A FRESH ART BREEZE IS BLOWING INTO FRIEZE

Yes, the big guns are at the capital's annual art show, but there's a wave of new London talent that could be better than ever.

- Anny Shaw

The art market might be feeling the pinch but, as VIPs queued down Regent's Park to get into Frieze London on Wednesday morning, the talk of the tent was how the emerging art scene in the capital is back — and even better than in the early 1990s when the infamous YBAS belligerently burst onto the scene.

“London is happening right now, it really is a renaissance,” the art dealer Stuart Shave tells me as collectors begin to stream through the doors and into his solo booth of exquisitely thrown ceramic works by the Russian-born, Los Angeles-based artist Sanya Kantarovsky, macabrely decorated with human entrails and spindly skeletons.

Shave, who opened his first gallery in 1998, is among a handful of London stalwarts including Maureen Paley and Sadie Coles who have recently expanded or opened further spaces in the capital (even as reported profits tumble), but he credits the emerging generation of galleries as fuelling the reinvention of the art scene. “London has that spirit; it’s possible to make things happen here,” Shave says. Crucially, price points at the emerging end of the market don’t tend to breach the £10,000-£15,000 mark, making it relatively affordable in art world terms.

Frieze is also backing up-and-comers. Last year the art fair returned to its cutting-edge roots, introducing a floor plan that gave emerging galleries in the Focus section (for businesses under 12 years old) plum spots at the entrance to the fair, pushing blue-chip heavyweights like Gagosian, David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, Pace and White Cube further inside. Despite some initial grumbles from those heavyweights, the floor plan returns this year — and the results are triumphant.