me know if you do because after racking my brains out for half an hour – I couldn’t. The work’s perceived ‘sacrilegious’ nature might have also had something to do with the words ‘WHORE, BITCH, MADONNA, VIRGIN’ inscribed on its base: an always useful reminder of the polar opposite perceptions of women still in existence today.

While this work was fascinating, some of the issues it raised seemed at least as far removed from daily life as the pedestal on which Lady Rosa was standing.

And then came a work that shook my casual afternoon visit: Women’s House (Sunglasses), 2002-2009. A series of 12 black-and-white posters on which female models are advertising sunglasses (by D&G, Gucci, Prada, Armani, Calvin Klein) have been appropriated by the artist for a rather different purpose. Namely, to tell the stories of 12 women in shelters.

Each story is different as is the age and nationality yet violence, betrayal and humiliation are present in all of them. Mihaela was beaten and made to kiss her husband’s friends’ boots while being called a Serbian whore by his Muslim friends; she spent 12 days in a hospital before deciding to leave him and all of this was happening against the backdrop of the war in Yugoslavia in the ‘90s.

If you have already sensed what the link between the glamorous model whose image the artist is using and the real Mihaela then you are quicker than I was when I first saw the images.

It’s the sunglasses. In the work of Sanja they cease to be the finishing touch in a perfect ensemble and  become the ill-functioning camouflage of abuse. No glasses are big enough or dark enough to conceal a black eye and it takes one concerned gaze to shatter the veneer of being well put together.

How many of us create such a veneer through the careful or not-so-careful use of make-up was the topic of another poignant work included here: Make Up, Make Down. In another, pre- YouTube Makeup guru, video installation Sanja was laying bare what many of us work hard to conceal: dark circles, undereye bags, wrinkles, saggy skin. Seeing Sanja confidenly draw lines on her face made my ongoing search for the perfect undereye concealer seem even more doomed. Easy to blend, offers full-coverage yet looks natural, doesn’t settle in fine lines and wrinkles and stays put all day. Drop me a line if you have used such a miracle-worker as I am about to lose all hope.

A shortened version of this article appeared on www.sexyfeminist.com. You can view it by clicking here

Leonardo – Painter at the Court of Milan

Where do we draw the line between practical items and art objects? Who decides whether something is kitsch, offensive, useful, beautiful or aesthetically valuable? Is it a great signifier of human advancement that we are so enmeshed with this world of ‘stuff’ or is it our weakness? How do we rationalise the preservation of objects in an age where physical matter can be replaced with digital reproductions?

At a time when many museums are having to re-evaluate the worth and relevance of their physical collections it seems more vital than ever that visitors can truly engage with them. Understanding and appreciating the value of objects is key to justifying their continued preservation and evolution. What is surprising, however, is how an afternoon amongst the most ordinary of objects can go so far in raising, and helping answer, these questions whilst reasserting the extraordinary power of ‘things’.

I arrived at the Museum der Dinge without really knowing I had arrived. The building looked more like an apartment block than a state-funded museum. Inside, however, was an extraordinary presentation of 20^th century material culture and design.

Visitors enter a nondescript front door and, a couple of staircases later, are presented with a compact and ordered display space that is at once unfussy and cleverly thought-out. The contrast between this discreet and curious space was refreshingly distant from Berlin’s main cultural zone of Museum Island.

The museum is formed of a maze of cases offering a cross-section of everything and anything related to the everyday life and culture of the twentieth century: technology, leisure, communications, photography, games, cosmetics, medicine, sex, politics, design, arts and crafts, mass-production.

Little is offered by way of labelling or prescribed information. There is no given ‘route’ through the permanent collection and visitors are free to pass from hand-made children’s toys to anatomical models, from kitsch souvenirs to samples of iconic furniture.

The museum prescribes to its own form of display referred to as ‘open storage’. This allows sample collections to be formed by the curators, creating links between differing objects and allowing contrasts to be made, encouraging enquiry and wonder. This is realised by housing the collection in rows of tall cabinets that appear ordered only by loose themes: colour, material, function, era, style, subject.

A shelf of artificial limbs, glasses, and gaudy sex-aids may be placed next to a collection of objects with nothing more in common than colour or material, alongside a plethora of advertising figurines and kitchenalia. The traditional division and taxonomy of artist/designer, movement, location, time, is escaped completely. This is partially the result of the content itself, which requires a different treatment, but also because the aims of the staff clearly extend beyond merely ‘showing’ the items.

Rather than seeming jarring or messy, this helps the collection as a whole make sense and the resulting juxtapositions are ingenious and thought-provoking.

Alongside the free arrangement of this main display is a changing exhibition space covering more specific topics, from individual Bauhaus students to artist interpretations of the collection. Visitors are able to examine objects within a more self-contained theme as well as having the opportunity to discuss individual items with the museum’s team of ‘Thing-Interpreters’.

