Richard Saltoun Gallery presented 'Something The Matter', a dual display of Helen Chadwick and Cathy de Monchaux, at Frieze London from October 14 to 18. The booth revisited the title and spirit of the artists' first joint presentation at the 22nd Bienal de São Paulo in 1994, bringing the two sculptors back into dialogue more than three decades later.

Chadwick (1953–1996) and de Monchaux (born 1960) emerged as two of the most distinctive voices in British art of the late twentieth century. Meeting at the São Paulo Bienal, they discovered a shared fascination with the attractive and the repulsive, and with the erotic tension between the two, and the encounter grew into a close friendship and a lasting artistic conversation. Across their distinct practices, both artists have explored the unstable territories between the body, materiality and desire, producing work that resists easy categorization.

The presentation arrived at a moment of renewed institutional attention for both artists. Their work is included in the group exhibition 'The 90s: Art and Fashion' at Tate Britain, which opened in early October, and follows their joint inclusion in 'YBA & BEYOND: British Art in the 90s from the Tate Collection', shown in Tokyo and Kyoto. Chadwick's touring exhibition 'Life Pleasures' has traveled from The Hepworth Wakefield in 2025 to Museo Novecento and Kunsthaus Graz in 2026, while de Monchaux's major retrospective, 'Studio, Wounds, and Battles, Desire is the Reiteration of Hope', opened at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris this year.

Chadwick, often described as a mentor to the Young British Artists, is known for materially charged explorations of flesh, the organic and the abject. De Monchaux, a leading Goldsmiths graduate of her generation, has built a practice around armored, leather-bound forms that bind eroticism to aggression.

Saltoun's booth proposed that their shared inquiry — into how bodies attract, repel and transform — remains as charged now as it was in 1994, and the fair presentation offered collectors a chance to engage with two careers currently being reassessed by museums.