Frieze Maker

Patrick Fetherstonhaugh chats art fairs in general, and Frieze in particular, with Matthew Slotover

I met up with Matthew Slotover at the very fashionable Kaffeine in London’s Great Titchfield Street, fresh from a meeting in Regent’s Park about this year’s Frieze Art Fair.

Matthew is the co-founder – with Amanda Sharp and Tom Gidley – of frieze, the highly influential contemporary art magazine, in addition to the subsequent and possibly even more highly influential Frieze Art Fair. Both of these accomplishments are remarkable as much for the level of their success as for the speed with which they achieved it, the Fair in particular springing from literally nothing straight to the top table in the international art world calendar.

Matthew had been doing the magazine for more than 10 years when he realised it was time to undertake a new challenge and so, informed by the international attendance at the opening of Tate Modern and sticking with a strict contemporary-art-only agenda, he went about putting together the Frieze Art Fair, again with Sharp, and produced a second gift for that hard-to-impress world. The move from magazine to fair is, as he explains, actually a very natural progression – advertisers become exhibitors, readers become visitors, and so on – and Frieze the brand (for want of a better word) expands from a printed conduit of dissemination to include a physical one.

The Fair is held each October in a huge, specially constructed tent in Regent’s Park – a bespoke venue in keeping with the long-running Frieze philosophy of doing it yourself – and last year hosted galleries from 30 countries. But, of course, Frieze Art Fair is much more than just a salesroom for art galleries. As is clear to anyone who has attended, especially on the ever-popular preview day, the Fair has become a fixture on the capital’s social calendar.

And thus we come to the desire for early entrance. Each year pretty much the first people into Frieze are (the) Tate, spending with its Outset/Frieze Art Fair Fund. After that, it’s broadly a case of the earlier the more serious, the later the more fun, and the observant can clearly see the difference in the early afternoon of the first day between the kind of people walking away from the Fair having concluded their day and those walking towards it about to start their evening.

Whenever you visit the fair, though, Matthew will be wandering around keeping everything in control. Calm and confident, he has the air of someone who knows what he’s doing – although, apparently, you shouldn’t ask him to lock your bike up as he’s already lost three…

This article originally appeared in Finch’s Quarterly Review www.finchsquarterly.com