Image: Marina Adams, ReWild, 2026. Acrylic on linen
New York’s Peter Blum Gallery is taking part in Frieze London, held in Regent’s Park from October 14 to 18, 2026, with a presentation of twenty works by ten artists. The selection spans more than five decades, from a 1974 painting by Robert Ryman to works completed this year, and moves between abstraction, material-led painting and pared-down figuration.
The oldest piece is Ryman’s ‘Untitled Brussels’ (1974), acrylic on a dark blue vinyl panel. The gallery describes the American painter (1930–2019) as treating a painting as the direct presentation of paint, support, fasteners and scale, and places his work in dialogue with Cézanne, Matisse, Rothko, Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt.
Figuration comes from Alex Katz, born in Brooklyn in 1927, whose simplified, large-scale images the gallery regards as forerunners of Pop Art. He is represented by the portrait ‘Elizabeth 3’ (2021) and two small oil studies on board, ‘Yellow Buttercups’ (2021) and ‘Study for Summer 17 (2)’ (2023).
Several artists approach painting through its physical materials. Martha Tuttle, based in Bozeman, Montana, shows ‘Flowers, nova’ (2024), a diptych in silk, pigment, dye, mineral and aluminum with a fire-darkened bar; her process involves dyeing, weaving and sewing with natural colorants and found minerals. Rebecca Ward takes canvases apart and reassembles them, as in ‘silver ellipse’ (2026), acrylic and dye on stitched canvas. The Stockholm painter Paul Fägerskiöld builds dense impasto surfaces in ‘Black Hole, Sun’ (2020), and Esther Kläs, a German artist working in Barcelona, contributes three untitled oil-stick drawings from 2026.
Color-led abstraction is represented by Marina Adams, whose ‘ReWild’ (2026) and the watercolor ‘A Series of Dreams: Dream 5’ (2022) draw, according to the gallery, on nature, textiles, poetry and music, and on John Keats’s idea of negative capability. John Zurier, who lives between Berkeley and Reykjavík, shows three paintings made between 2023 and 2025, including ‘Fuwa’ (2024) in glue-size tempera and oil. The Dutch painter Robert Zandvliet’s ‘Paradaidha Salix’ (2023) and ‘Le Jardin IX’ (2021) use egg tempera and treat landscape as a frame poised between abstraction and representation.
Nicholas Galanin, a Lingít and Unangax artist based in Sitka, Alaska, shows three works: ‘Ascension’ (2022), made from a carved Indonesian curio totem and copper; ‘Break in case of emergency (White)’ (2022), a porcelain axe in a wooden box with glass; and the monotype ‘Sháa (woman)’ (2024). The gallery frames his practice as an examination of Indigenous identity, the misappropriation of Indigenous visual culture and the legacies of colonialism.
