Frieze Masters

14 – 18 October

The Regent's Park

At Frieze Masters 2026, VOENA presents a selection spanning four centuries of Italian art and its wider influence, with Lucio Fontana as a key focus. Three ceramics and a painting by him are shown alongside a capriccio by Giovanni Paolo Panini, a newly published nocturne by the Candlelight Master, a history painting by Michele Desubleo, two landscapes by Giorgio Morandi, and works by Andy Warhol, Carol Rama, Mimmo Rotella and Agostino Bonalumi, set together so that the systems of influence running between the centuries become legible.

Panini’s A Capriccio of Classical Ruins with the Maison Carrée at Nîmes, the Temple of the Sybil at Tivoli, the Pont du Gard near Nîmes and the Borghese Vase is signed and dated in Rome in 1739, and gathers the monuments of antiquity into a composition of the artist’s own design. Ferdinando Arisi placed it in a period of particular creative fervour.

The subject of the Candlelight Master’s Saint Peter in Tears was not previously recorded in the artist’s catalogue. Gianni Papi describes it as a ‘very important addition’ to the group and places it ‘among his finest works’. Once with Giovanni Pietro Campana, it later belonged to the statesman Quintino Sella, when it was given to Gerard van Honthorst.

Michele Desubleo, born at Maubeuge, entered Guido Reni’s studio in Bologna in the early 1630s. His Sophonisba receives the poison from Masinissa (c. 1650) takes its subject from Livy, the Carthaginian queen drinking the poison her husband sent rather than be paraded through Rome as a captive. Alberto Cottino called it one of the most successful of Desubleo’s paintings along classical models.

Two nineteenth-century rediscoveries follow. Antonio Muzzi (1815–1894) painted Remembrance of a Journey (1841) for the Bolognese collector Severino Bonora, commemorating his escape from a shipwreck at the autumn equinox of 1840, the date inscribed on the rock at lower right. Unpublished, it was exhibited at the Pontifical Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna in 1842. A gouache by Erminia De Sanctis (1840–1919), Portrait of Medora (1867), from the Corsini collection in Florence, shows the soprano Carolina Rapazzini in Verdi’s Il Corsaro.

Four works by Lucio Fontana are set against the historic pictures. Donna allo specchio (1950–51), made shortly after his return from Argentina, is the only example of the subject from those years in the ceramics catalogue raisonné. The Spatialist Concetto Spaziale (1957) was made in Tullio Mazzotti’s manufactory at Albisola and shown at the XXIX Venice Biennale in 1958. With them are the painted, glazed and gilded roundels Battaglia (1950) and Concetto Spaziale, Attese (1968), a deep ultramarine canvas from the Tagli, inscribed on the reverse ‘Ho deciso / di andare / a Comabbio’.

Paesaggio (1940) was shown at World House Galleries’ Morandi retrospective in New York in 1957; Paesaggio (1962) belongs to his last years, when the landscape became a recurrent subject.

Two décollages by Mimmo Rotella come from his early work. Prodigio (1957) still carries the bill-poster’s date stamp, ‘7 Ottobre – 6 Novembre 1957’. Exotic (1961) was first shown at Galerie J in Paris in 1962, and then in the Pop Art exhibitions at The Hague in 1964 and Brussels in 1965.

The printed page is also the support of El Cacomixtle (c. 1940) by Alfredo Ramos Martínez, drawn in pastel and charcoal on a page of the Los Angeles Examiner of 29 September 1940, the printed columns serving as a scaffold for his figures. Two further works by the artist are included.

The Room (2005) by Minjung Kim is a mixed-media work on hanji paper over two metres high, made during her years in Italy and shown the following year at Palazzo Bricherasio, Turin, in Minjung Kim. Vuoto nel pieno. Her work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern and the British Museum.

Carol Rama’s Spazio anche più che tempo (1972), in bicycle inner tube on canvas, is a key example of her use of found materials between representation and abstraction. Bianco (1965) by Agostino Bonalumi, who worked alongside Castellani and Manzoni in Fontana’s orbit in Milan, is one of the estroflessioni, the canvas stretched over structures built behind it so that it projects into the viewer’s space.

Andy Warhol’s Portrait of Joseph Beuys (1980) identifies its subject by a single attribute, the felt hat, with sweeps of pale blue and lavender breaking across a yellow ground. It borrows the grammar of the devotional icon, often linked to Warhol’s Byzantine Catholic upbringing in Pittsburgh: the frontal face, the flat ground, the gaze that does not recede. Warhol had met Beuys in Düsseldorf on 18 May 1979.

Gabriele Basilico’s Beirut (Mosque in Background) (1991) was made when he was invited to document the city just after the civil war ended. Francesco Bonami called the series “not an indictment of war but a poetic reflection of the relentless folly of mankind”.