Regent's Park, English Gardens. Photo by Pippa Jane Wielgos, 2011.

Following up on her interview with sculptor Will Ryman last week, MutualArt.com’s London Correspondent Pippa Jane Wielgos had the chance to chat with other artists whose works were up in Frieze’s fantastic Sculpture Park. Curated by David Thorpe, the Sculpture Park is one of the most unique aspects of the fair, and features a wide variety of international artists whose innovative sculptures always draw visitors to the garden. This year’s Sculpture Park welcomed the works of 12 emerging and established artists, from veteran sculptor Kiki Smith to newcomer Eva Koťátková. Read more about these stellar sculptors below:

Neha Choksi (Project88) is featured for the second time at Frieze; her first showing was with A Child’s Grove, in 2009. Choksi was born in the USA and raised in India and received an MA in Classics from New York’s Columbia University. Her Frieze work Echo of the Inside (Column Cube I) 2011 is a companion to the sculpture, a 7-part photo series titled The Inside is Perpetual. It depicts the cube mold used for Echo of the Inside through various stages until destruction. The work is made from cementitious grout, pigment, and steel and was created for Project88 in a friend’s studio space in Bombay.

Choksi described the lengthy process which began with the casting of a perfect cube, with numerous re-castings of the subsequent re-pieced molds. “This process is repeated to create consecutively smaller and distorted cuboids, until there is nothing left to suture or to cast into. The resulting cubes are stacked into a column that tapers into the air above or settles into the ground below,” she explained. The work illustrates Choksi’s interest in the destructive process. “Clearly I am interested in how a formwork decays with successive uses, shown in the photographic series documenting the molds, The Inside is Perpetual. But it is the sculpture Echo of the Inside that allows me to address the loss of shape and substance in a very material form,” the artist said. "Through the materialization of this process we feel the absence of the original, in this case the perfect cube. It is an affirmative act of destruction.”

This is a departure from her work at Frieze’s 2009 Sculpture Park, A Child’s Grove, which featured a whimsical metal structure of trees, evoking childhood memories. Explaining this disparity, Choksi said, “I am re-approaching abstraction these days, which is newish territory for me. Even if I am working with long-examined concepts and re-adapting previously used methods, the form my work is taking is quite new. A Child’s Grove was firmly located in the realm of landscape, in figuration, and light play (pun intended). Echo of the Inside is corporeal, abstracted and quite grown-up in its play.”(Below Left: Echo of the Inside (Column Cube), 2011 for Project 88; Below Right: A Child's Grove, 2009; both by Neha Choksi. Images courtesy of Pippa J. Wielgos)

There is a common thread linking the two works, though, as Choksi explained, “Echo of the Inside continues the interest in embodying diminished materiality: the perfect cube disappears into formless nothing and the steel trees vanish into their reflective surface. Both sculptures present the absenting of something that is nevertheless there. Yet, Echo of the Inside feels like the unlocking of a new phase in my work.” The artist’s plans are to extend the concept and build bigger, similar structures. While in the UK, she is visiting the Cass Foundation and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, where contextually her work may become part of the UK sculptural scene.

Neha Choksi’s future exhibitions include a solo show with the final part of the Trilogy on Absenting (Petting Zoo and Leaf Fall were the first two). Another solo exhibition is planned, entitled The Weather Inside Me (Sunsets and Eclipses) with film, photographs and a performance, which involves old-fashioned film cameras and their destruction. Additionally, she will be part of a major live performance at Khoj Live in Delhi in 2012 with group shows in Vienna, Delhi, and Brisbane.

Eva Koťátková’s Lost and Found (Hunt Kastner Gallery) is, in the artist’s own words, “a monumental concrete structure, resembling a large tunnel” which appears at times cavelike, at times reminiscent of an underground pipe. Inside the tuberous sculpture there is a tape recording of a voice that eerily seems to inhabit the whole interior. She created the piece along with her father, Petr Koťátko. Repetitive narrative expresses what the artist explained as “how we fight the predetermined conditions and construct more or less actively our own biographies."

 Koťátková (pictured above, with Lost and Found; Photo courtesy of Pippa Jane Wielgos) says her work is an “exploration of common social structures, with their specific rules and communication patterns, and the individual’s (often unsuccessful) attempt to fit into society.” Specifically, her art tends to focus “on situations of exclusion, isolation and social pre-determination, [which are] often connected with the idea of education as a tool of manipulation and control.”

