frieze #254

Over 34 years, Frieze has developed from outsider indie to the leading magazine for contemporary art and culture, and during that time has spawned art fairs in London, New York and Los Angeles. It provides international art coverage, criticism and analysis, and promises (if not always delivers) jargon-free language.

This is their October 2025 issue, featuring the American sculptor Hugh Hayden on the cover. On first glance Hayden’s architecturally influenced practice is hard to decipher—‘a rarer quality in art these days, as artists increasingly face market and institutional pressure to frame their work within a readymade discourse’. This is the central concern of the issue, weaving together features on artists resisting straightforward categorisation, including the likes of painter Kerry James Marshall, poet John Giorno, and photographers Andreas Gursky and Nan Goldin, who speaks at length about her close relationship with downtown denizen and renowned portrait photographer David Armstrong.