Looking for Material Meaning at Frieze London
Who can look past the money?
Ruth Wecker
In mid-October, the art world, in all its sceney glory, descended on London. For five chaotic days, Regent’s Park became home to over 170 galleries and their carefully curated presentations of loud, eye-catching, and sometimes on-the-nose works of art. Frieze London self-promotes as a fair dedicated to spotlighting “living artists and innovative practice.” As anyone familiar with the contemporary art scene knows, today’s artists struggle, and often fail, to find true innovation and avoid art-historical redundancy. Afraid to be derivative, contemporary artists fall back on their own unique identity and subjectivity to ensure singularity.
The problem with a hyper-fixation on message, meaning, or symbolism is a potential negation of medium, method, and practice. At the risk of sounding like a formalist, the unfortunate reality is that galleries and art fairs prioritize sales over artistic advancement and end up promoting visually pleasing works over structurally challenging ones. Formalism has been successfully relegated back to its pre-Greenberg status; however, there is value in confronting a work’s formal qualities and allowing meaning to spill out, unforced, at its own volition. Weaving through the booths at Frieze London, I was on the hunt for pieces that spoke of their artist’s ideological disposition through a formal and physical understanding of their materials.
Remnant IV (2026), two discarded refrigerators, stacked and stuffed with bedding by Ghanaian artist Daniel Quarshie, stood alone and slightly off center in the Cape Town based Blank Project’s Frieze booth. Standing about five feet tall, the work was a dramatic and welcome sight amidst booths full of buttoned-up, ready-for-the-living-room art. The arrangement of familiar materials at that human-likes stature prompted an uncanny feeling that drew me in. Confronting the work was like confronting someone I recognized but could not quite place.
Quarshie made Remnant IV while working as an artist-in-residence at Gasworks, a non-profit dedicated to international artists in London. While at Gasworks, Quarshie turned his attention from the waste of his home in Kumasi, Ghana, to the discarded materials of his new urban environment. In Quarshie’s work, used and found objects evoke personal themes of memory, socio-political themes such as means of production and overconsumption, but also existential themes of life, death, and rebirth. Remnant IV touches on all of these ideas, while also displaying Quarshie’s grasp of the discarded materials’ particular properties.
The stacked refrigerators bring to mind a series of works by César, a member of the French Nouveau Réalisme group active in the 1960s. César’s ‘Compression’ sculptures—used cars smashed into a compact rectangle by a hydraulic press in preparation for recycling—capture an everyday object in a typically unseen phase of its life. Metal on metal, whether the crushed cars or stacked fridges, creates a pure industrial tension. Human life is only hinted at through signs of wear and use.
In Remnant IV, the more we look, the more familiar the objects appear; we can’t help but think of a stocked, empty, or rotting fridge. Overflowing out of the broken refrigerators, the bedding’s arrangement recalls the frustration of stuffing a duvet inside its cover, only for it to slip out again. The detached, decomposing door and manhandled bedding reminds us that these objects were once a part of someone’s home, a functional part of society, interacting daily with human beings.
Remnant IV presents us with refrigerator doors left open and blankets on the ground. These are not just used objects, but neglected ones. From this viewpoint, the work is a comment on waste, over consumption, and privilege. While the refrigerators are unable to provide a cold environment for food storage, the bedding has lost its ability to provide warmth. Without these functions, the objects are made redundant, and it is up to Quarshie how they continue to exist as signals of their former lives: a memento mori for an age of systemic urban waste. Quarshie forces us into a paradox where we must remember the unknown lives of these materials.
As the cost of running a gallery steadily increases, from rent to staff to exorbitant art fair fees, art dealers are understandably taking fewer risks. Nevertheless, artists who engage with their environment and challenge the viewer through degrees of subversion will always be essential to cultural, and art historical, progression. Works like Daniel Quarshie’s Remnant IV remind us that the value of art goes far beyond commercial worth.
