Mick Hartley

If the people can't go to the art with the gallery lockdowns, well, bring the art to the people. Frieze Sculpture is back in the English Gardens at Regent's Park, though this year it's for a couple of weeks only, from the 5th to the 18th October. 

Lubaina Himid – "Five Co0nversations", 2019. 

Kalliopi Lemos – "The Plait", 2020

Sarah Lucas – "Sandwich", 2011-2020

Arne Quinze – "Lupine Tower", 2020

Gianpetro Carlesso – "Torre di Saba", 2009

Gavin Turk – "L'Age D'Or (Green and Red)", 2019

Patrick Goddard, "Humans – Animals – Monsters", 2020

There is, as always, a tension between either leaving the sculptures to speak for themselves, or quoting the attached explanatory blurb – which helps you perhaps understand what the artist is "trying to say", but on the other hand can annoy with the sheer pretentiousness. You may enjoy the art, but have no interest in what the artists think their message may be.

So, for instance, those last three pictures, of Patrick Goddard's animal heads: "Goddard's heads are based on novelty masks, stylized approximations of animals scaled up to be worn by people. The zoomorphic abstractions mourn two extinctions; the corporeal kind and that of human's habitual encounter with animals."

Gianpetro Carlesso's Tower of Saba references the biblical story of Queen Saba and King Salomon. "Formally it is based on what the artist describes as deconstruction, a process of material subtraction".

You see?

Both Sarah Lucas and Gavin Turk are old BritArt hands.

Lucas's Sandwich is "an ambiguous emblem of nationhood and proletarian festivity. Awesome in scale and raw in its appearance, Sandwich opposes the pomposity of traditional public sculpture with its prosaic absurdity and functional accessibility."

Turk's big door, taking its name from the Bunuel film, "questions notions of home, security, architecture and also the bolder concepts of inside and outside".

Enough.