Frieze x Two-Minute Portraits

To celebrate this year’s Frieze Art Fair, NOWNESS asked illustrator Damien Florébert Cuypers to draw a series of two-minute portraits of key players gracing the private views, parties and week-long festivities. A frequent contributor to The New York Times, the young French doodler is known for his rapidly rendered charming sketches of the characters he meets at parties, clubs and parks in Paris and New York. “The two-minute sketches started in a bar in Paris,” explains Cuypers. “All we had were crayons and paper so we thought we’d see how quickly we could draw people.” Since its inaugural show in 2003, Frieze has quickly become a central event in the art calendar, welcoming curators, collectors and artists from around the world to a labyrinthine tent city in the corner of London’s Regent’s Park. Returning for a bumper ninth edition, this year’s fair includes galleries such as White Cube, Gagosian and David Zwirner, and big names like Pierre Huyghe and David Hockney; other highlights include an on-site television station helmed by emerging South London collective Lucky PDF, and a series of talks by, among others, NOWNESS contributors Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin.