No, we can’t quite believe it either — Frieze Week is back. For the next four days, Regent’s Park becomes the epicentre of the art world, with hundreds of galleries showcasing their finest work. London’s art scene has roared back post-Covid, fuelled by a wave of bold young gallerists opening spaces across the city. Their ambition has reignited London’s creative pulse and there is a renewed sense of excitement in the air.

Among the standout spaces leading this charge are Harlesden High Street, Ginny on Frederick, Rose Easton, Xxijra Hii, and The Sunday Painter. Each gallery embodies the spirit of the new London scene, whether through unconventional locations, eclectic artist rosters, the winding paths to their founding, or the sheer ambition of the gallerists driving them. These galleries are rewriting the rules of how, where, and why art is experienced.

So, we’ve decided to put the spotlight on each gallery. We asked the founders to share a little history of their spaces and give us the lowdown on what they’ll be exhibiting at the fair this week. Think of it as Frieze from the front row.

Barry Pierce: Could I get a little bit of history behind yourself and Harlesden High Street?
Jonny Tanna: A friend of mine got me to help someone with a film night in the pub. It went pretty well and we moved from the pub to a gallery down the street. This was on Portobello Road. The gallery was quite impressed and asked me if I wanted to do my own film nights and I was quite happy because I was collecting obscure films. This was between 2012 and 2016. Eventually, the gallery asked if I would like to curate exhibitions. I suddenly got this spark and started taking art seriously. I have no art background, I didn’t go to art school.

One day, me and the director of the gallery were walking through Notting Hill. We were walking past these antique stores, and he said, “I don’t know why, but we should go inside this store.” So we went in and started talking to this lady. I said to her, “I’m looking for space for exhibitions.” She said, “Well, all right, call this guy.” It was a property developer. So I called him and started asking questions. He was a bit rude and sassy, so I was a bit sassy back. Then he goes, “Hey, no one talks to me like that. I like you! Come here Monday morning.”

I went to his office on Monday, and he walked me into a room. He said, “Right, here’s your laptop, here’s your files. You don’t call me. I call you. Get to work.” So I just sat there for six months, reporting nine-to-five, working in this property development company. Then he called me up and said, “We’re going to do a survey.” I went along, and he took me to this space in Fitzrovia. It was beautiful. I said, “What’s there to survey? It’s perfect.” He said, “No, it’s your space! Here’s your keys, here’s your licence, here’s your check. I’ve taken a percentage from your check to pay your rent. This is yours. You’ve got your space.” So I just sat there and ended up running a gallery. Long story short.

BP: So you started in Fitzrovia but you eventually ended up in Harlesden, obviously. Tell me about that move and the importance of that location.
JT: So it’s Harlesden because I’m from here. But I also feel like I had a bit of a late start in life. I wanted to do something that, without sounding like a hero, I just wanted to help other people have access to art that they probably wouldn’t have had before. I went on this long journey to get here. With this space, I see it as a portal, a place where people can step in and experience contemporary art, which we don’t really have here, and it’s really healing for a lot of people here.

BP: Tell me about what you have planned for Frieze. I’ve seen that you’re setting up shop in Mayfair?
JT: Yeah, so I worked with this gallery in Düsseldorf called Setareh, who gave me complete carte blanche to do what I wanted. When the founder of that gallery said he wanted to set up shop in London, I said I was happy to help him in any way possible. We are putting on the first show in the gallery under the Harlesden High Street name. The idea is to give more visibility to the artists I work with, because there’s the rest of London and there’s Mayfair. You might be known in Fitzrovia, you might be known in Bethnal Green, but there’s one place where we’re not known, I can guarantee you, and that’s Mayfair.

The space will feature works by Jamiu Agboke, who I discovered at the Royal Drawing School in 2022. He’s a fantastic landscape painter. What’s great about him is he’s a six-foot-four Black dude who wants to be a middle-aged white man, and he paints like one as well. And then we have Abbas Zahedi, who’s from Ladbrook Grove. He had a traumatic experience with his family, he lost his parents and his brother early on, so he set up a workshop in a fish and chip shop. He was trying to help the community and get them into philosophy. And then it was from there that he built his art career. He’s doing an installation which is going to be these metal shelves hung on the wall. I don’t know if you know what a National Record of Achievement is, we used to get them in school, but he’s made his own, where he’s put his art achievements. It’s his National Record of Artchievement.

