Nat Faulkner is having a good month. His photographic work Artificial Sun II (2024) has just been acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and is already all over the fair as the inspiration for the stylishly dotty Stone Island T-shirts being worn by the Frieze staff.
This week the artist, who is represented by Brunette Coleman, was announced as the recipient of the Camden Art Centre’s Emerging Artist Prize. This annual prize picks an emerging artist from the fair’s Focus section and offers them a solo show at Camden Art Centre the following year. According to the centre’s director Martin Clark, Faulkner’s work “caught the jury’s attention for its rigorous and seductive use of materials and process”.
Meanwhile, the Guatemala gallery Proyectos Ultravioleta has won the Frieze London Stand Prize 2024 with a multi-sensory stand celebrating two artists from Chi Xot in the Guatemalan Highlands. The miniature paintings of the late Rosa Elena Curruchich document the lives and traditions of the Maya Kaqchikel people. The discreet size of her work was a deliberate decision, says the gallerist Cami Charask, made in the face of oppression and assault from male painters in the community, who “did not want her to be an artist”.
The winning stand of Proyectos Ultravioleta, which is presenting works by two Guatemalan artists © David Owens
With her work, she puts “women at the centre of public life”. Edgar Calel, meanwhile, uses clay to make scenes with slogans that comment on “ownership, land and ecology both past and present”, Charask says. The floor of the stand is covered in fragrant pine needles. The equivalent prize in the Focus section was awarded to Hot Wheels (Athens and London) for its presentation dedicated to the New York collective CFGNY.