E
manuela Tarizzo’s love affair with art started at the age of ten with history of art lessons at school in her native Milan, Italy, “I always felt that art was a fantastic vehicle for storytelling, and for understanding about humanity.”
Tarizzo, 37, is the new director of Frieze Masters, which has run alongside Frieze London for over a decade — together they make up one of the biggest fairs in the art world calendar, setting up shop in a huge complex of tents in Regent’s Park for a frenetic week in October. While Frieze London focuses on contemporary art, Frieze Masters brings together millennia of art history under one roof, and has long prided itself on mixing periods and practices in a way that cuts cleanly across the silos of “old master”, “modern” and “decorative”.
Emanuela Tarizzo
“What makes Freeze Masters a key fair within the art calendar is that the framework we offer is not something that you see elsewhere in other fairs,” Tarizzo explains to me over Zoom, looking chic and pared back in a grey T-shirt. “It really wants you to discover things that you may not have been familiar with before. You may come because you’re invited by a certain gallery that specialises in ancient art, but you can also discover medieval manuscripts, Australian First Nations paintings, pre-Colombian artefacts or Brazilian 20th-century masters that have previously been overlooked, not forgetting the old master paintings, drawings, sculpture, the curated sections. I think it’s very much a voyage of discovery that changes every year.”