Harlesden High Street take over SETAREH on 2 Bourdon Street, W1K 3PA

Barry Pierce: Could you tell me a little bit about yourself and how you found your way into running a gallery?
Freddie Powell: I went to the Rhode Island School of Design. I ran away to America to study lithography, and that was where I met [the artist] Alexandra Metcalf. I started curating shows while I was there, self-organising them in hotel rooms and motel rooms. And then I moved back to London around 2016. I interned and worked for Grace [Schofield] and Nigel [Dunkley] at Union Pacific, then I became the front desk girl at White Cube. Eventually, I became a manager there.

Initially, I opened the space in Farringdon in a sandwich shop when I was still working at the White Cube. I was like Kim Possible, living a double life. It was a non-commercial project where I was showing a lot of my friends – Jack O’Brien, Eva Gold, Racheal Crowther – and then it snowballed into a gallery, sort of accidentally. I had curated other projects for people before, but I always say that the gallery was founded by accident. Then, a couple of years back, the landlord from the building next door offered me the loading bay space at 99 Charterhouse Street and we’ve been here since.

BP: When people set up galleries, it’s often because they have a sense that something is missing in the city’s art scene. Is that true for you?
FP: No, I wasn’t setting up a gallery because something was missing. There was a tonne of amazing galleries that were happening, and I wanted to do what they were doing. It was a really happy accident, because the space in the sandwich shop was so cheap. I found it during Covid and I wasn’t paying much rent myself because I’d moved into a flat with my partner. The sandwich shop was, I think, £500 a month. I just got really lucky that everybody really got behind it. We used to have these mad openings with hundreds of people, and the press were really into it. Our first show had a print review in Frieze, which is crazy.

BP: What have you got coming up at the fair?
FP: It’s a solo booth by Alex Margo Arden, which comprises one large sculpture called Accounts and one large painting, which is a to-scale remake of an Accident Reporting Board from this historical film set. Across both works, Alex is drawing attention to systems that shape how labour is recorded and represented. The decommissioned museum mannequins that make up the big sculpture were used to stage industrial histories in the National Motor Museum.

Barry Pierce: What were the beginnings of Rose Easton?
Rose Easton: The gallery originally started as a project space in the same building we occupy now. One of my best friends, Molly Goddard, who is a fashion designer, had the whole first floor as her studio, and one of the rooms was “too cold for them to heat in winter.” So Molly’s partner, Tom Shickle, who is also a great friend of mine, called me and said we could have the space for six months. It was something we had talked about many years before but never picked up again. At the time, I was feeling a bit restless, so within 30 seconds I had said yes. We built the space out and programmed a show within a month. It was super DIY. The name of the space was Moarain House, which was the name of the building. Essentially, it was just meant to be a six-month project. We didn’t set up a business, a bank account, or anything. Then, on the first Saturday that we were open, some Belgian collectors came in and bought two works. So we kind of set up from there.

We opened the project space at the end of October 2021 and then we renamed and reopened as a commercial gallery, Rose Easton, in September 2022. Now I run the gallery in partnership with my husband Liam, and we represent seven artists.

BP: Do you have a background in art?
RE: I have a bit of a mixed background. I originally went to art school but I dropped out – I was doing a sculpture degree. I ended up being offered a job in fashion, so I followed that path for a few years. I worked as a womenswear buyer for the much-loved The Shop at Bluebird in Chelsea and then I set up and ran a womenswear label, Phoebe English, with the designer, Phoebe. I was a very precocious 20-year-old. I saw her graduate collection, which was all these black rubber and hair dresses, and I sort of hunted her down and forced her to make me one. [laughs] We set up together and I guess I helped facilitate her making the clothes that she is so brilliant at making.

Then I worked in production for a few years. Going from assistant to manager to producer, doing big shoots for Marni and Topshop. Then I had a bit of a crisis and had to refocus. I ended up going back to school, doing a BA in History of Art at Goldsmiths and started working for some galleries. That essentially rebuilt my career in art. I think that my interest in fashion and design and the intersection of all of those things very much informs the gallery programme.

BP: What are your Frieze plans?
RE: Well, we just opened our new space. So that’s exciting. For the first time we have two exhibitions open at the gallery. We have a Polish artist called Łukasz Stokłosa in our new space, and then a second exhibition with Eva Gold in the original space. For the fair, we have a solo booth of new works by Jan Gatewood. He is an American artist based in Los Angeles who we did a show with last January. He makes these absolutely incredible drawings that are sort of chemical reactions that happen on the page. He works with different organic and inorganic compounds – glue, salt, fabric, dye, bleach – and never uses a brush or traditional implements, but has this sustained, long-term commitment to paper as a medium. There are five new large-scale drawings and, for the first time, a free-standing sculpture.

