For this year's Frieze London, 56 Henry will present new works by New York-based artist Jo Messer. The fair will take place from October 9 through October 13, 2024 at The Regent's Park. The artist will present three new works; two triptychs and a polyptych. Panels in disparate colors will be strung together, each one echoing the last as the figures blur into a frenzied abstraction.

Jo Messer weaves narratives that are playful, erotic, and consumptive in turn, utilizing saturated canvases that house female nudes in various states of deconstruction and abstraction. She masterfully implies and obscures the bodies of these women – toes and shins hint at hips and torsos and then diverge into plates of fruit or seafood. These exaggerated feet and limbs are compositional marks rather than rendered figures. Messer's meditation on the themes of sex and food complicates the figures on her canvases, blurring the line between consumer and object of consumption. Her unique style explores painting’s full potential while playing with the historical and conceptual underpinnings of the medium. Of her oeuvre she writes, "The interplay between the familiar and the surprising, the gross and the slutty is where my work lives."

Jo Messer (b. 1991) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA from the Cooper Union in 2014 and her MFA from Yale University in 2017. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at 56 HENRY, New York; the Rubell Museum, Miami, FL; Morán Morán, Mexico City, MX; and The Ranch, Montauk, NY.

Wednesday, October 9: 11am – 7pm (invitation only)
Thursday, October 10: 11am – 5pm
Friday, October 11: 11am – 7pm
Saturday, October 12: 11am – 7pm
Sunday, October 13: 11am – 6pm

The Regent’s Park, London, NW1 4LL