Frieze Sculpture 2021 in Regent's Park: The Sculptures and What They Mean

A bronze head the size of a small car, lying on its side in the grass as if someone had just dug it up. That was the first thing I saw in the English Gardens of Regent's Park in autumn 2021. Beyond it, a silver monolith caught the sky. Further on, a red pipe curled across the lawn and a pineapple taller than a person stood among the flower beds.

This was Frieze Sculpture, the free outdoor show that the Frieze art fair brings to Regent's Park each autumn. I walked it with my camera, and this post goes through the works I photographed. For each one I've set out what it is, what it's made of and what the artist or gallery said it was about.

What Was Frieze Sculpture 2021?

Frieze Sculpture 2021 ran from 14 September to 31 October 2021 in the English Gardens of Regent's Park. It was free and open to anyone walking through the park. The show brought together 18 works by international artists, some made that year and some decades old.

It was the ninth edition of Frieze Sculpture. The curator was Clare Lilley, Director of Programme at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, who was selecting the show for the ninth year running. It overlapped with Frieze London and Frieze Masters, the two big art fairs held in tents in the park in mid-October.

Lilley described the 2021 selection as especially global. The artists came from South America, North and South Africa, Indonesia, Pakistan, the USA, Canada and across Europe. The themes she named were architecture, geopolitical power and environmental concern. She also pointed to bright colour and skilled handling of materials, and called the overall feeling celebratory.

Regent's Park had spent the summer of 2021 full of live music, films and open-air theatre and music at the bandstand. In autumn the sculptures took over the lawns as the leaves turned.

Which Sculptures Dealt With Time and Decay?

The head is Unearthed Bronze Eroded Melpomene (2021) by the American artist Daniel Arsham, shown by Perrotin. It is based on a classical marble head in the Louvre, known for centuries as Melpomene, the Greek muse of tragedy. Arsham cast it in bronze with a green patina and set it into the grass so that it seems half buried.

Parts of the face and hair break away into crystal-like shapes in stainless steel. They are meant to read as erosion. Frieze described the work as a relic of a post-apocalyptic fictional archaeology. The idea is that we are looking at the head a thousand years from now, as it is being excavated.

That's the thread through all of Arsham's work: familiar objects imagined as future ruins. It is an odd reversal of the way bronze usually works in a museum. A cast is normally made to preserve a figure, as the Rodin show at Tate Modern explained so well, not to make it look worn away. The same Melpomene head later went on show at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Wakefield.

The second work about time was much less pretty, and it had a stranger story.

This dark, crushed tangle is Biosignature Preservation (2019) by Jorge Otero-Pailos, shown by Holtermann Fine Art. It is made from the steel security fence that was put up around the US Embassy in Oslo after 9/11. The embassy building itself was designed by Eero Saarinen and completed in 1959.

When the building was protected as a Norwegian heritage site and sold, the fence was left out of the protection as unsightly. In 2019 Otero-Pailos staged a public performance in which demolition machines crushed the fence on site. He turned the mangled steel into a group of sculptures, and this is one of them.

Otero-Pailos trained as an architect and works in historic preservation. His point is that the ugly, defensive layers of a building are part of its history too. Frieze listed the work's themes as memory, heritage and transition. He has said it matters to remove the fence but also to find a way to keep it.

Which Ones Played With Colour and Light?

A whole group of works in the 2021 show was about colour, and three of them sat within a few minutes' walk of each other.

The silver point is Quantum Shift (Parabolic Monolith Sirius Titanium) (2021) by Gisela Colón, shown by GAVLAK. Colón was born in Vancouver, grew up in Puerto Rico and works in Los Angeles. She makes her monoliths from aerospace-grade carbon fibre, working with an aerospace company in Southern California.

Her work comes out of the Light and Space movement in California, and out of land art. The gallery said she turns classic masculine forms into feminine power, so the upright monolith is claimed rather than copied. She also told Cultured magazine that she developed the London surface to come alive in shade rather than sun. The finish shifts colour as you walk around it and as clouds pass.

It simply mirrors the sky and the people walking past, which is probably the point.

