Frieze London's Focus section, the curated zone for solo presentations by galleries operating for less than twelve years, is once again the most daring corner of the fair, according to a new survey of its standout stands. While the main booths lean toward measured, market-safe painting, the six highlighted Focus presentations offer the surprise and discovery that have long defined the section.

At King's Leap's New York stand, Isaiah Davis confronts how social and political forces mediate the Black body in three welded-steel sculptures. The centrepiece, Undertow (2026), mounts triangulated I-beams on wheels bearing inscriptions and names — including Trump, Epstein and Coombs — from which a chain extends like a ribcage, evoking slavery, fetish objects and reliquaries at once. Elsewhere in the fair, Ella Fleck's Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Award win for her Ehrlich Steinberg installation shows the section's institutional draw.

Several stands turn toward technology and its discontents. Yuli Serfaty's Who's a Good Girl?, presented by London's Xxijra Hii, stages a headless dog-human-digital hybrid with multiple breasts alongside a CGI video in which the creature gains agency and escapes surveillance drones by exploiting system glitches — a work laced with metaphors for climate catastrophe and AI autonomy. Ella Fleck's floor-shaking installation rumbles with real utterances from OnlyFans chats, drawing on the artist's experience working as a 'chatter' for a company managing creators' messages, in what the survey describes as an almost journalistic sculptural enquiry into alienated intimacy.

The remaining selections widen the section's material range. Jayeeta Chatterjee, showing with Mumbai's Chemould CoLab, pairs large textile works and woodcuts exploring women's labour with the disappearing nakshi kantha quilting technique, printing figurative designs onto used saris belonging to the women depicted. Amanda Moström, at Rose Easton's London stand, repurposes flea-market objects — an umbrella, a tissue box, an office chair — by wrapping them in goat hide, while Tom Hardwick-Allan, with South Parade, presents a nine-part plywood cross-section of an ancient tree embedding a baby in a womb, alongside a staircase of his own book collection wrapped in translucent glassine. Together the six stands confirm Focus as the section where risk survives at Frieze.