Frieze Week in London has stopped being just about Frieze London and Frieze Masters as smaller fairs are seizing the opportunity for more intimate fair models. On Tuesday, Minor Attractions hosted its fourth edition—this time with a new location at The Newman, a newly opened hotel in central London.
This year’s fair runs until Saturday, with 38 galleries from 15 countries set up in 16 bedrooms at the hotel. Some galleries are sharing, while others have an entire suite.
“We wanted to expand our footprint and grow. We needed a little bit of a refresh,” Jacob Barnes, co-founder of Minor Attractions, told ARTnews during the VIP preview. “London’s the best city in the world and I believe that wholeheartedly because what’s happening here is more exciting than anywhere else,” he said. Despite the fair’s youth, Barnes reports that international and billionaire collectors are walking through the door. Either way, he adds, his job is engaging collectors, advisers and curators with a younger audience and “not isolating an older, maybe more established audience.”
For many of the young exhibitors, Minor Attractions is a first taste of an art fair. Kindred, a Farringdon-based record store and radio station that’s been running for six years, has become a hub for young creatives, attracting many of the city’s DJs and artists to create and network. For Minor Attractions, they will be hosting DJ sets on Friday from DVD, Temz, Angelkin, and Scar. Dancers will find in the same room artworks by Jake Walker, Felix Butterwick, Eva Delaney, and Salvi De Sena, ranging from £550 to £3,000. An abstract painting by Walker features in Kindred’s show, signalled by the artist’s former profession as a trainee dancer at the Royal Ballet School. “My work is interested in movement, notations and sound diagrams. I do some work where I start with drawings and paintings, then I use that to start choreographing, for me it’s about all these different art forms crossing each other,” said Walker.
“Galleries can sometimes feel cold and not super active in terms of what happens in that space. A lot of the artists we’re showing are people we’ve met through the shop,” said Scarlet Griffiths, co-founder of Kindred, who is also exhibiting some of her photography in the event.
“I use photography as the starting point and a lot of it goes through repetitive hand processes such as scratching or stamping, I get into a very meditative state with it,” said Griffiths, describing a piece that’s been sewn and punctured. “Photographs quite often get absorbed very quickly, but there are so many layers to them.”
Elsewhere, Goldsmiths MFA Fine Art program graduates Moses Tan and Philip Steele collaborated on an installation show consisting of luxury items scattered around the bedroom, closet and bathroom.
“I’m interested in queerness and monstrousness. I was thinking about how I’m from Singapore, where censorship is a thing and because of that, we are deemed as monstrous. So, why not put myself as a monster out there to invite people in?” Tan told ARTnews. In the bathroom, Steele placed a pair of Prada shoes and a white Prada bag with a water fountain installed in each as a statement on the life cycle of grief. “We love our handbags, but it’s about how we hide stuff and we thought about those ‘What’s in my bag?’ videos and what’s left behind in a handbag,” said Tan. Tan and Steele’s works range from £800 to £3,000, which is still more affordable than a luxury handbag from New Bond Street.
Is wellness the new luxury? That’s the question that artist duo Bora Akincitürk and Millie Rose Dobree examined in their installation comprised of remnants of palo santo, a lighter (decorated with a marijuana leaf decal), a discarded McDonald’s drink, a used condom, and tie-dye towels. In a testament to its authenticity, one of the hotel’s housekeepers trashed part of the installation. “Participating in a fair at a posh hotel gives us something to push against and a lot of the work I show and make is commenting on capitalism and consumerism with a mix of desires,” Dobree told ARTnews.
Lauren Fulcher, director at Tache, described Minor Attractions as a good introduction to the art market. Tache opened in 2025 and has since been able to present “experimental and conceptual” work without sacrificing on quality. “We have strong sales in London and Minor Attractions has been really key to that. It’s really important to have this fair exist alongside Frieze as there’s an emerging class of collectors who are international and British with purchasing power who are more interested in emerging artists,” said Fulcher. The gallery presented the work of French artist Léa Porré, who uses wood and steel in her sculptures.
Minor Attraction may be small and intimate compared to the behemoth that’s Frieze London, but the fair didn’t shy away from inviting seasoned galleries such as the London-based Cedric Bardawil and Belgium-based Tatjana Pieter, who shared a room. Bardawil has been regularly participating in the fair since its inception in 2023. He described last year’s edition, for which he showed the works of Los Angeles-based artists Francesca Gabbiani and Eddie Ruscha, “a huge success.”
“It also worked really well commercially and it was a sellout,” he told ARTnews. This season he’s showing the works of British artists Paul Housley, Anthony Banks and Hannah Tilson starting at £3,000. According to him, the work has already attracted the interest of collectors ranging in age from their mid-to-late 20s and upwards.
Pieter, who has been running her contemporary art gallery since 2005, found comfort in sharing space with Bardawil.
“It’s really important that we really start to collaborate together instead of working against each other. The art world is a little bit under pressure and we need to start working together for the bigger goal,” she told ARTnews.
Pieter exhibited the works of Brian Harte and Anneke Eussen, starting from £2,000. The decision to present artworks under £15,000 was a strategic, she said, as her collectors have been asking for “good paintings” within that range—rather than spending £300,000 or more on what is essentially an impulse buy. “We really also want to reach a new generation of buyers and keep them on. I’m often selling to young people between 20s to 40s,” said Pieter. He added, “I’m targeting collectors from the US, Europe, Asia and now China—this is why London is important, it has access to all these continents.”