This mode of display also acknowledges the eccentric museum tradition from which it stems. Numerous early collectors were concerned with representing the world and ourselves in microcosm through the gathering of tangible artefacts. This notion seems particularly significant when considered alongside the collection on display here: there are surely few things that so clearly represent the modern age as consumption, as material possessions and mass production. This array of ‘things’ then can be seen as a slice, a striking, ugly, humorous, absorbing slice, of our lives and our recent past told through physical objects. What is on show is a celebration, a joyous collection of ‘our’ things, of design and creation as well as a glance into a numbingly consumerist world.

Smaller-scale museums often offer something quite distinct from their larger counterparts and the Museum der Dinge really takes advantage of this. There is an atmosphere of curiosity, a feeling of viewing a life lived through objects that feels genuinely relevant in a city that has such a clear love-affair with ‘things’ and a proud history of functional design.

You may not come face-to-face with a Caspar David Friedrich or a Kandinsky by visiting the Museum der Dinge but the everyday things around you might not seem the same afterwards.

If you live in London and are even vaguely interested in art chances are you would have heard about the Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery. Said to be ‘the most complete display of Leonardo’s surviving drawings’ it’s been making headlines for all the wrong reasons. First, advance tickets sold out. Then people started queuing to buy a ticket from 7 in the morning.  And now it’s been reported that tickets are being sold for prices around £400, believe it or not. Not only that but the people prepared to pay such sums won’t be able to get in after all after the Gallery announced tickets cannot be re-sold and will be suspended.

All of this hype is partly created by the claims of the Gallery who also decided to reduce the number of people allowed in the Gallery at any one point. And of course part of this interest is stirred by the canonical place Leonardo has not just in art history but in popular culture as well.

So why am I advising you not to bother going? Don’t get me wrong – I have a long history with the National Gallery. I wrote my dissertation on one of their paintings and enjoyed the benefits of their archive. Yet today I am reminded of the reasons why so many museums in the UK face declining numbers of British if not overseas visitors and a declining number of young people going to their exhibitions. They promote an air of exclusiveness, elitism which ultimately restricts the number of people wanting to go.

And these days no other major museum in London fits that bill more closely than the NG. Let’s look at the facts: with tickets costing a whopping £16 it’s clear who can benefit from a close proximity with Leonardo.

Instead of wasting hours on a queue, don’t bother. Go to any library and read Vasari’s Lives of the Artists. Then maybe read Hans Belting’s The Invisible Masterpiece to find out the roots of Leonardo-mania.

Alternatively don’t take my word for it: after all, I haven’t even seen the exhibition because, at least, the National Gallery are consistent in their approach. The same restrictiveness they apply to the general public, they also apply to eager young journalists wanting to go.

© David Parry PA

London, Sugar and Slavery aims to shed light on how the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and sugar production in 16-19  centuries, played a key role in making Britain an empire and London – an economic force. In some ways the Docklands Museum which houses it, is the perfect location for such a display. The building was originally used as a sugar warehouse and as such was a physical part of the slave trade.

Since the Museum of London Docklands is a traditional museum, however, there was an inherent limit to how provocative and political an exhibition about slavery staged here could be.

London, Sugar and Slavery was developed chronologically – starting with the first settlers of African descent who arrived in London before the 1500s and formally ending with the Slavery Abolition Act from 1833. ‘Formally’ because there is also a  panel, included at the end, about the conditions in which people of African descent lived in the British capital in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

The exhibition was easy to follow and it managed to introduce new issues gradually. In this way it served as a very good introduction to anyone who wants to find out about slavery in this country but has little prior knowledge and doesn’t know where to start. Interactive screens, panels, reprinted original texts and paintings made the included material (some 140 objects in total) varied and attractive to engage with. The Museum’s determination to produce not simply a historical investigation but an engaging, modern take on the emergence of the slave trade and its impact on the colonial economy was evident. Before the exhibition was opened to the public in 2007 the Museum brought in a group of young Londoners to engage and reflect on the capital’s troubled past and their opinions are included at various points throughout the exhibition.

Some of the best aspects of this exhibition were to be found in these people’s reactions. The strongest comment came from a man of African descent named here ‘Junior’. A black and white photograph of the man shows the young man looking down, his face turned to his left. A red teardrop with the image of a young female slave is dangling from his right eye. The accompanying text elaborates: we have not gotten over slavery, we still dwell on it.

Unfortunately this strong message was tucked away in a corner, next to the mobility lift at the end of the gallery, when it should have been given a central place. After seeing the image and reading the accompanying text, I was left wondering were these the words of the young man or the curator?

