With hundreds of exhibitions and events vying for attention in London during Frieze week, Apollo's editors pick out the shows they don't want to miss.
In June Russian air strikes set fire to the Dormition Cathedral in the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery complex, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The complex is normally home to a number of extraordinary works of 18th-century craftsmanship, seven of which are now on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum. They include a gilded silver and enamel chalice with six enamel medallions depicting scenes from the Passion on the base, and a 60cm-high gospel book that took two years to make with a specially made printing press; overlaid with silver rocaille foliage, the front and back covers are studded with miniature enamel paintings.
In 2021, to settle a massive inheritance tax bill, the heirs of the former Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee donated 23,000 objects from his enormous art collection to two national museums. Last year the National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, D.C., displayed more than 100 of these works; the exhibition travelled to the Art Institute of Chicago earlier this year and is now open in a different form at the British Museum. This exhibition presents a grand sweep of Korean art from ancient sculpture to paintings and ceramics from the Goryeo and Joseon periods to contemporary art by Nam June Paik, Do Ho Suh and more.
Hernan Bas (b. 1978) paints slender men in familiar settings - a nightclub, a food market, an art gallery. But there's always a perturbing element to proceedings: in The Sip In (2019), for instance, four men sitting at a bar seem unfazed by the invisible figure moving a glass in front of them. Bas's latest exhibition depicts people in retail settings including a lava lamp emporium and a beach-front stall. In what seems like a nod to the idea that retail never sleeps, the show is on view at both Perrotin in Tokyo and Victoria Miro in London (until 17 November and 14 November).
Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo are widely recognised as the prime movers of Mexican Surrealism, but Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is making the case for the contribution of Sofía Bassi (1913-98) to be recognised. Bassi took up painting at the age of 51 and spent five years in prison for the murder of her son-in-law. The work she made in jail is the focus here: it includes paintings in which spectral female figures float above or through twilit cityscapes, expressing a freedom that Bassi no longer enjoyed. Among the rarities here are a painted ostrich egg and an altarpiece, Open this door at which I call, sobbing (1970).
