“Save me” emblazoned in purple and red italics on one of the stands at the Frieze fair.

Tracey Emin's neon scream comes from pre-pandemic times, but at the first London re-assembly of the usually annual Frieze and Frieze Masters event, it expresses something of the nervousness of a market that probes the terrain and gets out of it after the corona-related forced break Hopes to catch up with capital.

Gina Thomas

Features correspondent based in London.

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Foreign participants are of course less present than usual in the two large tents in Regent's Park. Here and there, there were also complaints from around 280 exhibitors about the onerous customs formalities since Brexit, which have been further exacerbated by the truck crisis. Some even let themselves be deterred from participating; others trembled to the last as to whether their goods would arrive on time.

But there was no sign of this at the opening: The energy, reported dealers who were also at Art Basel, is swinging higher than there; the mood is confident, business for works up to half a million dollars is going well. The hustle and bustle that has been common up to now, however, is limited by the corona measure taken by the organization to time the entry. Admission prices of up to £ 205 for both fairs are also likely to be significant.

The offer at the Frieze fair, which focuses on the contemporary, is strikingly more reserved, the tone more introspective, probably not least because the artists who were thrown back on themselves in the lockdown were increasingly painting.

The booth of the London trader Victoria Miro also makes this visible through a selection of images, including Chantal Joffe's oil painting of clover-like "Corona" flowers in a jug, which were created under the impact of the pandemic (prices up to 22,000 euros).

Meticulously crafted canvases

Instead of extravagant conceptual installations, meticulously crafted canvases are imposing: like the labyrinthine circle at the Krinzinger Gallery in Vienna, which Waqas Khan captured with the finest red ink strokes on a 2.4 by 2.4 meter canvas. The large-format portraits of the actress Maggie Cheung, which the American-Taiwanese artist Brooke Hsu executed in green ink, have a similarly suggestive effect at the stand of Edouard Malingue from Hong Kong. The entire presentation of Hsu's works - including a diptych based on the Balthus painting "The Sacrifice", which measures almost 2.5 by 2.7 meters - has already been sold for prices between 20,000 and 42,000 dollars.

Certainly the big dealers like Gagosian and Thaddaeus Ropac, who is represented at both Frieze fairs, come up with their famous names.

On the very first day, Ropac listed the oil painting “Room with a shower” by Georg Baselitz among its sales.

The representation of a sketchily painted, larger-than-life violet head-standing figure, valued at 1.2 million euros