Sculpture Takes Root in the Regent’s Park
As Frieze Sculpture 2026 draws to a close, curator Fatoş Üstek invites visitors to explore a final meditation on how art inhabits space and transforms landscape. Eleven artists consider sculpture as a living, breathing ecology this autumn.
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The English Gardens at the Regent’s Park become a site of quiet contemplation when sculpture arrives with intention. This season, Frieze Sculpture 2026 has transformed the verdant expanse into something altogether more complex: a meditation on how three dimensional form dialogues with landscape, with bodies moving through space, with the social and environmental currents that shape our moment.
Eleven artists have contributed works to this year’s exhibition, each approaching sculpture as something far more porous and relational than the monumental traditions might suggest. These are not objects placed upon the land; rather, they are interventions that acknowledge ecology as something lived, inhabited, collaborative. The works breathe with context, whether social, spatial or environmental, suggesting that sculpture today is less about declaring permanence and more about understanding connection.
On Sunday, 1 November, curator Fatoş Üstek will lead her final tour through the exhibition, a last opportunity to walk amongst these works and listen to the thinking behind them. The tour runs from noon until one o’clock and is free to all who wish to attend. It is a generous offering, the kind that recognises how much richer an encounter with art becomes when one is guided by someone who has lived closely with the work, who understands its anxieties and its possibilities.
The participating galleries and artists form a constellation of contemporary practice: works that range from visceral and bodily to abstracted and philosophical. Each piece occupies its own logic within the landscape, responding to light, to season, to the particular geometry of this London park. Together, they propose that sculpture is never simply about form. It is about the space around the form, the people who move through that space, the stories and structures that shape how we see.
For those unable to attend the closing tour, Bloomberg Connects has created an extensive digital guide to the exhibition, featuring audio commentary from Fatoş Üstek herself alongside voices of the participating artists. These recordings offer another kind of intimacy with the work, a way of sitting with questions and ideas that continue to unfold long after one has left the park.
Frieze Sculpture 2026 concludes this weekend, drawing its season to a close as autumn deepens and the gardens prepare for winter. It has been a remarkable moment for sculpture in London, a reminder that this ancient medium remains vital, questioning and alive.
Imagery courtesy of Frieze (@friezeofficial).
