Frieze London and Frieze Masters open in The Regent's Park on Wednesday, October 14, with an invitation-only preview, and to the public from Thursday, October 15, to Sunday, October 18. As reported by ARTnews on Monday, the contemporary fair now counts 176 galleries from 43 countries, against 160 from 44 last year.

When we wrote about Frieze Sculpture in September, we closed on a promise: to see which of the twelve galleries behind the eleven works in the English Gardens would also turn up in the tents. We have now gone through the exhibitor list name by name. This is what it says.

Four in, eight out

Of the twelve galleries with a work in the park, four appear in the exhibitor list ARTnews published for the two fairs:

  • Hauser & Wirth, in both Frieze London and Frieze Masters. In the park it has Angel Otero's Dreams and Salt.
  • Victoria Miro, in Frieze London. In the park, Conrad Shawcross's Eye of the Needle.
  • Jhaveri Contemporary, of Mumbai, in Frieze London and also in the Spotlight section of Frieze Masters, with a solo presentation of Anwar Jalal Shemza.
  • Sullivan+Strumpf, of Sydney, in Frieze London.

The last two share one sculpture, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran's Warrior Figure. So the four galleries that are inside the tents account for three of the eleven works outside them.

The other eight works come from galleries that are not on the list at all: Leila Heller Gallery, The Muse Gallery, Albion Jeune, Dirimart, Dom Art Gallery, Rajiv Menon Contemporary, Ruttkowski;68 and The Chemistry Gallery. Not in the main Galleries section, not in Focus, not in any curated section, and not at Masters.

One caution about our own count. The list we worked from is the one published on June 11, which had 172 exhibitors at Frieze London and 138 at Masters. The total has since moved to 176, so four names were added that we have not been able to see, because Frieze's own exhibitor page would not load for us this week. If one of the eight is among those four, we will correct this.

What the stand costs

We do not know which of the eight applied for a stand and which never meant to. What we do know is the arithmetic, because for once the numbers are public. As reported by ARTnews last week, a stand at Frieze London is charged by the square metre on a rising scale: £597 for a small booth of 30 to 50 square metres, up to £671 for the largest, of 110 to 130 square metres. That puts the cheapest possible stand at £17,910 and the most expensive at £87,230, before walls are furnished, lit, staffed and filled with shipped work.

For a blue-chip gallery that is a line in a budget. For a gallery in Prague, Bochum or Dubai with one large outdoor piece and a programme the London audience does not know yet, it is a different calculation. A seven-week free presentation, under the fair's name and on its audio guide, is a way into London that does not require selling the cost of a stand back in five days.

Kristell Chadé, Frieze's executive director of fairs, said as much in an interview with ARTnews published on Monday. "We know costs have gone up across the board and that galleries, especially mid-sized and younger ones, have to make decisions and are thinking very carefully about where they show, why, and what," she said. "And I think that's actually healthy." She pointed to the sliding-scale pricing the fair introduced in 2024 to help galleries move from Focus into the main section, and to curated sections "that have lower entry points".

That is a fair description of what the organizer has done. It is also an admission of how narrow the door has become. We argued in August that the park is the real marketing budget of the week. The gallery list adds something to that: the park has become the fair's entry tier, the place where a programme can be seen under the Frieze name without paying Frieze's floor price. Eight of twelve are there and nowhere else. The interesting question, a year from now, is how many of the eight have a stand in 2027.

A correction on The Code Universe

In the same August note we read the new section, The Code Universe, as the fair circuit's second attempt at digital art, after the retreat we described in the Art Basel Zero 10 story. The full line-up shows that reading was too narrow, and we should say so.

The section, organized by Carol Yinghua Lu, director of the Inside-Out Art Museum in Beijing, is described in Frieze's release, as quoted by ARTnews, as an examination of "how artists respond to societal transformation through the prism of mass culture, from everyday objects and consumer goods to the imagery and information flows of mass media". That is a show about media and consumption, not about code as a medium. The artists bear it out: Shinro Ohtake, shown jointly by greengrassi and Take Ninagawa, is a collagist and painter whose scrapbooks go back to the 1970s; Nikita Kadan comes with Voloshyn Gallery of Kyiv and Miami; Selma Selman with acb Gallery of Budapest; Carolyn Lazard with Trautwein Herleth of Berlin.

What the section does offer is geography. Its nine galleries include Nonfrasa from Bali, Valentine from Jakarta, Spurs Gallery from Beijing and the London space TINA. As a way of bringing in programmes that would never apply for a main-section stand, it is a better idea than the title suggested. As a category, it is harder to judge: a section defined by "mass culture" could hold almost anything, and sections that can hold anything tend not to be remembered. Our test from August stands. If it returns in 2027, it worked.

The ceiling is lower than in Paris, and that may be the point

The week's prices should be read against a plain fact. At last year's Frieze the largest reported sales were in the low seven figures, as ARTnews put it. The top reported lot was the Münter that Hauser & Wirth sold at Masters, which we covered at the time. A week later at Art Basel Paris the same gallery sold a Gerhard Richter for $23 million.

Dealers no longer pretend otherwise. Thaddaeus Ropac told ARTnews that his London stand will carry "fresh contemporary works", with the historical Duchamp, Fontana, Lichtenstein and Warhol held for Paris. Kenta Murakami of Ortuzar, which is at Masters this week and at the Grand Palais next, described the two as "one extended fair" and added that "you can start a conversation in London that you might close in Paris".

There is a generous way to read this, and Bernard LaGrange of Gagosian Art Advisory gave it to the same publication: lower prices might let Frieze "go back to being a place where you can discover what's new and what's exciting", which is what people went for before, in his words, "it just got a bit stale". We think that is right, with a condition. Discovery is only a strategy if the galleries doing the discovering can afford to be in the room. A layout that puts young galleries by the entrance, as this one does, with solo stands for Márcia Falcão at Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel and Agata Ingarden at Berthold Pott, is a good decision. A park where two thirds of the galleries stay outside the tent is the other half of the same picture.

What we will count

Three things, once the fair closes on Sunday and the sales reports are in.

First, whether any reported sale in the contemporary tent clears the low seven figures, or whether Masters again carries the top of the list.

Second, what is reported sold from Focus and from Artist-to-Artist, the seven solo stands where an established artist nominates a peer. Those are the sections the fair holds up as its argument for discovery, and they are the ones that are hardest to find in a sales report.

Third, whether the two museum funds the fair names, the Tate fund and the new Dasha Shenkman Focus Fund, announce what they bought. An acquisition from a Focus stand by a public collection is worth more to a young gallery than the week's turnover.

We will come back to all three after October 18.

Exhibitor lists by section, the Code Universe description and the gallery counts as of June from ARTnews (Maximilíano Durón, June 11, 2026). Current gallery and country counts, and Kristell Chadé's quotes, from ARTnews (Hikmat Mohammed, October 12, 2026). Stand prices, last year's sales comparison and the Ropac, Murakami and LaGrange quotes from ARTnews (Daniel Cassady, Devorah Lauter and Hikmat Mohammed, October 7, 2026). Opening days as listed by The Art Trace (Antonino La Vela, September 20, 2026). The comparison between the park's galleries and the exhibitor list is our own. This is desk coverage.