SEOUL.- David Zwirner is bringing a broad cross-section of its program to Frieze Seoul, combining newly made works with paintings and photographs by some of the most influential artists of the past several decades. Rather than organizing the presentation around a single theme, the gallery is using the fair to create smaller conversations between artists, generations and approaches to painting.
The presentation will include new work by Francis Als, Suzan Frecon, Walter Price, Dana Schutz, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Rose Wylie and Katherine Bernhardt, alongside works by artists including Mamma Andersson, Michal Borremans, Scott Kahn, Yayoi Kusama, Gerhard Richter, Steven Shearer, Wolfgang Tillmans and Luc Tuymans. Bernhardt arrives in Seoul with added visibility: a traveling retrospective of her work is currently on view at the Cube Art Museum at Seongnam Arts Center through September 6.
One of the more intriguing pairings at the booth brings together two new paintings by Brazilian artist Lucas Arruda with work by Giorgio Morandi. The connection is less about direct influence than a shared belief in what can happen when an artist narrows the field of vision and asks viewers to slow down.
Arruda's two untitled paintings from his ongoing Deserto-Modelo series were made in 2026. Both are modest in scale — one measures roughly 30 by 34 centimeters and the other 30 centimeters square — yet his landscapes often seem to extend far beyond their physical dimensions. Horizons emerge from shifting light and atmosphere, occupying a territory somewhere between remembered landscape and abstraction.
The dialogue with Morandi places those quiet, concentrated surfaces within a longer history of artists who found seemingly endless possibilities in restricted subjects and carefully calibrated variations.
Elsewhere, Francis Als is represented by works made almost four decades apart. Sud, from 1986, is an exceptionally small oil painting measuring just four by six inches, while Rio Amazonas, Septiembre 22, completed in 2025, is similarly intimate. Together, the paintings offer a glimpse of the way Als has continued to use modest formats throughout a practice otherwise known for performance, film, drawing and actions unfolding across cities and landscapes.
At the opposite end of the scale is Rose Wylie's Napoleon (Film Notes), 2026, a two-part painting measuring more than three meters across. Wylie's paintings frequently draw on things she has encountered in everyday visual culture — films, newspapers, television, art history or remembered images — without disguising the process of selection, exaggeration and reinvention that takes place between seeing something and painting it.
Dana Schutz's The Voice, also completed this year, continues the gallery's emphasis on new painting. Measuring five feet high, the work joins a presentation in which figuration repeatedly rubs against distortion, memory and imagination.
Belgian painter Michal Borremans is represented by Nina II, a 2026 oil on linen. Borremans' carefully staged figures often seem to belong to familiar pictorial traditions while remaining psychologically difficult to place. The apparent calm of his surfaces can make their ambiguity all the more unsettling.
Earlier works add historical depth to the booth. Gerhard Richter's Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting) from 2001 appears alongside Luc Tuymans' The Stage from 2010, while Scott Kahn's Landscape with Tile Floor and Als' Sud, both dating from 1986, reach further back.
Kahn's painting is especially characteristic of the peculiar tension that has made his work increasingly visible in recent years. His landscapes and interiors can appear almost dreamlike, combining precise observation with spaces that feel remembered, invented or psychologically charged.
Mamma Andersson is represented by two works, Pond from 2019 and Behind the Curtain from 2014. Working from photographs, films, printed material and art-historical references, Andersson creates scenes that often feel as though something has just happened — or is about to. The gallery's selection includes both a vertical canvas and a wider painting on wood panel, emphasizing the variety of formats through which she constructs her enigmatic environments.
Material experimentation becomes more pronounced in Walter Price's Shoot!, 2026, which combines acrylic and gesso with sports cards, PVC glue, screws and plexiglass on a wood panel. The work reflects the artist's tendency to build images through both painting and physical accumulation, allowing everyday objects and materials to interrupt conventional expectations of the picture surface.
Rirkrit Tiravanija, meanwhile, works directly with a newspaper in untitled 2026 (bangkok post, may 3, 2026). Silver and gold leaf are applied to newspaper mounted on handmade paper and wood panel, transforming material associated with immediate, disposable information into something more enduring and visually precious.
Photography enters the presentation through Wolfgang Tillmans' still life Prinzessinnenstrasse, 2010, while the densely considered abstractions of Suzan Frecon provide another counterpoint. Frecon's purple ocher moroccan, painted in 2021, reflects a practice built around carefully proportioned shapes, surfaces and colors that reward sustained viewing rather than instant recognition.
A work by Steven Shearer, The Moody Muse from 2025, further expands the gallery's approach to contemporary figuration. Like several artists included in the booth, Shearer works through an awareness of earlier painting traditions while drawing imagery and atmosphere from contemporary culture.
Taken together, the presentation avoids the feeling of a single compressed group show. Instead, it functions through a series of smaller encounters: Arruda beside Morandi; early and recent Als paintings separated by nearly 40 years; monumental works beside canvases that can almost be held in two hands.
That range may ultimately be the booth's strongest idea. At an art fair, where attention is constantly pulled from one work to the next, David Zwirner's presentation asks viewers to notice not only individual names but the different speeds at which artworks operate — from Bernhardt's immediate graphic energy and Wylie's oversized narrative fragments to Frecon's measured abstraction and Arruda's nearly disappearing horizons.
In a setting built around looking quickly, some of the most compelling works in the presentation may be precisely those that insist on being looked at slowly.
