Elena Soboleva (@elenasoboleva) is a Specialist at Artsy.

Sail past the crowds admiring Kusamas, Condos, and Emins. There will be plenty more in the next fair and the one after. Instead, this week at Regent’s Park, stop by these 10 booths and galleries to check out what’s really new. And I don’t mean Christian Rosa new; you’re not going to find the majority of these Under the Influence while at Phillips nor at Christie’s First Open, quite yet. With strong examples of sculpture and installation, these artists invade London and push material boundaries and art fair-goers’ attention spans, while challenging viewers to elevate their cognition.

Jayson Musson – Salon 94 – Booth A1

Unleashing ‘Hennessy Youngman’ persona on the U.K. in the form of cryptic pseudo-iconographic canvases, (based on comic book perceptions of what ‘modern art looks like’) Musson rewrites pop-culture with his own unique take. He currently has a show at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in his hometown of Philadelphia with Alex Da Corte, and this week brings his humor to the Brits.

Michael Rey  – Office Baroque – Booth B11 

Hailing from L.A., Rey’s “IBJECTS” are hybrid forms which occupy a space between between image and object. Made from oil on plasticine clay on panel, the works are flat near-recognizable shapes that intersect painting and sculpture with holes, which the artist calls “orifices, points, or measures of space.”

Ben Schumacher – Croy Nielsen – Focus, Booth J7

After curating a summer show with Berlin’s leading space for emerging talent, Croy Nielsen, Ben Schumacher presents his analog-meets-digital sculptures at Frieze. Packing more information than any press release could convey or hard drive could contain, his elaborate systems push the limits of conceptualization into sleek forms.

Michael Dean – Supportico Lopez – Focus, Booth G21

Drooping, tongue-like, and corporeal in essence, Michael Dean’s “Analogue” series (left), are equally evocative and lethargic while propped against the walls. Berlin gallery Suportico Lopez is bringing his sculptures to Frieze along with some excellent pieces by Zin Taylor and Steven Bishop, promising an all-round great booth.

Laure Prouvost – MOT International – Main, Booth F7 

For a mid-fair respite, melt into one of Prouvost’s films. This pixie-cut, French queen of video, who unexpectedly claimed the Turner prize last year, has recently turned the hearts and eyes of many Americans her way. MOT presents Grandma’s Dream, 2013 which compliments the Turner Prize piece and employs whispers to tell a personal narrative.

Ante Timmermans – Barbara Seiler – Focus, Booth J12 

Presenting an enveloping installation that delves into philosophical tropes of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot along with a five-member dance troupe, Belgian artist Timmermans brings his laborious drawings and performances to Frieze. He synthesizes repeating motifs such as the donkey, a traditional animal of burden, along with symbols of order and control. 

Jonas Wood – David Kordansky Gallery – Main, Booth C1

Bringing West Coast cool to the grey U.K. shores, Kordansky presents a booth including L.A.-based Jonas Wood, an artist who American collectors have been chasing for couple of years (and whose works have made it to Phillips). Wood creates collages, which then in turn he paints; the final, flat effect is akin to something that Matisse would’ve created, had he been living circa now and a devoted NBA fan. In his works exquisite fauna and hip-hop culture collide.

Virginia Overton – Freymond-Guth Fine Arts Ltd. – Focus, Booth H17

Working in abstract sculptural forms that tend to challenge the nature of the materials used, Overton creates pieces with rigor and poise. For Frieze, she is in the Focus section upheaving and upending her practice and the floorboards.

Justin Adian at Skarstedt + Eddie Martinez at Timothy Taylor + Will Boone at Jonathan Viner Gallery 

Recalling the American generation of manly AbEx personas, this is what happens when you take New York’s bearded boys (Boone has yet to grow his) and transplant them to London. These three, who are all friends back at home, will be occupying London and your Instagram feed—and they’ll be having more fun than anyone else, along with the Half Gallery and Karma crew. 

Justin Adian’s well-deserved first solo show in UK at Skarstedt opened this Monday. His warped and malleable forms have a quality which is irresistible in person. Playing with tension between canvas and wall, sculpture and painting, the ‘Backlit’ works cast iridescent shadows.

Sunday Art Fair 

Lastly, if you really want to see some great emerging art, make your way over to The Sunday Fair just down the street from Frieze. There you will find Zürich’s BolteLang, London’s Seventeen Gallery, New York’ s Laurel Gitlen and Kate Werble, and Detroit’s What Pipeline. All 24 participating galleries are carefully chosen and excel at curatorially driven art installation and artists who are way more substance than hype.

Photo credits: Will Boone, GOLIAD. Courtesy of Jonathan Viner, London; Jayson Musson, Stone River IV, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York; Michael Rey, Knimpp, 2014. Courtesy the artist and Office Baroque, Brussels; Michael Dean. n (Working Title), 2013. Courtesy always Supportico Lopez, Berlin; Jonas Wood. Orange Orchid Clipping, 2014. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles; Justin Adian. Photo by Elena Soboleva.

Elena Soboleva works for Art.sy  – an online platform for discovering and collecting art.

Numerous events shaped the art world in 2012, including the thirteenth iteration of Documenta festival in Kassel, Germany, a record-setting Contemporary Evening sale at Christie’s and the unprecedented hurricane, the effects of which have left a lasting impact on Chelsea.  Here is a roundup of the the year’s best, which I felt worth commemorating as the highlights of 2012 and my picks for what to expect in 2013.

1)  Best Art Festival: Documenta 13 

Without a doubt the greatest art event of 2013. No other art world happening, retrospective or biennial could match the exquisite cultural organism which Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev created in Kassel, Germany. Its subtlety was underscored by a cohesive vision with a decentralized focus, within which a multitude of microcosms sprung to life.

