The combination of place and process in the 2025 presentation of Berg’s works at Frieze Masters is a quite fantastic stroke of artistic serendipity. The fair is held directly beside the Gloucester Gate of Regent’s Park, where Berg lived and worked for nearly twenty years from 1969–1988. As such, every visitor to the fair will – before seeing the works presented there by Frestonian Gallery – have done what Berg did on a daily basis, that is to take a stroll through the park, and (given that the fair takes place in autumn) very likely payed particular attention to the changing of the seasons, before entering the grand tent of the fair itself.
Multiply that pleasant but fleeting interaction by the (at the very least) seven thousand times that Berg made the same kind of journey, and then again by the many hours of each of those days spent in careful contemplation, interpretation and re-expression of the surrounding – from the grandest to the merest detail – and one begins to have a notion of what any place can mean to an artist, and what the Regent’s Park in particular meant to Adrian Berg.
In his choice of prime, and for a large portion of his career sole, subject there is a certain logic. Berg was an avid devourer of poetry, as well as jazz and classical music. He was also keenly interested in mathematics and colour theory. In all these fields lies a balance between a deter-mined, logical structure and the freedom of pure, exuberant, individual expression. In the grand Regency garden – a haven of natural beauty and ordered composition amid the sprawl of London – Berg found a physical manifestation of the combining of passion and thought.
The two central canvases in the Frieze Masters presentation represent the absolute peak of his engagement with his most beloved subject. A fascination with the passage of time and the unrepeatable nature of any specific view provides us in both cases with a carefully ordered and reconstructed series of moments caught in time by an artist perfectly in tune with his subject and in full command of his medium. Combined with the watercolours, early smaller canvases and the exquisite treatment of golden leaves and shadows in the two St Katharine’s Precinct paintings the presentation at Frieze Masters can be seen as a fragment of a love letter that Berg spent twenty years crafting, rediscovered some forty years later, on his own doorstep.
