During London Frieze Week, Frieze Exhibition on the Fireplace presents a captivating plexus, merging the architectural 'frieze' above the fireplace with the idea of 'freeze,' a moment of stillness. The exhibition opens by exploring this fusion of meanings. Miniature works rest on translucent film paper, arranged atop the mantelpiece. These semi-abstract signs and symbols oscillate between whimsy and chaos, between the tender and the tragic. Their translucent quality alludes to the importance of the space they occupy—the fireplace itself, adorned with an ornamental frieze. The images blend so seamlessly into their environment that they become like scales, shed by time, clinging to the surface. These delicate layers seem to absorb the fireplace’s history, bearing the imprints of memories long past, as if revealing its buried stories. In their quiet integration, they decorate the profound silence with echoes of significance.
This stasis evokes the idea of dormant life, much like the opening moments of Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice , where a sense of calm precedes an inevitable upheaval, and the objects around the central character are laden with symbolic weight. The stillness of the space here, too, becomes a harbinger for transformation, where both the environment and the artwork will soon undergo a profound shift.

Suddenly, the calm is ruptured by an act of aggression—an attempt to set one of the pictures alight. This impulse embodies the existential crisis: destruction as a path to rebirth. Like questioning of personal sacrifice, the act of setting fire here is an inquiry into whether something meaningful can arise from the ashes. Can an artist truly sacrifice their own creations to forge something greater? Can the destruction of the old give birth to the new?
This moment also recalls Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, where the family home, full of life and meaning, is transformed by fire—an act of violence that obliterates the familiar, forcing a confrontation with the unknown. The attempted destruction in this exhibition symbolizes a similar leap, a push into the void, where the certainty of loss is a means to build a new reality.
Only by being willing to sacrifice yourself can you influence the broader course of life; there is no other way. This idea of self-sacrifice echoes through this exhibition, where spiritual and existential suffering must be endured to achieve transformation.

The destruction reaches its peak: the entire collection is engulfed in flames. The sacrifice is complete. Just as the house in The Sacrifice is burned down in a climactic moment of self-offering, here too, the artist’s creation is consumed by fire.
The flames curl and twist, melting the materiality of the artworks, dissolving them into nothingness. There is something both terrifying and mesmerizing about this primal destruction, akin to watching hypnotic fire scenes, where the conflagration signals both the end and the promise of renewal. The viewer is drawn into an endless gaze into the fire, into the mystical cycle of purification and annihilation.
From this destruction emerges hope—an act of faith in creation through obliteration. The flame becomes a symbol of transcendence, where the remnants of violence carry the seeds of rebirth and regeneration.

As the flames recede, we witness the moment of purification. The fire has cleansed the space, transforming the time and matter it consumed. What remains is no longer what it once was. The viewer senses the world being restructured, as matter becomes fluid, malleable, and open to transformation.
Here, fire represents a force beyond human control, a divine element that strips away the old to allow for the emergence of something new. The exhibition shifts into a space of transmutation—a place for re-embodiment. The artist’s work has undergone a metamorphosis, reborn from the flames.
This moment speaks to the idea of self-preservation through surrender, where transformation is achieved by relinquishing control, allowing forces beyond comprehension to reshape and redefine the self.

With the ashes settled, the exhibition reaches its conclusion. The once vibrant fireplace, now dormant, becomes an altar. It is no longer a place for flame, but for the contemplation of what remains. This space, once alive with fire, now resembles the arches of an ancient Roman temple, or perhaps a pagan sanctuary, where the newly created artwork sits under the watch of unseen gods.
The fireplace, once a vessel for fire, now serves as an altar of rebirth. The new work, borne from destruction, is neither victim nor conqueror—it exists in a liminal state, hovering between past and future, life and death, creation and decay. It stands in the tradition of ritualistic sacrifice, where destruction is a gateway to renewal, much like the ultimate message that only through loss and surrender can we glimpse transcendence.
The exhibition reflects the cyclical nature of existence, the transformation of space, and the eternal process of rebirth. It echoes deep meditations on sacrifice and regeneration, on the delicate balance between destruction and creation, on existence in a space where material and spiritual realms converge. Through the ashes, through fire, something new is always born.