Frieze London, 2026: Jun Martinez, Dignora Pastorello, Silät

For Frieze London 2026, Cecilia Brunson Projects is pleased to present a group presentation of new works by Jun Martínez and Silät, and historic paintings by Dignora Pastorello. The fair is open to the public 15-18 October, with a VIP preview on Wednesday 14 October.

Following last year’s sold-out presentation of textiles by Claudia Alarcón & Silät, this year’s booth continues that gallery’s commitment to showcasing works by artists who have developed powerful visual languages in response to repressive political contexts and challenging social conditions:

“Having grown up in Chile under dictatorship, I feel a strong connection to artists who have developed subtle but strong voices under oppressive conditions. With the recent election results in Brazil and right-wing governments sweeping across the region, we are witnessing a return to repressive conditions which makes the voice of the artist more important than ever. 

What connects Silät, Martínez and Pastorello is not a style, but a way of looking. Their work quietly asks us to pay attention to histories held in materials, landscapes, communities as well as intimate, domestic spaces. Here, quietness is not passivity. It can be read as a visual strategy through which histories of repression and coded resistance are processed anew and given fresh meaning.”

– Cecilia Brunson

For Silät, the relationship between form, community and resistance is embedded within the very making of the work. At the centre of their practice is a collective model of making involving more than 100 Wichí women weavers in northern Argentina working with chaguar fibre harvested from the Gran Chaco.

These new tapestries take the rectangular form of protest placards created by members of the community during demonstrations for Indigenous land rights in northern Argentina, connecting the works to an ongoing struggle for land and recognition.

Formerly known as Claudia Alarcón & Silät, the collective has now embraced a more community-focused approach that challenges Western conventions around individual authorship, with sales benefiting the group as a whole. The collective has fostered an international institutional presence with recent solos at MASP in Brazil, the Gund in the US, the De La Warr Pavilion in the UK, and inclusions at the Carnegie International in the US, the Denver Art Museum in the US, the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain, and an upcoming group exhibition at Tate Liverpool in 2027.

For Puerto Rican artist and Royal College of Art graduate Jun Martínez, the natural landscape becomes a site through which histories of colonialism are remembered and reclaimed. His paintings emerge from direct encounters with the environment, translating them into immersive compositions that move between landscape and abstraction. He will continue this dialogue in his first institutional exhibition curated by Sara Hermann in 2027.

At the centre of the booth is a pentaptych painting focusing on the roble blanco (Tabebuia heterophylla). Native to Puerto Rico and celebrated for its spectacular pink and white flowering canopy, the tree serves as both subject and symbol, with its reforesting capabilities acting as an emblem of survival and renewal. Martínez sets the fragile beauty and biodiversity of the Caribbean against the pressures placed upon its ecosystems with the roble blanco becoming a way of understanding the landscape as a living archive. For the artist, this tension offers a regenerative proposition. The landscape is not passive or acted upon. It is active, living and capable of renewal. From an island whose past and present remain deeply shaped by its relationship with the United States, Martínez looks to the resilience of the natural world as a way of reimagining place.

Alongside these contemporary practices are paintings by Dignora Pastorello (1913–2001), a quietly pioneering figure in post-war Argentinian painting who was the only woman in Grupo Cinco.

Her intimate worlds, rendered with flattened perspective, can be understood as part of a wider generation of artists who developed coded forms of expression in response to the dictatorship.

At Frieze London, these three practices come together through a shared attention to the histories embedded in materials, the communities from which artworks emerge and the marginalised landscapes and lived experiences that continue to shape and complicate art history.

Request a preview