The poignant message, with its double meaning, was in a stark contrast to a prominent panel next to it, presenting a sweetened take on the contemporary repercussions of slavery. To make the topic more palatable the exhibition organisers felt the need to end on a positive note. Thanks  to the slave trade, it was argued, Londoners can now enjoy ethnic cuisine, music and fashion which weave together different cultures.

The message here was clear: racism is now a thing of the past that we, completely unconnected to such a past, can examine it with detachment and curiosity much like one studies a long-gone civilisation. When I read the following paragraph I started wondering if the people who had done the display and I were living in the same London:

London was not always a welcoming place: many new arrivals were forced to live in the city’s poorest housing and take badly paid jobs. They often faced explicit racism.

The funny thing was, the time period this refers to was ‘50s and ‘60s of the twentieth century. Clearly, the curators have never visited Brixton, Peckham, Dalston or Haringey and are blissfully oblivious of how ‘newcomers’ often live.

Other topics – such as human trafficking today and the involvement of women in the abolitionist movement, were only mentioned in passing. Had they been given more prominence, this exhibition could have been groundbreaking. As it is, London, Sugar and Slavery only marked some of the points on a contentious terrain and was happy to let sleeping dogs lie.

Free exhibition. To visit the museum website click here.

The date is the 13th of October, the location – Central London. I am headed to Regent’s Park for the opening of one of the biggest annual art fairs: Frieze Art Fair. Before I get closer to the park I expect to see massive signs but there are none in sight. Then notice a line of identical BMWs and I now know I am close to the entrance.

There are no crowds outside but at least 20 security guards. One of them stops me and asks me if I have a pass. I explain that I am about to get it.

A long corridor leads to the main event. At regular intervals are different registration desks. The biggest among those is the VIP one. The one for press is quite small and the attention of the two women behind it is already directed at the young man who claims to be a journalist but has no ID. His entry is denied.

I enter the main part of the fair – the exhibition room which is a temporary tent-like structure and this year houses 173 galleries from 33 countries under one roof. London and New York have highest number of galleries: 36 and 30 respectively which should come as no surprise. Frieze is comprised of Frieze Art Fair, Frieze magazine and Frieze foundation. This year is the ninth instalment of the fair and as of next year it will also be taking place in New York. In this aspect Frieze is following in the footsteps of Art Basel which also runs in Miami.

Every year a jury comprised of gallerists selects the final participants in the fair after a few months earlier galleries around the world have applied for participation. Some of the participations are no surprise to anyone like Gagosian Gallery, for example, which has three offices in New York, two in London as well as offices in Paris, Rome, Beverley Hills, San Diego, Hong Kong, Athens and Geneva.

Despite their reputable standing, Gagosian recently found themselves in the middle of a very humiliating scandal after it emerged that Bob Dylan had used photos available on the Internet to create his The Asia Series sold through Gagosian. Before this became public knowledge the paintings were claimed to have been a reflection of Dylan’s direct experiences and observations during his travels there.

To balance the strong participation of well-established galleries, Frieze have also created a separate part of the event – Frame, open to galleries which have been in existence for under six years.

If you are wondering whether among this year’s list was a Bulgarian gallery the answer is no. However, there were two works by Bulgarian-born Christo Yavasheff – Christo represented by Annely Juda Gallery in London. Simultaneously, Annely Juda Fine Art were holding an exhibition of Christo’s works entitled 40 years, 12 exhibitions which shows his past, unrealised and current projects. His current projects are Mastaba Project for the United Arab Emirates and Over the River – Project for Arkansas River and for Frieze the gallery had selected two drawings for these two projects. It is precisely through the sale of preparatory drawings that Christo will be able to realise the projects.

The main goal of the fair – as the name suggest, is the selling of art. I am reminded of this on Frieze’s website which urges its visitors (over 60 000) to maintain a behaviour which allows participating galleries to conduct business. To the same end, perhaps, journalists are prohibited from bringing in ‘bulky’ equipment. It’s clear that despite the good revenue which the sale of tickets must bring (a one-day ticket costs £27), such revenue is negligible compared to the sums of money for which art sells here.

Depending on what kind of role one has in the art world, the word ‘sale’ when applied to art can be considered dirty. I remember the first time I went into an auction house and saw price labels attached to sculptures and paintings. It took me a while to adjust.

On entering Frieze I was given a new turn. In front of me was a yacht. Not a model or a drawing of one but an actual luxury 10-metre long yacht, Aquariva Cento. On one side was a TV showing commercials for the same boat and in front was a sales consultant. I started wondering if Frieze had entered the yacht business. It turned out I was not far from the truth. The German artist Christian Jankowski and Ferretti Group, who manufacture the boats, had joined forces for this project. If someone wishes to purchase this yacht as a work of art they can do so for the sum of 650 000 euros. If they prefer to buy it as a yacht – then the price tag is half a million. What makes one a work of art and the other – a ‘simple’ yacht? A certificate by the artist.

