Issue 211

The May/June issue of frieze is Andrew Durbin’s first as editor. As his tenure begins, the magazine has refreshed its design and formats for a new decade. Cindy Sherman answers our questionnaire and Paul Chan asks: is anything in metaphysics worth redeeming? Plus, a series of columns on comedy – from guidance on how to crash an art-world party to a review of Jerry Saltz’s How to Be an Artist.

Also featuring: a profile by Matthew McLean on Jimmy Robert in his Berlin studio, an essay by Francesca Wade on the anarchist, art critic and literary editor Félix Fénéon, who long before Twitter, was turning news stories in fin-de-siècle France into three-line novels; an interview by Barbara Casavecchia with Yuri Ancarani ahead of the premiere of his latest film Atlantis (2020); and a roundtable with Claire-Louise Bennett, Brian Dillon, Goshka Macuga, Bill Sherman and Carmen Winant, who consider Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–29) – an unfinished attempt to map the ‘afterlife of antiquity.’

Novelist Vanessa Onwuemezi writes on Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s new painting, Prospect West of a Necromancer (2019) –and 22 reviews from around the world, including Adam Linder & Shahryar Nashat at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and a three-part exhibition by Prem Sahib at Southard Reid, London.