For the Frieze Viewing Room, Josh Lilley is proud to present six new works by British painter Ryan Mosley, including the debut of large-scale wall hangings.

The Ryan Mosley presentation at Frieze New York 2020 was conceived as an introduction and an evolution alike. It was to be Mosley’s first monographic US fair presentation since his 2011 solo booth with Alison Jacques at the Armory Show, and his first under the Josh Lilley canopy; it was the planned unveiling of the textile wall hangings, a body of work Mosley has been developing in private for the past 12 months; and it was a new approach to the artist’s oeuvre, honouring extensive discourse established over the past decade while looking at his work with fresh eyes.

The booth design comprised four large paintings, one per wall in an interior space with a narrow opening that implied a parallel reality. The outside walls were stages for the proclamation of two textile wall hangings, a new strand in the artist’s practice, appearing as banners for the passing public. The new paintings, from medium to large, span the range of group scenes for which Mosley is known — rites, pacts and leisure scenes for characters outside of space and time — in his signature scholarly, wide palette.

The paintings are a snapshot of a practice, picking up on the artist’s inclusion this spring in Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, an important treatise exhibition on the global stakes of contemporary figuration told through ten painters, among them Cecily Brown, Daniel Richter, Tala Madani and Dana Schutz.

The wall hangings are an extension of a major commission for 22 Bishopsgate, the London skyscraper that will open this autumn, as the second largest structure in the country, with eight Mosley works in its lobby. The two works on display are the first and only works of this kind available to the public. Hand-cut, dyed and assembled through a laborious, many-step process, these new works shed light on the long-honed, hard-won processes — formal, manual and neural — behind Mosley’s compositions.

This is Josh Lilley’s first solo project with the artist, who has appeared in key gallery group shows over the past decade, including the opening exhibition in 2009, the 10th-anniversary show in 2019, and 2017’s A New Kitchen Sink, a group show treatise on British figurative painting in a moment of social change.

Ryan Mosley (b. 1980, Chesterfield, UK) has been the subject of multiple solo exhibitions at Alison Jacques, London; Tim Van Laere, Antwerp; and EIGEN + ART, Berlin and Leipzig. He will hold his first solo exhibition at Josh Lilley in 2021.