The Moderns Come to London: Frieze Week 2026
In this exclusive contribution to artWeb Africa, Hannah O'Leary, former Senior Vice President at Sotheby's and founder of Hannah O'Leary Fine Art, reflects on Frieze Week London 2026. Drawing on more than two decades of experience in the international art market, she examines the growing recognition of African modernism, shifting collecting practices and the changing relationship between African art and the global art establishment.
I have done Frieze Week in London for more than twenty years, first from the auction rooms and this year, for the first time, from my own stand. The pattern rarely changes: too many openings, too few taxis, and a nagging sense that the most interesting conversations happen in the queue for coffee. What did change in 2026 was the history on offer. Contemporary African art has long been a fixture at Frieze London, but this year the African twentieth century, too often a footnote, ran through both Frieze Masters and, for the first time, 1-54.
The wider market remains, let us say, selective. Buyers are taking their time, and the froth of the early 2020s has settled. But fairs are where this market now meets: Art Basel and UBS found that fairs accounted for 35 percent of dealers' sales in 2025, the highest share since 2022. For galleries working with African artists, whose clients are often spread across three or four continents, a week like this matters more than ever. The global market has been soft for a couple of years now, and events well beyond the art world keep finding their way into the aisles. The mood, accordingly, was one of cautious optimism. In a downturn, collectors tend to retreat to tried and tested names, and the interest in African modernism follows the same pattern: artists such as Ntiro and Mancoba are already in the history books. What makes them exciting is that, until now, they have had so little attention at the fairs.
West Wind at 1-54
For its fourteenth London edition at Somerset House, 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair did something it had never done before: it gave African modernism a dedicated spotlight. West Wind, a 1-54 Presents exhibition curated by Dr Nancy Dantas, took its title from Miriam Makeba's 1966 song, a rallying cry for African unity. It was also the public debut of my new practice, Hannah O'Leary Fine Art, which presented works by seven leading African modernists: Alexander "Skunder" Boghossian (Ethiopia), Gerard Sekoto (South Africa), Sam Joseph Ntiro (Tanzania), Papa Ibra Tall (Senegal), Uzo Egonu (Nigeria), Kofi Antubam (Ghana), and Bertina Lopes (Mozambique).
Credit is due to Touria El Glaoui, the fair's founder, who saw the need to connect the contemporary artists showing in the other wings of Somerset House to the rich art history of twentieth-century Africa. Those artists have a lineage, and West Wind put it on the walls.
I said yes to Nancy's invitation without much hesitation. These are among the most significant African artists of the twentieth century - figures who engaged with independence movements, Pan-Africanism and global modernism, and whose work deserves to be considered alongside that of their international peers. And yet, remarkably, for several of them this was the first time their work had been shown at an international art fair. It tells you how much remains to be done.
Why has recognition taken so long? Partly geography: many of these artists worked between Lagos, Dakar, Addis Ababa, Paris and London, and fell between the cracks of national histories written elsewhere. Partly access: works left the continent in private hands, archives were thin, and few museums collected them at the time. And partly, frankly, a Western art history that took a very long time to accept that modernism had more than one centre. If anything, scholarship has been trying to catch up with the market. Major museum exhibitions are helping to close the gap: Nigerian Modernism at Tate Modern, Paris noir at the Centre Pompidou, Project a Black Planet at the Art Institute of Chicago, and MoMA's three-part survey of twentieth-century Africa, which takes in photography and architecture this year and fine art in 2027.
The response was heartening. Over four days the stand welcomed representatives from MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Toledo Museum of Art, Tate, and the Barbican. Among the wider public, some knew these names well; many were meeting Antubam or Ntiro for the first time, and it was a pleasure to watch people stop, look again, and come back with questions. Bringing the modernists in was a confident move, and a generous one: it gave today's artists their ancestors, and the ancestors a new audience.
Frieze London
In Regent's Park, one of the most magnetic booths - no small feat at Frieze - belonged to Bolanle Contemporary. Nominated by Firelei Báez, the gallery showed a solo presentation of the Afro-Dominican American artist Eilen Itzel do Espírito Santo. It was a reminder that the diaspora conversation is not one-way: artists of Báez's generation are now actively opening doors for those who follow.
