As public funding dwindles, the number of prizes and awards for institutional acquisitions continue to proliferate during Frieze week. The Tate Frieze Fund, which this year is supported by an individual private patron, offers a team of Tate curators early access to the fair and a budget of £150,000 to purchase works for Tate’s collection. The two works acquired are both by mid-career, UK-based women artists hitherto not owned by Tate. Lubna Chowdhary’s Assemble (2025) from Jhaveri Contemporary is a major ceramic piece that impressed the panel with its scale and authority. Commenting on the work, the Tate director Maria Balshaw says “it can hold an entire room”. The other work is a striking life-sized drawing by Barbara Walker purchased from Victoria Miro titled The End of the Affair (2025), which depicts a woman with a dead swan at her feet.
Winning double
Alex Margo Arden, who is showing an arresting conglomeration of former museum mannequins lashed together with a length of rope at Ginny on Frederick in the Focus section, is the first recipient of the inaugural Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation Prize. This new award, which “aims to highlight practices that challenge commercialisation and display within the context of the fair”, offers £10,000 to be shared by the winning artist and their gallery as well as a special commission for the foundation’s library. “Alex represents the new generation of artists in London who are carving out our future,” says Nicoletta Fiorucci, who made the selection with fellow jurists Hans Ulrich Obrist and Lydia Ourahmane.
Arden’s mannequin mash-up, Accounts (2025), is also among the works selected by the Arts Council Frieze Acquisitions Fund, which this year has grown to £90,000. Other works purchased from Frieze for the Arts Council Collection are Petros (2025) by Sarah Ball from Stephen Friedmann; A Touch Up by Olu Ogunnnaike from Hollybush Gardens; and works by Vanessa Raw from Carl Freedman and Liorah Tchiprout from Pippy Holdsworth.
Michael Landy’s epic kinetic sculpture Multi-Saint (Thomas Dane) and Shaquelle Whyte’s painting of wrestling figures (Pippy Holdsworth) have been acquired through the Contemporary Art Society’s Collections Fund at Frieze for the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. Meanwhile, the annual Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Prize, which selects an early-career artist from the Focus section of Frieze to have a solo exhibition at the Camden Art Centre, has this year been awarded to Bogdan Ablozhnyy, who is showing in the a.SQUIRE booth.
Offsite, but also coinciding with Frieze, the winner of the Circa 2025 prize is Adnam Faramawy, whose film A Proposal for a Parakeet’s Garden—made in response to the migration crisis and in support of refugees seeking asylum in the UK—was chosen from more than 1,000 submissions on the subject of “refugia” by a jury including the artist Alvaro Barrington, the pop star Björk and the curator Norman Rosenthal, among others. As well as £30,000 to support his practice, Faramawy will also produce a new commission for the big screens on Piccadilly Circus in central London, due to be shown in 2027.