But this yacht is mere pennies compared to Jankowski’s other work – a 68-metre long yacht which cost 75 million euros as a work of art or 60 million – as a yacht. In the exhibition catalogue the two are marked as The Finest Art on Water but if they are sold separately one will be named Christian and the other – Jankowski.

A critique of the over-commercialisation of art, a reference to the Venice Biennale and the yachts of the mega-rich collectors or a clever way to make money? Everyone can find an answer for themselves or redefine the question. What one can’t deny is Jankowski’s idea is testing the waters. Whether his idea will sink or float – only time will tell.

To realise his idea Jankowski needs a buyer who hasn’t turned up yet despite the optimism of the creators of the yacht who, paradoxically, hope that it sells as art. Will The Finest Art on Water sell? The artist is optimistic. His logic is that rich people don’t buy second-hand yachts. That means that in time when they want to rid themselves of a yacht (for whatever reasons) it will be unsellable. As art, according to that logic, its price could increase depending on how Jankowski’s career develops. Perhaps this is why the yachts bear his name.

If a buyer does turns up then Jankowski’s project will acquire new dimensions and will change from being a sculpture to being a performance work in which central place is allocated to the buyer. Then the buyer will become a co-author since without his decision (which also has a financial aspect) that the yacht is a work of art, the yacht remains just a yacht, albeit a very expensive one.

This is one explanation of the situation.

Another work – by Elmgreen & Dragset, represented by Victoria Miro Gallery, led me to a different possible explanation. It’s called The Fruit of Knowledge and features a 180-cm long chimpanzee, propped on 10 hefty books among which The Bible and Art Now, reaching for a banana. An ironic commentary about the public at the fair or maybe some artists here were making monkeys out of us? There was evidence for both.

The audience was very impressed by the mirror surface of some of the works here. Convex Mirror and Concave Mirror by Anish Kapoor, represented by Lisson Gallery were very popular as well as Ivan Navarro’s installation who was represented by Paul Kasmin Gallery. Through the clever use of mirrors, plexiglass, neon lights and electric current his work multiplied the image of the viewer standing in front of it. This effect was irresistible to many.

While some were looking at themselves I decided to have a look around. The space of the fair was filled with people. The organisers had created three areas where one could escape if not the noise at least the crowds: a VIP area, a family zone and a Press room. What lay behind the VIP entrance I could only guess: five men and women were guarding the entrance. The family zone was almost empty and the press room was so small that with 6 people inside it felt packed. Judging by the size of the different areas one could conclude that the journalists were the least important. And this is largely true. The really important people here are the collectors.

I thought it was time for me to have a look at the Sculptural part of the exhibition which was free and located in the park. My gaze was caught by a giant (11.8metre-long) metal sculpture of a rose with four flowers. It was created by Will Ryman, represented by Paul Kasmin Gallery. The rose, entitled Icon, was simultaneously in contrast and in harmony with its surroundings. The red colour was even stronger on the green background and the disproportionately big rose was bigger than some of the nearby trees. A few metres away from the rose was another sight which caught my eye. A man in rags was lying on the grass. At first I thought this might be a performance work but the poor state in which the man was looked too genuine to have been staged. If it were a performance, I reasoned, then there would have been a crowd of people. Instead, the art lovers were chatting away in front of nearby works, the photographers were taking photos and the BMWs were heading in a different direction.

The question who is the highest paid artists at this year’s fair is of interest to many but the exact prices of the most expensive works remain a secret. We do know that the artist in question is Gerhard Richter, represented by Marion Goodman Gallery, who currently has an exhibition at Tate Modern. His most expensive work is thought to be Strip 2011 – a digital print based on an earlier abstract work of his.

Many thought that the most disturbing work is Crush, 2011 by Romanian artist Andra Usutra which is a cast of the artist’s body. One of the things which made the work particularly horrifying is that the body looks like an emaciated corpse with shrivelled skin. Despite the graphic nature of this work I found another installation to be even more chilling.

Untitled 2011 by Elmgreen and Dragset recreated the space of a morgue. One of the metal compartments was open and on the surgical table coming out of it lay the corpse of a white woman whose entire body was covered by a white sheet except for her feet. In a plastic bag next to her were her belongings: black Prada shoes on high heels, a pearl necklace, a wedding ring, a red nail polish and a Blackberry. In a different environment I doubt the effect would have been as strong but at Frieze which was bustling with women with similar expensive accessories I wondered what did they think? Devoid of clues as to the woman’s death, the installation invited a wealth of speculations. The white sheet in particular seemed to serve as a screen onto which one could project one’s own worst fears and see them played out.