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Someday is pleased to present new work by Peter Brock and Umico Niwa for Frieze London 2024.  Brock and Niwa employ disparate methodologies to explore the boundaries and thresholds that shape personhood in relation to their environment. With corresponding visual vocabularies, their works consider how developments in technology impact biological, ecological, and psycho-spiritual realms.

Brock expands on the genre of landscape to investigate the romantic and technological sublime. Working on aluminum and plaster, his compositions maintain a distinct sculptural sensibility. Brock layers, sands, carves, and paints each metal substrate - using material to physically process visual metaphors. Carefully compartmentalized, these works explore the role of spatial motifs— such as horizons, boundaries, planets, and the sky— in structuring our self-perception. For Frieze 2024, Brock presents a new series of paintings in which his signature geometric abstractions take on clearer shapes of celestial bodies. The moon becomes a central yet indifferent figure - emerging from transparent skies, imposing its order within each abstract system, and lending a narrative dimension to the methodical composition of line and plane. Metallic slits of polished aluminum echo planetary curvatures as if eclipsed by its own shadowy satellite, an id for the moon’s detached, superego-like presence. The strictly rational and calculated get observed by lunar bodies from within the painting, leaving the viewer with a feeling of being perceived.

Niwa’s intimate sculptures explore how Western notions of identity subsume human life into constructs of sexuality, race, and gender. Organic elements and scavenged refuse are fossilized in electroplated metal rinds or adorned with botanical matter. Animating these discarded materials with a sense of fecundity, Niwa seeks to restore empathy and dissolve the illusory divisions that contribute to bodily dysphoria. For Frieze London, Niwa presents a new, multi-media installation that functions as an imaginative ecosystems for the cohabitation of both manmade and natural creatures. The complex megapolis structure is built from sheet metal, plastic, and other recycled materials now transformed into walkways, ramps, and platforms for her anthropomorphic sculptures. Charcoal forms assembled from incinerated biomaterials form ghostly communities interacting within the imagined cityscape. The organic matter is not consumed by the technological, and the inorganic is not frowned upon by the natural. Rather, the two realms transcend these categorizations by forming a codependent union: a synthetic microcosm is brought to life by its frozen dwellers, and vice versa.

Together, the artists display both commonalities and frictions reflective of their individual efforts to transcend rigid binaries. Through these joined efforts, the presentation offers new ways to contemplate our terrestrial predicament.

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Peter Brock (b.1986) lives and works in New York. He has an MFA in painting from the Milton Avery School of Art at Bard College, and studied in Monika Baer’s class at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany. His work has been exhibited at Diez Gallery, Amsterdam; International Objects, Brooklyn; Nino Mier, Los Angeles; Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York; Goeben, Berlin; Root Canal, Amsterdam; Calle Cedro 328, Mexico City; Peana Projects, Monterrey; 83 Pitt Street, New York; _2B, Madrid;321 Gallery, Brooklyn; and Federico Vavasorri, Milan, among others. He received the IAAC award for art criticism in 2021 and regularly publishes reviews and essays with Frieze Magazine, Art-Agenda, Texte Zur Kunst, Flash Art, The Brooklyn Rail, and Artillery Magazine.

Umico Niwa (b. 1991, Nagoya, Aichi, Japan) is a current resident at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. She received her MFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA. She has held solo exhibitions at XYZ Collective in Tokyo, Japan (2023); Someday Gallery in New York City, NY (2022); Tilings in Montreal, Canada (2022); and Holding Contemporary in Portland, OR (2020). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at Simon Subal in New York City, NY (2022); Kristina Kite in Los Angeles, CA (2021); and Miriam in New York City, NY (2020). She was a resident at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (2022).