Born in 1982, the artist lives and works in Prague. She studied from 2002 to 2008 at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, Prague Academy of Applied Arts, San Francisco Art Institute and the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. In 2007, she was awarded the Jindřich Chalupecký Award for young artists in the Czech Republic. Recent international exhibitions include the 2010 Liverpool Biennial and 2011 Lyon Biennale.

Johan Creten  (Almine Reich gallery) is showing his Le Banc des Amoureux (Lover’s Bench), which nicely compliments the elaborate garden setting. The work was made from hand-modeled wax over a period of several months in the artist’s studio in Paris, and cast using the lost wax technique in his Belgium foundry. Creten stated that the concept of this idea originated on a trip to Le Puy-en-Velay (France) some 17 years ago, where he was “surrounded by stories about Cold stones that have the power to heal, and springs that can turn objects into stone, that inspired me to do a whole body of work.” Additionally, the artist said he made a set of drawings and a clay model of the work, after which “it took years to find its final form in bronze.” (Above, the artist stands by his work, Le Banc de Amoureux - literally! Photo courtesy of Pippa Jane Wielgos).

Creten put a lot of detail into his final sculpture: Every flower was so finely cast that even his digital fingerprints can be read on the petals, creating the effect of what he says is “a perfect ‘trompe-l'oeil’ in bronze.”  Post-production work on the piece includes a patinated process and oxidation. Over time, Creten explained, the work “will change beautifully in nature with oxidation. Look at the front, back, side views and see how shape and meaning [transform!]” Encouraging viewers to touch his work, the artist emphasized the strong connection prevalent in many of his earlier works, which depicts the relationship between “Mother” and the sea (in French, mother and sea are pronounced the same, with only a slight spelling difference). He said the theme of the piece centers on “one of the greatest subjects around...Love, but also about carnal lust, spiritual bliss...and beauty.”

His next solo-show is at the Museum Dhondt Dhaenens in Belgium for 2012, and the artist is always working on new projects: “This summer I went to the woods, not far from Angers, to glaze a new set of ceramic colons, sculptures. I have been working on for a few months now, there is no Internet, no cell phone, just silence and tons of wet clay...”

Gimhongsok’s Star (Kukje gallery) is, as its title simply states, a star made from stainless steel that the artist created in his home town of Seoul. “My work takes a complete opposite standpoint regarding the idea of perfectness from the construction of something like machinery or architectural buildings, which are built according to a strict blueprint,” he explained. “In this work, the seemingly imperfect form is in fact a step towards perfection.”

The artist maintains his creations require careful planning and he derives his inspiration from the meaning and appearance of other artworks. He said that while he’s never consciously planned his career, there is a lot involved in order for today’s contemporary artist to succeed in the art world. “The artworks of contemporary artists have shifted not only in terms of quality, but exhibition planning, and the management of artists has become professionalized. The expansion of the market and the increase of exhibition spaces has resulted in the emergence of so many diverse artists,” he elaborated, “and therefore you can’t just sustain your career solely based on the quality of your works.”

Despite all of this, Gimhongsok believes that the trendsetters will prevail, even if some success is contingent upon marketing, networking, and other factors. “It’s still those that attempt to innovate and establish a unique aesthetic perspective that retain a strong presence,” he said. Gimhongsok’s future work will be featured in a variety of group exhibitions, taking place in Korea.

Other sculpture artists represented in the newly expanded fair included Claudia Fontes, Decoy for Andean Condor (Ignacio Liprandi Arte Contemporáneo); Alicia Framism, Cartas al cielo; Tom Friedman, Circle Dance (Stephen Friedman Gallery); Des Hughes, Angry Pins (Ancient & Modern); Thomas Houseago, Hermaphrodite (Hauser & Wirth); Wilfredo Prieto, Mountain and River (Annet Gelink Gallery); Kiki Smith, Seer (Alice II ) 2005 (Timothy Taylor Gallery); and Britain’s popular favorite Gavin Turk, Ajar (Galerie Krinzinger/Aurel Scheibler).

 The next fairs: Frieze New York will be held in New York City (at Randall’s Island Park, Manhattan) 4 -27 May 2012, and Frieze Masters, London, 11 -14 October 2012.

Circle Dance, by Tom Friedman (Stephen Friedman Gallery) Photo courtesy of Pippa Jane Wielgos

Written by Contributor Pippa Jane Wielgos and MutualArt.com writer L. Meir. Photos: Courtesy of Pippa Jane Wielgos