Next came Untitled (2021) by the Portuguese sculptor José Pedro Croft, shown by Galeria Vera Cortês in Lisbon. It is a portico of six panels, four of painted iron and two of coloured glass, on a steel structure. At 6.2 metres high it was one of the tallest works in the show.

The painted panels alternate matte and glossy surfaces, and the glass lets the park show through in a different colour. The gallery linked it to Goethe's theory of colour and to the way perception changes with where you stand. Frieze called it vibrant despite its fragility and instability. Seen from one side, the panels line up yellow, orange and red against a mirrored surface.

The third colour piece was Environnement de Transchromie Circulaire (1965 to 2017) by Carlos Cruz-Diez, shown by Galerie Philippe Gravier of Paris. Cruz-Diez was a Venezuelan artist, born in 1923, who spent most of his career in Paris and died there in 2019.

He started his Transchromie series in 1965. Each one is made of tall transparent coloured strips set at different distances. When they overlap, the colours mix by subtraction, the way stacked sheets of coloured film darken each other. As you walk around, the lawn, the trees and the other visitors change colour through the strips.

The circular version at Frieze was made in 2017 from the 1965 idea. Frieze described it as a subtractive colour experience, with the landscape modified by colour as you move.

Which Sculpture Could You Actually Play On?

The glossy red loop is Play Sculpture by Isamu Noguchi, shown by White Cube. Noguchi designed it around 1965 and revised it around 1980, but this one was only fabricated in 2021. It is made from six pieces of standard sewer pipe, the long curved elbows used underground, joined into one continuous loop.

Noguchi spent decades designing playgrounds, most of which were never built. He saw play equipment as sculpture that children could climb, sit on and move through. Frieze called this piece one of his most successful playscapes, an environment in a single object. Of all the works in the show, it was the one that looked most like an invitation.

Noguchi was very much in London that autumn. The Barbican opened a major Noguchi retrospective on 30 September 2021, so the red pipe in the park was a small preview of his ideas about play.

In 2025, Tideway fabricated another Play Sculpture as a permanent public work at Heathwall Quay by the Thames in Battersea. It was described as the only permanent one in a public space in the UK.

Why Was There a Giant Pineapple in Regent's Park?

The pineapple is Pineapple (2020) by Rose Wylie, shown by David Zwirner. It is painted bronze in two parts and stands 3.5 metres tall. The body is patterned in red and white and the crown of leaves is black and spiky, and much bigger than a real pineapple's.

Wylie was born in 1934 and is best known as a painter. The sculptures were her first move into three dimensions, and they come from motifs in her paintings. According to David Zwirner, the pineapple started with one she bought at her local market, grown in Ghana.

She was struck by its vaguely human proportions, its prickly skin and its oversized crown. Frieze read the sculpture as a wry comment on the idea of the prickly woman. Standing in a flower garden, it looks like one of her flat, painterly shapes that someone has pulled off the canvas and propped up.

Which Sculptures Were About Nature and Myth?

Three works sat closer to nature, and they each came at it from a different side: myth, the human body and plastic waste.

The white cloud on stilts is Event Horizon (2019) by the Bulgarian artist Stoyan Dechev, shown by Anca Poterasu Gallery of Bucharest. It is made of aluminium and stainless steel. The shape is a thundercloud, and the angled legs are its lightning bolts.

Dechev is interested in how a symbol travels through time. A cloud with lightning once stood for Zeus, Jupiter, Perun and Thor. Today the word cloud means data storage. Frieze said the work calls on a mythical past to speak of an endangered future. The title borrows the physics term for the boundary beyond which nothing can be predicted.

These tall stems are from Muamba Grove (2019) by Vanessa da Silva, shown by Galeria Duarte Sequeira. Frieze listed three of them together, numbers 1, 3 and 4. They are made of steel, fibreglass, resin and UV paint, and the tallest is about 3.6 metres.

Da Silva was born and raised in São Paulo and has lived in London for many years. Her work deals with immigration, identity and displacement, and with being Brazilian in Europe. The gallery described the forms as genderless, neither human nor plant. They are hybrids in the middle of turning into something still unknown. Movement matters to her, and she has worked with a choreographer on the series.

