Frieze London 2026: Thomas Dane bets on paper, with artists Steve McQueen and Glenn Ligon

Art fairs reward the loud gesture: the canvas you can read from three aisles away, the sculpture that stops traffic in the tent. A sheet of paper asks for the opposite. It is where artists think, test and get things wrong, and it only gives itself up to someone standing close. For its booth at Frieze London, Thomas Dane Gallery has gone with that quieter register, hanging works on paper by twenty-eight artists, among them the artist and Oscar-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen, the conceptual artist Glenn Ligon, the painters Cecily Brown, Dana Schutz and Salman Toor, and the ceramicist Magdalene Odundo.

The image the gallery sent out with the announcement shows what that bet looks like. In a sheet from Glenn Ligon’s Blue (for JB) series a field of ultramarine is flooded with black pigment that has pooled and dragged across the centre of the sheet, its ragged edges reading like a print pulled imperfectly by hand. It is a surface that records its own making, evidence a finished canvas tends to hide.

Glenn Ligon work on paper Blue (for JB) #21, a field of deep ultramarine with dense black pigment pooled across the centre — Glenn Ligon, Blue (for JB) #21, 2026. © Glenn Ligon. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Limited

The booth’s title, Works on Paper, 1965–, leaves its end date open, and the list reads as an unfinished lineage rather than a theme. British abstraction is there in Prunella Clough and Bob Law, Arte Povera in Marisa Merz, alongside Hurvin Anderson, Amy Sillman, Akram Zaatari, Igshaan Adams, Xie Nanxing and younger painters such as Jake Grewal.

Ligon carries the idea back to the gallery’s own rooms. Prompts, his sixth exhibition with Thomas Dane, gathers earlier and new works that, in the gallery’s framing, inform and re-contextualise one another. In the front space, Untitled (America) and Untitled (Double America) began life as the fabricators’ templates for his AMERICA neons; what remains are scorched, ghostly outlines of letters that were never meant to be seen. A new piece, Black Panther Coloring Book #2, covers the images in Akinsanya Kambon’s drawings with black oil-stick rectangles, leaving only text and fragments visible. Redacted #15 crosses out, typewriter X by typewriter X, a passage from James Baldwin’s essay Stranger in the Village, a text Ligon has returned to since the 1990s. The show also revisits the drawings born of a Walker Art Center residency, where children coloured in pages of Afrocentric colouring books.

Glenn Ligon drawing of four coloured-in figures from an Afrocentric colouring book page: a father reading to a child, Othello, a singer and a woman named Furaha — Glenn Ligon, Dad, Othello, Furaha, Singer #3, 2001. © Glenn Ligon. Photo: Ron Amstutz

Next door, Paul Pfeiffer premieres Pasodoble, a new single-screen video installation filmed on a bull-breeding farm outside Seville, in a historic bullring in Bilbao and inside a broadcast van parked outside it. Pfeiffer, whose survey travelled from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to the Guggenheim Bilbao, steers away from the climax of the corrida and towards the labour, sound and broadcasting that keep the ritual running.

Frieze London runs at The Regent’s Park, where Thomas Dane Gallery is at booth A14; preview days are 14 and 15 October and the fair is open to the public from 15 to 18 October. Prompts (11 Duke Street, St James’s) and Pasodoble (3 Duke Street) both open on 13 October and run until 19 December 2026, and the two spaces will open on Saturday 17 October for the Frieze Week West End Day. For a week built on spectacle, the gallery’s most persuasive argument may be the smallest objects in the tent.

Tags: Thomas Dane Gallery, Frieze London, Steve McQueen, art fairs, Cecily Brown, Glenn Ligon