Minor Attractions runs through October 17 at the Newman Hotel in Fitzrovia. Courtesy Minor Attractions
Despite ongoing Brexit repercussions and a wider market recalibration, London’s art week continues to expand, bringing with it an increasing number of satellite fairs circling Frieze. These smaller exhibitions frequently offer the most compelling cases for discovery, especially at the emerging and accessible end of the market, presenting experimental works in intimate, thoughtfully arranged spaces.
This year, two such fairs have adopted the hospitality format. Minor Attractions returns for its fourth edition in 2026, shifting from The Mandrake to The Newman, both located in Fitzrovia. Meanwhile, London Invitational,a new branch of Dallas Invitational,makes its debut at The Chancery Rosewood in Mayfair, housed in the former U.S. Embassy designed by Finnish-American modernist Eero Saarinen.
Both fairs operate under dealer leadership, maintaining deliberate small scale and careful curation to foster conversation between artworks and their environments, creating more engaging experiences for visitors while establishing stronger narrative frameworks that ideally lead to sales.
Minor Attractions: From Alternative Venues to Hotel Transformation
In its inaugural edition, Minor Attractions occupied two non-hotel spaces in Soho and London Bridge. Founded by Jonny Tanna of Harlesden High Street and Jacob Barnes of GROVE, the fair aimed to provide smaller galleries with visibility during Frieze Week without the financial burden, commercial pressure, and exclusivity of traditional fairs.
Today, the event feels more like a curated group exhibition than a commercial trade show, with 75 galleries from 15 countries occupying the first floor of the Newman. Several galleries share spaces, while a dedicated “individual presentations room” showcases single works by multiple artists, offering galleries minimal risk and commitment.
“Moving to the Newman represents a significant evolutionary step for us,” Barnes told Observer. “This iteration required a fresh, ambitious environment where uncompromised contemporary culture could thrive on a larger scale. We’ve balanced our growth with our signature intimacy, completely transforming the hotel’s first floor and 16 bedrooms.”
The expansion extends beyond physical walls through a decentralized city-wide cultural program combining art, film, performance, and nightlife. Curation and unexpected encounters maintain the format’s effectiveness despite the larger exhibitor roster. Most presentations defy convention in their engagement with surroundings, creating “fun, curious encounters” that keep visitors alert, even those battling jet lag.
Site-Specific Installations and Artist Highlights
Founded in 2023, Minor Attractions produces cultural programming supporting London’s artistic community. For example, Léa Porré’s site-specific installation spans a bathroom and bedroom in one of the first rooms. Red grapes overflow from the sink while arabesque-shaped wooden structures hang throughout the space and inside the shower, framing animations of surreal, almost hallucinatory feasts.
The interplay between digital imagery and physical craftsmanship defines Porré’s practice, embracing both as valid tools for imaginative world-building. She describes these works as “vignettes of fragmented collective memory”,fictional souvenirs where dream remnants, cultural stereotypes, and historical forms merge into hybrid symbolic fragments, blending individual and collective imagination.
Presenting this installation is Tache, a two-year-old London gallery located across from the hotel, returning for a second participation. “Minor Attractions has become such a distinctive part of London’s art week,” gallery director Lauren Fulcher told Observer. “The gallery deliberately returned with site-specific works responding to bedroom and bathroom interiors. Our strongest sales have resulted from an active curatorial process and refusal to compromise on intentional, inventive installations,even in the most commercial art environments.”
All works remain accessible below £5,000, including larger pieces like the wooden table Grand Service (£3,300). Nearby, Singaporean artist Moses Tan’s uncanny kinetic sculptures draw attention. A disembodied hand reminiscent of ‘Thing’ from The Addams Family waves from a hermetic structure on the hotel bed, while another sculpture emerges ominously from behind curtains to grab a martini.
Beneath their theatrical surface lies psychological investigation of coded behaviors and social constraints, revealing how power, pleasure, and identity are negotiated and performed. First-time participant starch gallery shares the room with Sydney-based LAILA, showing Tessa McKain’s works that translate familiar monuments into tactile three-dimensional forms, questioning cultural mechanisms behind image value in our scrolling age.
Diverse Presentations Across the Hotel
McKain’s work pairs with biomorphic, fungus-like ceramics by Angus Gardner that mimic nature’s generative processes. Italian artist Francesco Pacelli fills a bathroom sink with shells for DES BAINS’ presentation, sharing the room with Galeri Reus and an installation by Swedish artist Erika Trotzig, who turned a bed inside out, exposing its inner filling and transforming comfort into something visceral and unsettling.
