In our 75th anniversary year, we are excited to launch Right About Now, an exhibition featuring a selection of our recent acquisitions.
Opening on Friday 3 December at Frieze’s new gallery space No.9 Cork Street, this free exhibition is the most extensive display of Arts Council Collection acquisitions to date, and highlights a diverse selection of artworks by 18 artists. From multi-part installations to painting and moving image, the works displayed joined the Collection in 2019–2021 and represent some of the best and most ambitious modern and contemporary British art.
Right About Now will bring 33 works together across two floors of No.9 Cork Street. The artworks on display include Adam Farah’s I AM FREE (FREE AM I MIX), 2018. Displayed on the ground floor of the gallery, the work is a wall-sized poster featuring the artist wearing a t-shirt custom-printed with lyrics from the song ‘I Am Free’ by Mariah Carey. It represents an important influence in the artist’s life. The photograph has been digitally manipulated to express the desire to feel and be free enough to fly, while also being an ode to the power and life force of friendships.
Liv Preston’s sculpture DOG QUEST, 2020, depicts a dog’s head. Cast from a piece of graffiti found in an outbuilding at an abandoned slate mine in North Wales, this object considers the representation and consistent presence of dogs in human culture. The word ‘quest’ in the work’s title alludes to its method of production by a team assembled to document the graffiti, rendering it as something closer to a treasure or relic than simply a record of a surface.
Magda Stawarska-Beavan’s installation Bracka 40, 2020, examines the city of Łódź in the artist’s native Poland, providing glimpses of Jewish lives obliterated by the Nazi ghettoisation of the city during the Second World War. Her delicate panels of printed and hand-painted paper hang from the ceiling, depicting rooms where rituals of parting and death once took place. Images of a cemetery are accompanied by a soundscape of birdsong and traffic noise, illustrating how an important layer of the cultural fabric was torn from the landscape, never to be replaced or mended.