Frieze Art Sculpture Trail, Autumn 2026

Regents Park

Autumn in Regent's Park has always had a touch of the stage set about it, the plane trees shedding leaves with the weary professionalism of a chorus line, but for the next few weeks the English Gardens have acquired a cast. Frieze Sculpture has returned for its 14th edition, with 11 artists spread through the park's historic English Gardens, curated for a fourth year running by Fatoş Üstek. The theme, we are told, is hybridity, a word that in art-world usage means roughly what "fusion" means on a restaurant menu: a promise that things which have never met will get on famously, and a warning that they may not. The dog walkers, to their credit, remain unconvinced either way. A labrador stopping to consider a monument is the purest form of art criticism London has left, and it is usually more concise than the wall text.

The best of it earns its keep. Angel Otero offers a doorway that leads down beneath the grass, which is the first piece of public art I have seen that openly admits the ground under a London park is more interesting than anything placed on top of it. Douglas White's Black Palm is a life-sized tree built from reclaimed tyre rubber, and it stands among the real trees like a man in a dinner jacket who has wandered into a barn dance: impeccably dressed, faintly menacing, and aware that everyone is staring. Ivana Bašić contributes a brutalist monument, while Tarini Sethi's intricate stainless-steel screens, my favourite, depict utopian scenes, so that you can walk in five minutes from the architecture of the council estate to the architecture of paradise, which is roughly the commute most Londoners already make in their heads between Monday and Friday.

Not everything lands, but then a sculpture trail that did not contain at least one object resembling an abandoned boiler would feel like a con. Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran's vivid dual-faced idol looks both ways at once, like every visitor trying to work out which way the café is. The real triumph is that none of it costs a penny: the trail stays in the south-east corner of the park until 1 November, long after the fair itself has packed up its champagne and its collectors. By then the idols will have weathered London’s October, and anything that survives that has earned the right to be called monumental. Go before the clocks change. Take the dog. Listen to what it says……….