At Victoria Miro, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami enjoyed a focused presentation within a booth that elsewhere included Yayoi Kusama, Chris Ofili, Paula Rego and Wangechi Mutu – and her paintings held their own in that very grand company. Portia Zvavahera, who lives and works in Harare, was on view at both David Zwirner and Stevenson – and on the Wednesday night, the day Frieze opened, she set a new world auction record at Christie's London evening sale. Zwirner also showed Jem Perucchini, and Southern Guild's group presentation, as ever, was a standout.
The Nigerian-born, London-based artist Ken Nwadiogbu, winner of the 2026 Degussa Young Generation Art Award, filled the Degussa Lounge with I Know the Shadows Will Always Be There, a solo presentation on identity, migration and cultural heritage. Bold paintings of Igbo masquerade figures carried Nigerian traditions into contemporary Western settings, while floor-to-ceiling strands of handwoven Akwete fabric turned the lounge into an immersive installation.
In the Focus section for emerging galleries, the Dakar-based Selebe Yoon presented the Senegalese artist Arébénor Basséne. His paintings draw on Dogon cosmology, astronomy and maps to explore the connections between earth and stars. Working with natural pigments, wax, graphite and wood shavings on batik, he builds intricate, map-like surfaces that marry ancient knowledge with a distinctly contemporary vision.
Frieze Masters
For me the real story of the week was across the park. The stand-out at Frieze Masters was Galerie Mikhail Anderson's solo presentation of Ernest Mancoba – one of the most important African artists of the twentieth century. Born near Johannesburg in 1904, Mancoba left South Africa for Paris in 1938 and became the only African artist in the circle of CoBrA, decades before most of Europe was ready to acknowledge him. His work is exceedingly rare, so it was thrilling to see three museum-quality canvases alongside works on paper spanning his whole career.
Nearby, Loft showed Mohamed Melehi, whose hard-edged waves defined the Casablanca School and still look startlingly fresh. Elsewhere, Tafeta showed Lamidi Fakeye and ko artspace Adebisi Fabunmi. And Vigo offered something genuinely rare: student work made by Ibrahim El-Salahi at the Slade in London between 1954 and 1957. Seeing the young El-Salahi find his footing, before the calligraphic language that made his name, was fascinating.
The point is not that Frieze Masters has found Africa. It is that the people who buy Picasso and Fontana are now being shown Mancoba and Melehi in the same room, at the same level of scholarship, and asked to judge them on the same terms.
Collectors, and two kinds of fair
Are collectors becoming more knowledgeable? Yes - though not all at the same speed. The serious ones, many of them on the continent, now ask about provenance, exhibition history and where a work sits in an artist's career before they ask about price. That is a real change from a decade ago. But I would be lying if I said names, trends and museum endorsement no longer drive buying. A Tate or MoMA acquisition still moves a market faster than any essay. The task for those of us in the middle is to make sure the scholarship gets there first.
The two fairs play different and complementary roles. 1-54 remains the place where African and diaspora art is the whole point: it builds depth, introduces new names, and gathers the community in one courtyard. Frieze offers context - the chance to see Mancoba beside his European contemporaries and be judged as their equal. An artist ideally needs both: the specialist fair that understands them, and the general one that refuses to treat them as a special case. This year, for the first time, it felt as though the two were having the same conversation.
And the week ended, as it always seems to now, with the most common parting line of the season: "See you in Paris!" With Art Basel Paris following hard on Frieze's heels, the same conversations simply moved across the Channel.
Hannah O'Leary is the founder of Hannah O'Leary Fine Art, a London-based advisory and brokerage practice specialising in Modern and Contemporary African art. Formerly Senior Vice President at Sotheby's, where she built and led the Modern & Contemporary African Art department, she previously co-founded the African art auctions at Bonhams. She is a Trustee of the Norval Foundation and a Council Member of the Royal African Society.
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