The red shapes hanging in the tree are Untitled (module 1 and 2) (2019) by the Polish artist Tatiana Wolska, shown by L'Étrangère and Irène Laub Gallery. Wolska won the Mtec Bursary that year, which supported an emerging artist in the show.

They are made from thousands of discarded plastic water bottles. Contemporary Lynx reported that Wolska and two assistants cut the bottles into small pieces and melted the edges together with soldering irons. The result is a red, bubbly skin full of holes, like a living organism.

The gallery said the modules point to the wasteful consumption behind environmental catastrophe. Wolska herself has linked her reuse of materials to growing up in communist Poland in the 1980s, when people stored everything and transformed it. Hung in a tree, the red shapes look a little like fruit or a strange fungus.

What Is the Story Behind Annie Morris's Stacks?

The stack of coloured spheres is Stack 9, Ultramarine Blue (2021) by the British artist Annie Morris, shown by Timothy Taylor. Frieze described it as irregularly shaped patinated bronze spheres rising towards the sky. The spheres are blue, green and orange, each one slightly lopsided.

Morris has spoken publicly about where the stacks began. She lost a baby, stillborn, and started making them afterwards. She described them to FAD Magazine as a way to hold on to the shape she had lost. Frieze linked the work to motherhood and the female body.

The stacks aren't only about grief, though. FAD wrote that they also stand for life continuing and pain slowly receding. Each sphere is shaped by hand and none is quite round. Stacked up, they balance in a way that looks fragile and steady at once.

Who Else Was in the Show?

I didn't photograph every piece, so here are the others that made up the 18. Rasheed Araeen showed Lovers in The Regent's Park (2021), and Anthony Caro showed Palanquin (1987 to 1991), a painted steel piece. Ibrahim El-Salahi showed Meditation Tree (2018), made from charred oak.

Solange Pessoa showed soapstone works from her Skull series (2016). The Indonesian painter Yunizar showed Induk Monster (Mother Monster) (2017). Divya Mehra brought a work about a DIY Taj Mahal with a very long title.

For the first time, a public institution also took part. The Serpentine showed a fragment of the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion by Counterspace, the studio led by Sumayya Vally.

Does Frieze Sculpture Still Happen Every Autumn?

Yes. Frieze Sculpture has returned to Regent's Park every year since the 2021 show. The 2025 edition ran from 17 September to 2 November 2025.

The 2026 edition, the 14th, runs from 16 September to 1 November 2026, again in the English Gardens and again free. Fatoş Üstek curates it for the fourth year in a row, with 11 artists. The artists and layout change every year, so none of the works in this post are part of it.

If you like big art in open spaces, I've also written about the 100 life-size elephants in Green Park, another outdoor show that turned a London park into a gallery.

Visiting Frieze Sculpture in Regent's Park: Practical Notes

📍 Where: The English Gardens, The Regent's Park, London NW1 4LL. The gardens are on the east side of the park.

📅 Open days: Frieze Sculpture 2026 runs from 16 September to 1 November 2026. Dates change each year, so check frieze.com.

🎫 Admission: Free. There is no ticket or booking for the sculpture park.

⏰ Opening: The sculptures are outdoors and follow park hours. The Royal Parks list pedestrian gates as open from 5am, with closing time around dusk. Check the Royal Parks site for the season.

🚇 Getting there: Regent's Park (Bakerloo line) and Great Portland Street (Circle, Hammersmith & City and Metropolitan lines) are the closest stations. Warren Street is a little further.

🚗 Parking: Pay-and-display bays on the Inner and Outer Circles, 9am to 6.30pm.

☕ Food: The park has several cafés and kiosks, including The Broad Walk Café and The Regent's Bar & Kitchen.

⏳ How long: About an hour to see every piece without rushing. Allow longer if you follow the official digital guide on the Bloomberg Connects app.

📷 Best time: A weekday morning, before the crowds. Overcast days suit the reflective works.

🗺️ Nearby: Queen Mary's Gardens, the Open Air Theatre and the Avenue Gardens are all within the park.

Which of these 2021 sculptures would you have wanted to see in person, and have you been to Frieze Sculpture since?

_______________________

Did you enjoy this article? If you'd like to contribute to the running costs of WithinLondon, click the button below:

All photos were taken by Ina/WithinLondon, unless stated otherwise.