In another room, Max King’s Pleasure Garden creates an entire casino-like environment with autonomous gambling machines in the shower and bedroom, plus a giant wheel of fortune that never stops spinning. Drawing from observations of human behavior in constructed leisure spaces, the installation explores commodification of luck and capitalist mechanisms underlying orchestrated escapism.
Combining readymades and industrially produced objects, King questions how recreation is designed, controlled, and commercialized, blurring boundaries between entertainment, chance, and consumption. Plicnik Space Initiative backs this ambitious presentation and was selected for Major Futures, Minor Attractions’ new initiative funding emerging practitioners. Other recipients include Jean Watt (A Place to Rest) and event programmers Umi Ishihara and Fiona Ye (FLATLINE CITY 水平都市).
While the fair remains free to visit, the initiative raises funds through optional ticket donations, independent contributions, and a September auction. A rich program of talks and performances accompanies the presentations, including ETA, a performance by Amsterdam-based project Trespassing featuring a solitary wanderer becoming an ephemeral living sculpture in the Newman’s hallways.
London Invitational: An American Presence in Mayfair
London Invitational debuts with 12 exhibitors including established names like François Ghebaly, LOMEX, Broadway, and Vardaxoglou, several regulars at Frieze and Art Basel. All galleries received invitations, emphasizing selectivity and intention in curation and staging.
British-born, Dallas-based dealer James Cope, founder of Dallas Invitational, leads the initiative alongside collector, consultant, and arts advocate Jessica Nowitzki. Nowitzki also serves as trustee of Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa and maintains connections with the Dallas Museum of Art and Nasher Sculpture Center. Building on Dallas’s success, London Invitational provides American galleries a platform during Frieze Week to connect with British and European collectors.
“London Invitational builds on what we established in Dallas,” Cope told Observer on opening day. “London’s international mix brings together galleries, collectors, and visitors globally, creating new opportunities for connection and discovery while maintaining the personal, boutique feel central to the Invitational.”
This inaugural edition feels distinctly like an American outpost in Mayfair, with U.S. galleries dominating the lineup. That was precisely the ambition,building bridges between scenes, allowing dealers to test new markets without conventional fair booth commitments.
The setting at Chancery Rosewood proves more luxurious than typical art fairs. The exhibition occupies guest suites on the third floor, offering intimate alternatives to main fair overwhelming scale. In one early suite, François Ghebaly presents young Japanese artist Koichi Sato alongside paintings by Marius Bercea and a gouache by Jessie Makinson, all priced under $20,000.
From Los Angeles, Bel Ami showcases large, layered canvases by Japan-born, London-based artist Minami Kobayashi (£18,000-£33,000) alongside a haunting sculpture by Whitney Biennial artist Isabelle Frances McGuire. LOMEX, familiar with hotel and independent fair circuits, presents works by Yoshitaka Amano whose delicate sumi paintings complement the suite’s domestic setting.
Amano’s work coincides with a major Asia Society Texas survey recognizing his visual imagination beyond commercial illustration. The gallery pairs his work with Kye Christen Knowles’ drawings and paintings, rendered with uncanny hyperrealism that exposes vulnerability beneath masculinity’s constructed myth. Next door, Marinaro emphasizes materiality and handmade processes, displaying Ryan Johnson’s plywood clothing sculptures alongside wood-framed paintings by Ever Baldwin and works by Alessandro Teoldi and Ridley Howard, all under $10,000.
Young Miami dealer Andrew Reed brings varied selections from his roster, including works by Dan Attoe, Kate Bickmore, Sam Creasey, László von Dohnányi, Lukas Müller, and Seohyun Oh. The atmosphere suggests a relaxed, low-risk approach for dealers engaging British and European collectors through casual, relationship-driven formats.
Whether this American outpost will establish lasting European relationships remains uncertain, but the model suits a market increasingly questioning traditional fair costs and returns as collectors seek authentic, personal connections before transacting. Bel Ami Los Angeles at London Invitational 2026. Courtesy Bel Ami LA
More from London: At Frieze and Frieze Masters, Rediscoveries Are Giving the Market New Momentum | One Fine Show: “Ana Mendieta” at Tate Modern in London | Yan Du’s YDP Brings a New Model of Art Patronage to London | Public Gallery Built Its Reputation by Letting Artists Take the Lead | The Must-See London Exhibitions Beyond Frieze | The London Restaurants With the Most Impressive Art Collections