“Days are where we live,” as Philip Larkin put it.1 What are the days made of? Several exhibitions on view in London during Frieze Week turn away from the endless motion of the international art world—today London, tomorrow Paris—to focus on everyday life and domestic spaces as sites of identity, society, and community.
For How is your day? (2026), Sung Tieu asked her mother to document her life using a pair of Meta glasses. A rice cooker in the kitchen, signs for the recent local elections in Germany, the queue at the grocery store, peeling apples and carrots in the sink, a walk through a park: at Emalin, each video is displayed on one of fourteen old-fashioned monitors installed on a metal frame in a straight horizontal line. Made for social media, Meta glasses are set up in portrait mode. Tieu took her mother’s footage, projected it in the studio, and reshot it for this work, giving the imagery a grainy, past quality. Tieu watching her mother’s experiences projected from the other side of Berlin is a touching account of connection and distance.
Also on view is Untitled (Shower Room / Door) (2026), another in a series of tile mosaics (including one on the facade of the German Pavilion in the current Venice Biennale) tracing the outline of the Berlin building Tieu grew up in, a housing estate complex built for migrant workers. In this piece, Tieu depicts the communal shower rooms. Together, the two works at Emalin create a rounded view of daily life, its most social aspects and its most intimate, and how at times they’re intertwined.
Tieu’s work contends that the home isn’t only a private space. At Brunette Coleman, Marietta Mavrokordatou turns her lens to her apartment in Athens and finds in it echoes of something she’s seen before. Trip 1, 2, and 3 (all 2026) show a room empty bar a piano, a large window, and a stone floor. Their kaleidoscopic effect is created when the artist turns the paper multiple times while printing the works by hand. They begin from Bill Brandt’s Surrealist-inflected Portrait of a Young Girl, Eaton Place (1955), and conjure the same noirish mystery. What is the relationship between the person and the place? These images don’t provide an easy answer, only the feeling of a distorted view into someone else’s life.
Cece Philips’ paintings at Public evoke an atmosphere of urban space: tight flats, bedroom windows with flimsy curtains billowing, two figures sharing a bathtub. The palette is navy blue, sepia brown, wine-bottle green, winter-sun muted yellow, and the light sources—a lamp, a window, the flickering lights from a neighboring building—are often present. In 11pm (2026), which measures just 12 × 10 cm, a figure is caught leaning against a piece of furniture with a lit lamp on it. It takes incredible control to hold domestic scenes in frames this small without making them timid. Instead, these paintings feel textured, populated, ambient. Their female subjects in domestic spaces hint at Vermeer and their sparseness is lonely like Edward Hopper, only populated by people of color in contemporary spaces.
Two other painting shows by women depict contemporary scenes with reference to the history of art. At Sadie Coles, Nicole Eisenman shows ten new paintings, including Parking Lot of Violent Forces and Depressive Positions (2026), in which a car full of uniformed men is driving through an empty, weedy parking lot. It’s a ghostly image of decaying day-to-day life in the US. But painting doesn’t have to address the nightmarish aspects of the contemporary moment head on. Lissy on a Night Without Clouds (2026) includes a motif Eisenman has painted before: the galaxy wallpaper on a Mac computer. Lissy looks through a telescope at the galaxy already represented on the screen of the computer at its base. It’s an image of possession and desire, or reality and artifact, or the desire to know something for yourself, by your own eyes, beyond doubt.
At Goldsmiths CCA, the ironic title of Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s exhibition, “Being Poetic Ruins Life,” refers to a Chinese tradition requiring poets and artists to withdraw from life in order to cultivate the spiritual purity required for art. Instead, these far-from-reclusive paintings address subjects ranging from Virginia Woolf to a matcha cricket cake to the 1984 nuclear-horror film Threads (incorporating a note to self: “Hello! Stop Stop watching this scary scary British movie!”). They all draw on the work of Agnes Martin, who is acknowledged in the titles (e.g. Threads (1984 film) on Imitation of Agnes Martin, 2026) and with geometric forms and short texts painted into the corners (“This paint [sic] is an imitation of "Untitled" c.1964 by Agnes Martin 20.3 × 20.3 cm original work is a paper work”). Wang takes up work that is made in solitude and uses her classical training in calligraphy and ink art to bring it into contact with her interests in Western art, pop culture, and storytelling.
Wang’s paintings are not made in isolation, but in conversation with the history of art. At Gagosian, this allows for a reappraisal—or reappreciation—of the work of the seemingly singular art of René Magritte. As Magritte’s work warps your vision, so does this exhibition: the gallery has been transformed from a white cube to a moody dark space, spot lit and with thick curtains on the walls. The extravagant show brings together more than one hundred paintings and sculptures by Betye Saar, Ed Ruscha, Allison Katz, Alex Da Corte, and Vija Celmins. These works are not in direct dialogue with the dozens of Magritte paintings, but rather they show how many different people can circle the same ideas and bring to them a multiplicity of perspectives.
It’s an overwhelming exhibition that’s also incredibly fun to look at. Sarah Lucas’s concrete-and-chair sculpture of a headless female body (SLAG, 2022) and Rachel Harrison’s A Broken Arm (2023) relate not only to each other but also to Magritte’s assorted headless men. And it feels like Magritte has come back from the past to unsettle a present which is, like his paintings, at once surreal and so real: like ICE agents in an abandoned parking lot, like the way migration splits lives between past and present, like looking at your own home as if it were an old photograph. Like days, “They come, they wake us,” writes Larkin, “Time and time over.”2
Philip Larkin, “Days” in The Whitsun Weddings (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 27.
Larkin, “Days.”
