For Frieze London 2024, James Cohan will present a two-person booth of new work by Jesse Mockrin and Kennedy Yanko, two artists who engage deeply with the art historical canon–of Western European painting and modernist abstraction, respectively– to radically transformative ends.

Jesse Mockrin’s presentation for Frieze London 2024 explores three biblical narratives – the Abduction of the Sabine Women, the Judgement of Solomon, and varied representations of Mary Magdalene. Mockrin notes, “these age-old stories are united by an overarching theme: the exploitation of the vulnerabilities of women.” Mockrin’s paintings complicate and radically re-envision her source material. She employs strategies of fragmentation, enlargement, recombination, and concealment to imbue once-familiar compositions with new layers of subversive significance. Mockrin’s paintings “serve to expose these biases hidden within the canon – to make them visible, to upend them.”

Working with paint skins and found metal, Kennedy Yanko constructs sculptures and architecturally scaled installations that defy the limits of their own materiality. Steeped in the visual language of Abstract Expressionism, Action, and Color Field Painting, Yanko’s works cast off the boundaries of their medium, occupying the generative spaces between painting and sculpture, abstraction and figuration, surreal and earthbound. For Frieze London, Yanko is reducing her scale, creating her own version of miniatures. These diminutive, freestanding sculptures force the viewer to perceive the work aerially, joining the perspective the artist takes while in the act of painting. From this suspended vantage point, the viewer is pushed to zoom out from the often-immersive experience of Yanko’s larger scale works and consider the luxurious tangibility and jewellike materiality of these objects unto themselves.