Focus Booth F10
London NW1 4LL
Focus returns to Frieze London from 15 – 19 October 2025 to champion emerging talent from across the globe. Frieze’s long-standing section dedicated to fostering a community of young galleries up to 12 years old is advised by Joumana Asseily (founder, Marfa’), Piotr Drewko (founder, Wschód) and Cédric Fauq (chief curator, CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux).
In The Church of Self, Glen Pudvine delves into the crisis of meaning in an increasingly secular, digitally saturated world. Through painting, performance, video and mirrored architecture, he examines how modern rituals of self-optimisation - wellness, fitness, personal branding - have replaced traditional communal belief systems, elevating individuals to prophetic status under the structures of neoliberalism.
However, Pudvine resists a simple critique. Rather than rejecting individualisation outright, The Church of Self explores how breaking things down to the personal level (the core tactic of neoliberal atomisation) can paradoxically be used to challenge the ideology itself. By foregrounding vulnerability, endurance, and imperfection, Pudvine offers a vision of individual practice as a site of collectivity and relational healing; gesturing viewers to question privatised ideals of competition, self-surveillance, and self-ownership.
In a mirrored chamber, visitors encounter Caravaggio style nude self-portraits of Pudvine in strenuous fitness poses, lined up like temple icons. Each painting portrays not strength, but struggle - bloodshot eyes, strained muscles - inviting empathy as well as awe.
Reflections merge the viewer’s body alongside Pudvine’s, collapsing the distance between subject, audience and ritual act. The mirror acts both as seduction and critique: a symbol of infinite self-spectacle and a gateway toward shared recognition. A towering mirrored monolith at the edge forms an infinite loop, evoking the endless cycle of data capitalism and algorithmic culture.
Throughout the duration of the fair, Pudvine will also run the equivalent daily distance to his studio around Regent’s Park, which over the 5 days of the fair equates to an ultramarathon. Live-streaming biometric data - heart rate, body temperature, exhaustion - will feed into the installation on a mirrored video screen, bringing life into an otherwise disembodied space. The mirror surface directly overlays the viewer onto Pudvine’s sympathetic and parasympathetic bodily responses. His weary, injured, fluctuating body provides a stark, unglamorous counterpoint to the polished wellness images circulating through digital capitalism. This screen instinctively seduces viewers into self-documentation, a reflex shaped by constant digital media consumption; yet the vulnerable presence of the surrounding painted nudes unsettles this impulse, introducing a critical tension between habitual self-promotion and the ethical complexities of gaze, identification, and solidarity.
The Church of Self also situates itself within the longer lineage of the male nude in art history. Pudvine reclaims the male body not as an object of conquest or idealisation - as seen in much classical and academic painting - but as a vulnerable, permeable form, defined by failure, strain and empathy. Unlike the heroic or mythologised male bodies of the past, Pudvine’s figures resist glorification. Instead, they offer a complicated, open invitation: to recognise fragility as a site of strength and shared humanity.
Finally, painted as devotional icons in the style of Renaissance masters, gold-leaf panelled kettlebell icon-paintings evoke the sacred aesthetics of traditional religious art, drawing parallels between contemporary objects of self-betterment and historical symbols of collective faith.
Through painting, performance, and space, The Church of Self transforms the art fair booth into a temple-like site of embodied resistance - where being well, being vulnerable and being together offer a path out of isolation.
All enquiries info@xxijrahii.net
