Frieze Art Fair
international contemporary art fair
Frieze Art Fair is an annual contemporary art fair first held in 2003 in London's Regent's Park. Developed by the founders of the contemporary art magazine Frieze, the fair has since expanded to include editions in four cities, in addition to acquiring several other art fairs.
Following the original Frieze Art Fair (also referred to as Frieze London), the fair added Frieze Masters (2012), also in London, dedicated to art made before the year 2000; Frieze New York (2012); Frieze Los Angeles (2019); Frieze Seoul (2022); and Frieze Abu Dhabi (2026). In 2023, Frieze acquired The Armory Show in New York, and EXPO Chicago.
In 2016, American holding company Endeavor acquired a majority stake in Frieze. In 2025, the co-founder of Endeavor, Ari Emanuel, is set to buy Frieze in a deal valued at $200 million.
History
Frieze magazine was launched in 1991 by Amanda Sharp, Matthew Slotover, and artist Tom Gidley. The magazine was initially conceived of as an alternative to more established art publications like Artforum, and drew contributors like Hilton Als, Peter Schjeldahl, and Lynne Tillman.
In 2003, Slotover and Sharp parted ways with Gidley and launched Frieze Art Fair. Early editions of the fair saw steady increases in attendance, rising from 27,700 at the first fair to 105,000 in 2016.
“Frieze Art Fair” enters the record as international contemporary art fair. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Frieze, Fair and international can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1464827. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2003, 2012, 2000 and 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “Frieze Art Fair” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.