Finding the agency and memory imbued in objects, and delving into multidisciplinary fields and difficult histories, Documenta 13 wove together hundreds of strains, ideas and artists. The works are countless but I could not miss mentioning the poignant simplicity of Tino Sehgal’s black-out performance, Theaster Gates’ study of material culture and  Adrian Villar Rojas’ clay explorations in form and architecture set amongst a tiered garden. Also numbering amongst the highlights of the year were Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s sound installations in the Karlsaue Park and the Hauptbahnhof train station.

2) Best Show: Jesper Just / This Nameless Spectacle

This was Just’s first exhibition at James Cohan Gallery and one of the best shows I saw in Chelsea last year.  Featuring three video works, which concisely explore cinematic tropes without ever succumbing to the faults of oversimplified, didactic cliches or undecipherable abstract concepts. Spectacle, only in name, the show was profoundly mesmerizing and built up a tension between the narratives depicted and their absorbing effect on the viewer.

3) Best reflection of our time: Richard Phillips

Richard Phillips show at Gagosian Gallery was probably the most controversial and misunderstood exhibition of the year. It brought to light the difficulty in navigating contemporary art and our own desire to deny the carnal instinct incited by his oversized, hyper-realistic Pop canvases.  The complexity of the relationship between the viewer and artwork was heightened through the celebrity subjects, Sasha Grey, Lindsay Lohan and Adriana Lima, whose inherent iconicity destabilized perception.

4) Best proof that New York is still the capital of the art world: Frieze NY

The first iteration of Frieze NY Art Fair delivered well beyond everyone’s expectations. Featuring a stellar roster of international galleries, with Roberta’s Pizza and The Fat Radish cuisine, all housed in an airy tent, which even spawning its own twitter meme — the show was a hit.  But more than a success, it proved the question on everyone’s mind of whether NY can sustain two fairs. The answer is clearly yes. This year will be the centennial anniversary of the Armory Show and Eric Shiner, the Director of the Andy Warhol Museum, will be at the curatorial helm of the American Focus section that is bound to be terrific.

5) Best Season: Park Avenue Armory

When thinking of which institution provided the most consistent and stellar exhibitions in the past year, my mind went straight to the Park Avenue Armory.  The lineup featured: Space Program: Mars by Tom Sachs, Merce Cunningham’s final choreographic collage and the most recent The Event of a Thread installation by Ann Hamilton which transformed the space into a swinging playground.

The Park Avenue Armory had an exceptional program in 2012, and succeeded in uniting art, performance and experience in one space.  The highlight of the year was Janet Cardiff’s The Murder of the Crows, an overwhelming installation of over 200 speakers at various heights, progressing through a 29 minute cycle of symphonic movements ranging from the Red Army march to dream-like sonatas.

6) Best Opening: Brant Foundation

Being whisked away for a Sunday afternoon to Greenwich, Connecticut to mingle with the art world elite under a billowing tent, housed on Brant’s own polo fields is a perfect recipe for an opening.  The two solo shows this year, Karen Kilimnik and Nate Lowman, each offered a complete artist’s vision, and incorporated site-specific elements that extended the work beyond the exhibition space. Whether Lowman’s ‘readymade’ white Bronco that had belonged to O. J. Simpson or Kilimnik’s Fountain of Youth spilling forth to mirror the idyllic setting, the Brant Foundation remained a terrific destination for a grand fête.

7) Best Art Party: House Party at The Boiler, Pierogi Gallery 

Maybe it was due to the recession or lack of jobs for MFAs, maybe just because he could. Artist Andrew Ohanesian took a bold approach and invested his grad school savings into building a fully functioning interior of a suburban home in a Williamsburg gallery space and throwing a giant house party.  The piece had resonance for anyone who’d spent their teen years in a that setting and was accurate right down to the contents of every drawer and week-old pizza in the fridge.  Above all, it was a ton of fun.

8) Best Vision – Trevor Paglen / The Last Pictures

Quixotic at heart and pointedly visionary, The Last Pictures acknowledged spacecraft as the last monument of our era. Presented in partnership with Creative Time, the project was the culmination of Paglen’s research as an artist in residence at MIT.  He created an ultra-archival disc of images, capable of lasting in space for billions of years and in November of 2012, traveled to Kazakhstan to launch the satellite EchoStar XVI carrying this archive of humanity. Attached to the satellite’s anti-Earth deck and in geostationary orbit, the disc will broadcast over ten trillion images over its fifteen-year lifetime. For the New York celebration of this project, Paglen was joined by filmmaker and artist Werner Herzog for an epic discussion on life beyond our planet and the terrain of future man.

9) Best Revival: Jonas Mekas 

The pioneering avant-garde filmmaker, who is the touchstone for every artist working in time-based media, finally received well-deserved attention last year. The Centre Pompidou in Paris retrospective was followed by an exhibit at the Serpentine Gallery in London, which opened in December.  Mekas also recently celebrated his 90th birthday and Anthology Film Archives, the New York film establishment which he co-founded in 1970, hosted a week-long program of rare screenings to mark the occasion.

10) Best Sign of the Times: $1.068 billion

That’s how much contemporary art sold in the week of November 2012 proving wrong every naysayer and pessimist waiting for the art market to crash.

Notable Mentions:

Best Acquisition: Though there were many important acquisitions this year, MoMA’s purchase of John Cage’s 4’33 was especially significant.

Best Birthday: The 25 year anniversary of the GIF (graphic interchange format) was celebrated by a project by Tumblr and Paddle8 in Miami Basel this year. The exhibit brought together artists and curators to honor the bitmap that has outlasted most other quarter-century old technologies with its anachronistic charm.

All images courtesy of Elena Soboleva, except for Safe from Harm, 2012, digital c-print, Richard Mosse, Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York