Barry Pierce: I’d love to know about the history behind Xxijra Hii.
Ema O’Donovan: It’s kind of complicated, because we weren’t really supposed to become a gallery at all. I was an artist for about eighteen years or so, and I had started to wind down my practice. I was just helping curate a few things and doing some writing for people. I decided to convert what was my workspace into an area where I could start doing some projects with friends, to begin with, but I’d never worked in a gallery before. I was just enjoying curating things and putting things together. I guess it went quite well.

My Frieze artist this year, Glen Pudvine, had a really successful exhibition with us at the end of 2022. We found that we worked together extremely well, and he expressed that he wanted to continue working with me. I wasn’t sure how to sustain that without just starting a business. At the beginning, we were a non-profit gallery, and 100 percent of the sales went to the artist. If we got enquiries, we’d forward them straight to the artist. We continued that until the middle of 2023, and from then on, we’ve worked as a commercial gallery. It’s very grassroots in terms of experience, and it all happened very organically. We were only six months old when we did our first Frieze. We didn’t expect to get in. Now we represent five artists.

BP: I’m intrigued by the location of the gallery because we’ve heard so much about Bloomsbury and Bethnal Green being the new centres of art for young gallerists, but you’ve set up shop in Deptford. What drew you to the area?
EOD: I mean, to be honest, I think Deptford has always been an artistic area. I just don’t think it’s been seen in the same way. There have been studios here for decades. A.P.T. have been here for, like, 30 years. They were an artist co-op that bought their warehouse and now they have a huge gallery programme. Acme Studios’ Propeller Factory has been here for years, and you’ve got Goldsmith’s around the corner. So I feel there has always been a draw for artists to this neighbourhood for a long time. Obviously, it’s a lot more affordable than other parts of London, so I think it’s managed to hold on to that creative steam. I like that what we’re doing attracts people out of Central. We’re only ten minutes away from London Bridge on the train. There is a perception that we’re really far away but we’re actually not at all.

BP: What have you in store for Frieze?
EOD: As I mentioned, we have Glen Pudvine this year, who has quite incredible painting skills, often referencing Renaissance works and things like that, but with a dark humour. He always engages with the architecture of a space. In our first exhibition with Glen, he created a four-metre anamorphic painting of tortellini that replaced the entire gallery office windows.

For Frieze, we’re once again transforming the environment. We’re cladding the entire booth in mirrors, attracting people through this idea of wanting to take a selfie at Frieze Art Fair, but inside the booth are these paintings of the nude male form. It’s intended to make people question why they’re attracted to something, or why they’re not. Glen is also doing a bit of a performance at Frieze. He’s running an ultramarathon over the course of the fair, around Regent’s Park. It sounds huge, but he’s actually running the distance he would normally run to his studio. He’s just doing it every day of the fair, which adds up to an ultramarathon. It’s something like 11k a day.

Barry Pierce: Could you tell me a little bit about the origins of The Sunday Painter?
Harry Beer: We started out as a not-for-profit project space back in 2010. We took on a building and built out studios and a kind of project space. Before that, we were doing off-site shows while we were all finishing up art school. We hosted exhibitions in the project space and ran the studios for about five years. It was during that period that Arts Council funding had been cut quite considerably. The studios helped cover some of the costs, but continuing in London as a not-for-profit became quite difficult. We also realised that we were doing shows with artists we loved, but they were one-off exhibitions, and then those artists would go on to work with other galleries. We wanted a deeper, ongoing relationship with artists. So we incorporated as a commercial gallery in 2015, and that was when we did our first Frieze. This year will be our tenth Frieze.

BP: I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on the surge of new galleries that have opened in London post-Covid, as someone who has been in the game for just a little bit longer.
HB: I think it’s good. It shows that there’s a healthy appetite for people starting these things up, and if the audience is there, it’s great. I do think opening a space now, you have to be instantly professional. When we started, Instagram wasn’t that big yet. We didn’t have an Instagram account for quite a few years. There’s a whole front-facing aspect to running a gallery that you have to do nowadays. There’s less just bricks and mortar, putting on a show and getting people into the gallery, there’s a whole new outward-facing nature to galleries where you have to be very slick. That was a thing we didn’t have to contend with. Or we just didn’t know how to do it, maybe. [laughs]

BP: What have you in store for your tenth visit to Frieze?
HB: We’re showing a Chilean-American artist called Ernesto Burgos. He’s based in New York, and we’re coinciding it with his new monograph, which is being produced with Zolo Press. For most fairs, we tend to present one or two artists in solo presentations. Which, maybe, could be commercially detrimental because you only have one offering, one artist. But I like the depth you can show when you do a solo presentation. We decided to show Ernesto because he did a show with us in 2023, and we thought it was a good time to do it with the new monograph that he’s producing.