Rise Art launches extended partnership with Minor Attractions, starting with London-based gallery Santi

Minor Attractions is one of the most exciting art fairs in the world. Amidst the feeding frenzy of Frieze Week in London, it transforms The Mandrake hotel into a gathering place that feels both intimate and monumental. From its warren of hotel rooms turned fair booths to its dizzyingly expansive events programme, the fair feels like a place where something significant is always happening – something urgent, something you’ll regret missing.

Last year, we collaborated with Minor Attractions on an online presentation that sought to capture some of the fair’s energy. With help from curators including Marcelle Joseph and Hector Campbell, we selected a concise group of works from the 70-plus exhibiting galleries to showcase on our website, alongside context and critical reflection.

In continuation of this spirit, we are now rolling out a year-round collaboration built around a series of focused, in-depth presentations produced in collaboration with a single gallery.

This month, the gallery Santi – an exciting new addition to London, which celebrated its first anniversary last month – presents a group of five new prints by the Florida-born, London-based artist Sean Pearl.

Each work, though small in scale, contains a mélange of recognisable motifs borrowed from the history of image-making. “Sean Pearl’s etchings engage with symbols that predate the artist, drawing on existing imagery and its continued circulation,” explains Santiago Steib, the gallery’s founder. Invariably, there is a sense of humour and cynicism in such engagements. At Pearl’s hand, the printmaking method itself also becomes fodder for pastiche. “These works feel prop-like,” he writes, “as if I am role-playing an etcher.”

These are five prints about printmaking; about the artist as an image recycler and a conduit – often a mischievous conduit – for the memetic repetition of forms and ideas throughout history.