When Emanuela Tarizzo arrived in London in 2006 to study at Courtauld Institute of Art, she was surprised. “I discovered that art history was seen as an elitist subject,” she says, eyebrows raising. “And that was strange.” In Italy, where she grew up, it had been a school subject like any other, taught from the age of 10 alongside history and maths. Announcing you meant to pursue it further brought only practical questions: what type of job? Which museum? “Nobody… would say, ‘Oh, ladies who lunch.’”
Since April last year, Tarizzo has been director of Frieze Masters art fair. She came to the role from the other side of the aisle – nine years at Christie’s and a directorship at Tomasso – and has the polished calm of someone used to talking people through purchases with several noughts attached. Her role at Masters means that, during the fair, she has little time to stand still, let alone lunch (asked about her Frieze fair uniform, she smiles: “Trainers, trainers, trainers all the way”). When the two white tents occupy Regent’s Park in October, the territory is split, roughly, into pre-2000 (Frieze Masters) and post-2000 (Frieze London). Tarizzo’s side will feature nearly 140 galleries from 30 countries, selling millennia’s worth of work, from classical marbles to kaleidoscopic modernist canvases.
Galleries aside, there are three further sections to the fair. Spotlight, curated by the Courtauld’s Devika Singh and Sofia Gotti, will feature midcentury work from South Asia to West Africa. Reflections, curated by Abby Bangser, will show pieces inspired by the iconic architecture of Casa Luis Barragán in Mexico City and the Cosmic House in Holland Park. Threaded across the fair will be Anke Kempkes’s Queering Modernism. “What we’re trying to do with the section is to position these stories as integral and foundational to 20th-century modernism,” Tarizzo says.
Storytelling is key to Tarizzo’s way of working and to the trade itself, which has told plenty of tales about who belongs in it; when objects are old, the assumption tends to be that the traditions around them are too. That is shifting. “There are more women in directorial positions, who lead galleries,” she says – Cordelia Bourne at Patrick Bourne & Co, on British art from the 18th to mid-20th centuries; curator Laura De Jonckheere at De Jonckheere, on Flemish painting; Valentina Vico, a partner at Benappi, on Italian and European Old Masters – “and it’s important to be an example.” Tarizzo was hired by women herself, a first after years of being hired by men. What matters, she says, is parity.
The fair is immersive, thrilling, exhausting. “It might sound odd, but the one thing I was not prepared for is the feeling when it ends,” she says. There’s achievement, and something like bereavement – “all very strange and sweet at the same time”.
Hair & make-up: Jodie Hyams. With thanks to Sir John Soane’s Museum
