LONDON: London’s Frieze art fair, which opened on Thursday, for the first time devotes a special section to ceramics, largely featuring Latin American artists. And it was a Latin America gallery that picked up this year’s Frieze Gallery Stand Prize.

The Guatemala City gallery won for its Proyectos Ultravioleta, featuring work by Guatemalan artists Edgar Calel and Rosa Elena Curruchich.

Some 60,000 gallery owners, collectors, influencers and visitors are expected in the British capital until Sunday for the annual event. One of the world’s biggest and most prestigious contemporary art fairs, it offers visitors the chance to see works by both big names and emerging artists.

The ceramics showcase was the brainchild of Pablo Jose Ramirez, curator of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

Entitled “Smoke” — a reference to the process of drying out clay in a kiln — the section features the work of 11 indigenous or diaspora artists, mainly from Central and South America.

It aims to give “visibility to artists who probably otherwise would not be represented in an international art fair”, said the Guatemala-born curator.

“Work on ceramics and on clay has been around us forever but it is not until recently that it was somehow kind of recognised as a form of art,” he said.

The section also unites artists who navigate between several worlds — “indigenous, ancestral stories” and globalised contemporary art, he said.

Lucia Pizzani, an artist “in exile” who arrived in London in 2007, said she was one of millions of Venezuelans who left the country because of a long political and economic crisis. Her totems are made of black clay imprinted with Latin American plants such as corn or eucalyptus — a link to “my personal history of migration”, she said.

Published in Dawn, October 11th, 2024