MARTÍN RAMÍREZ and JOSEF KARL RÄDLER [Frieze Masters]

Josef Karl Rädler was a turn-of-the-century autodidact whose compelling canon of double-sided watercolours document life in the pioneering open-air hospital in which he resided. It was there that this once-successful entrepreneur trans-formed himself into The Court Painter of Austria, Siam and Italy, an astounding portraitist whose depictions of fellow inmates startle with their serenity and silence.

The main booth at Frieze Masters is dedicated to the impossible architectures, swirling landscapes and heroic pioneers of Martín Ramírez. Cited by many as the most influential of the self-taught American modernists, Ramírez assembled not just one of most significant bodies of material in the 20th century canon, but one of the foremost by any Latin American artist of any era.

Today Ramírez is in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum and MoMA. Retrospectives include Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (1989) and Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (2010). His work is on display in Kasper König’s The Shadow of the Avant-Garde at Museum Folkwang, Essen (2015) and is central to Lynne Cooke’s 2017 project at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, the Smithsonian Museum, Washington DC, and LACMA, Los Angeles