The Art Market London Hosts Frieze and 154 African Art Fair
In the Return of Art Fairs, Smaller Is Better
At a time when many huge events take been canceled, i-54, Art Paris and Viennacontemporary gladly threw open their doors.
Wearing a yellowish face mask designed in Federal democratic republic of ethiopia, the gallerist Rakeb Sile greeted a trickle of visitors to her booth one recent morning at the ane-54 Gimmicky African Art Off-white in London. Addis Fine Art — the gallery of which she is a founder in the Ethiopian majuscule, Addis Ababa — had on brandish a colorful cityscape, a portrait painted on fragments of used sheet and a jewel-studded black greatcoat worn in a recent operation-art piece exterior Buckingham Palace.
"With the right precautions, we just have to keep things moving," said Ms. Sile, who is of Ethiopian descent, referring to the pandemic. She said the gallery owed it to its staff and artists, and to the 1-54 fair, which was founded in London in 2013 and is at present also held in New York and Marrakesh, Kingdom of morocco.
"The narrative on Africa is always then apartment, and very, very shallow," she said. "Somewhere like this, you can come in and really discover things that y'all just never thought you would notice."
Prototype
The pandemic has led most of the world's fairs to cancel en masse and instead accept online editions. These include Art Basel, in Hong Kong, Basel, Switzerland, and Miami Beach; FIAC, which was to have taken place in Paris this week; and the Frieze Fine art Fair in London, which commonly coincides with ane-54.
Withal 1-54 and at least two other stalwarts, Art Paris and Viennacontemporary, decided to go alee this fall.
The context could hardly accept been tougher. The virus has caused astringent restrictions on travel and crowds, ii defining features of any international fair. According to a midyear fine art-market place survey on the virus's impact that was published by Art Basel and UBS Global, fair cancellations in the get-go half of 2020 accept led to galleries' generating merely 16 percent of their sales at art fairs, downwardly from 46 percent during the same period last year. Nine of 10 galleries predicted no second-half recovery in this sector of the business concern, and only a third forecast a sales increase at fairs next year.
One time Frieze went virtual, one-54, which ran from Oct. viii to 10, could have canceled. It was helped by its smallness and its location at Somerset House, a stately 18th-century building in primal London with a warren of interconnected rooms that allowed 1-way traffic menstruation and strict crowd command.
Though the fair, at capacity, drew only 3,000 visitors this year (down from eighteen,000 in 2019) and featured thirty galleries (downwardly from 45), several booths sold out, including Ed Cantankerous Art, which featured ruglike textile works by the Welsh-Ghanaian creative person Anya Paintsil. The off-white itself broke even.
"In a earth where people are more and more worried nearly big gatherings, about safety and almost the prospect of getting ill, we have to think about more intimate formats, and ours happens to be one such format," Touria El-Glaoui, the fair's founding manager, said after its end. "Nosotros're already modest, and already flexible, unlike a off-white in a convention center that hosts more than than 100 galleries."
Image
Ms. El-Glaoui said she hoped to go alee with the New York edition of 1-54 adjacent May — and to hold it in the photographer Annie Leibovitz's old studio, the Caldwell Factory, equally had been planned for this year before its cancellation.
Discounting likewise helped make the fairs happen. Viennacontemporary, which offered half-toll booths, ended up hosting 65 galleries in full, downwardly from 110 last year. Art Paris gave a xv percent discount to established galleries and xiv newer ones, and gave the latter the proceeds of its ticket sales, a total of 110,000 euros (almost $129,000). A total of 112 galleries participated in the Paris fair this year, down from 150 in 2019.
Art Paris was the first off-white to have the post-lockdown plunge and keep as normal, occupying the domed turn-of-the-century Grand Palais from Sept. 10 to 13. This year's edition drew almost 57,000 visitors, down 10 per centum from last year. It also had first-time exhibitors that included the high-profile gallery Perrotin and multiple half-dozen-digit sales, among them those of a drawing past Giacometti and ii sculptures by César.
Art Paris was long perceived every bit a largely local art-world outlier. Merely "what was previously singled out every bit a weakness in my example — that the fair wasn't international enough — turned out to be an advantage," said Guillaume Piens, its managing director since 2012.
Image
"Purchases were mainly by French collectors, challenging the commonly held conventionalities that France has few collectors and that we'd be nothing without American buyers," he added. "Things take changed a lot."
Mr. Piens said he was correct to have resisted turning Art Paris into a clone of other large, global fairs, where visitors run across "practically the same things," regardless of where they go, and "it's like driving down the same highways, with the same names and the aforementioned galleries all over."
Johanna Chromik, artistic manager of Viennacontemporary, besides noted that local — pregnant Austrian — collectors fabricated that fair a success this year, bookkeeping for half of sales, up from the usual i-third. The Vienna result, which ran from Sept. 24 to 27, as well caters to Austria'southward neighbors, especially the Czechia, Slovenia and Hungary.
Image
Putting on the fair was difficult, Ms. Chromik said — "you can imagine how many sleepless nights I had" — only she added that collectors were "highly motivated" and "really buying; we had solid to really skillful sales this twelvemonth." Many visitors had not been to a off-white since the Armory Evidence in New York in March, so they were pleased "to see art for existent, in three dimensions," she said.
Collectors' enthusiasm was confirmed by the UBS/Fine art Basel report. Despite the virus, 82 percent said they planned to attend exhibitions, art fairs and other events in the ensuing 12 months. More than half hoped to attend events both at dwelling house and abroad. And 59 percent of the loftier-cyberspace-worth respondents said that the virus had increased their thirst for collecting.
Image
And then fairs seem here to stay, the events' directors said; there will only be fewer of them.
"I don't believe in returning to how nosotros lived before 2019," Ms. Chromik said. "We learned from this yr."
She said some of the practices introduced at Viennacontemporary this twelvemonth — similar shared booths, of which in that location were about half a dozen — could well continue.
What the Covid-xix pandemic has fabricated articulate, said Mr. Piens of Art Paris, is that the final several years featured "also much foie gras and also much Champagne, resulting in a behemothic indigestion."
Mr. Piens added, "We're all on a nutrition now."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/arts/fairs-small.html
0 Response to "The Art Market London Hosts Frieze and 154 African Art Fair"
Post a Comment