Sessions Art Club pop-up returns to Frieze London 2025

It’s no secret that food feeds Jonny Gent’s art, just as art fuels his appetite for hospitality. For the painter, creative director of Cabin Studio, and founder of Sessions Arts Club – a Clerkenwell restaurant that’s also an exhibition and performance space – both worlds are full of rituals: of theatre, restraint, and desire. ‘I think food should hum beneath the skin, like a good painting,’ he tells Wallpaper*.

Much like Gent himself, his Clerkenwell restaurant is ever-restless, periodically reimagined by artists and designers, and, since last year, no longer bound by the historic walls of its home in Sessions House, a former courthouse. Its first foray beyond what was once a judges’ dining room came at Frieze London 2024, where the team created a discreet refuge from the fair’s frenzy. The pop-up concept took its cue from the reverse of an artist’s canvas: walls draped in untreated cotton that diffused the light in soft, painterly tones, layered with floral shadow installations by Hattie Fox. The collaboration between Gent, architect Russell Potter of Soda Studio, and Richard J McConkey of A Studio Between was a study in texture, intimacy and suspended time.

For 2025, Sessions Art Club (SAC) returns to Frieze London with a new mise-en-scène: a dining space that sits somewhere between confessional and stage set. Potter, McConkey and Gent reunite to create an environment shaped by cinematic light and tactile form inspired by the primal surfaces of France’s Lascaux caves (the site of prehistoric paintings), and the stylised tension of Paul Verhoeven’s 1992 movie Basic Instinct. The film’s singular blue-lit interrogation scene becomes a visual leitmotif, refracted through shifting shadows and glowing table surfaces that pulse between natural and artificial illumination.

Cut-out objects from Gent and sculptural forms are interspersed with Hattie Fox’s botanical interventions, a surreal echo of cave flora. Guests enter to find a bar framed by a bold architectural façade, which acts as a display, with others stretching across the rear and side walls. In the kitchen, chef Abigail Hill’s menu channels the same sense of seasonal beauty and studied nonchalance found on the permanent Sessions Arts Club site, equally suited to a fleeting mid-fair interlude or a languid, post-gallery lunch. Expect Carlingford oysters, Cobble Lane fennel salami, Jerusalem artichoke risotto, and goat’s curd with rainbow chard.

As with the 2024 edition, the pop-up features limited-edition objects and collaborations: six one-off Tekla bags embroidered with Gent’s handwriting and quotes from Basic Instinct and philosopher Alan Watts; SAC at Frieze posters; Lost Wines Vols 1-3; graphic T-shirts by Mans Ericson of Every Night Studios; Completedworks objects; Drake’s x SAC x Cabin Studio caps; and other pieces that are half art, half artefacts.