As the frantic hum left in the wake of Frieze London and Frieze Masters—which drew to a close on 18 October—gradually dissipates, Frieze Sculpture, on view in The Regent’s Park’s historic English Gardens through 1 November, continues to recast the city’s autumn chill into a quiet yet deeply arresting outdoor trajectory.
Curated by Fatoş Üstek for its 14th edition, weaving the works of 11 international artists into the park’s landscaped fabric, the selection features one threshold that abruptly halts your stride across the lawn: Angel Otero’s Dreams and Salt (2025–2026), presented by Hauser & Wirth.
Amid the park’s manicured grounds stands neither a monumental marble plinth nor a gleaming metallic volume. Instead, you are met with an ordinary plywood door driven into the soil at a sharp angle. Left slightly ajar—as though someone were still inside, or had only just slipped away—peering through the narrow gap reveals a short flight of steps plunging below grade into subterranean darkness. As the treads vanish into the earth’s unseen strata, the sculpture’s true resonance lies not in its modest timber surface, but in that uncanny void beneath.
Raised in Puerto Rico, educated in Chicago, and now dividing his time between New York and his home island, Otero surfaces memories of migration and belonging through this disquieting intervention. Stripped of its domestic architectural setting and embedded in the turf, the everyday object is suspended in both a spatial and psychological limbo. Does it lead down into a safe haven, or mark an escape hatch abandoned in flight from the past? The answer remains deliberately elusive.
The material transmutation characteristic of Otero’s practice strikes an uneasy balance here between the sheer weight of the earth and the frailty of plywood. The hidden layer concealed behind the door becomes a visceral metaphor for the emotional sediment that gathers over time—the widening distance wedged between oneself and the soil of one’s upbringing.
As the slanted autumn light filters through the opening and the artist’s own voice narrating via Bloomberg Connects plays in your ear, one is left transfixed at the threshold. Amid the serenity of Regent’s Park, Dreams and Salt prompts a sudden, silent reckoning with one’s own concealed thresholds—with the stairs left behind that remain elusive even when looking back. If you find yourself in London before early November, diverge from the park’s pathways and seek out this modest aperture into the earth.
