Displaying items by tag: Frieze Art Fair

Frieze London and Frieze Masters open this week (October 6-9) at the Regents Park in London. It’s their 14th and 5th editions, respectively; the fairs will bring together more than 300 of the world’s leading contemporary art galleries from 30 countries. Frieze London will feature The Nineties, a new gallery section curated by Nicolas Trembley, as well as ambitious installations and solo presentations by the world’s most exciting artists, including many major female figures. Frieze Masters will excite with new curators, innovative gallery collaborations, incoming antiquities specialists, and Frieze Master Talks that will feature Marlene Dumas, Okwui Enwezor, Gabriele Finaldi, Philippe Parreno, Alastair Sooke and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Frieze Sculpture Park will open concurrently with the fair and will remain on view through January 2017.

Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde fish and Piero Manzoni’s white canvas were among the top purchases during Frieze Week in London as the auction houses sold 231.2 million pounds ($373 million) of art.

As the biggest week-long concentration of art events in Europe ended yesterday, dealers at Frieze Art Fair individually reported brisk sales and the tallies at the auction houses almost doubled from last year’s October sales.

Frieze Week, a seven-day concentration of art events, is currently underway in London. Between auctions, selling exhibitions, and a swath of fairs, approximately $2.2 billion worth of art will be up for grabs.

The epicenter of the event, the Frieze Art Fair, will open to VIP guests on Tuesday, October 14. Now in its twelfth year, the fair will present contemporary offerings from 162 international dealers, including Gagosian Gallery, Marian Goodman Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Casey Kaplan, Lehmann Maupin, Pace Gallery, Galerie Perrotin, Sprüth Magers, White Cube, and David Zwirner. Located in a bespoke structure in Regent’s Park, the Frieze Art Fair features a number of unique sections.

In a surprise move, Frieze art fair announced on Thursday that in 2015 Victoria Siddall will become director of Frieze London and Frieze New York.

The fair’s co-founders, Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover, the current directors, said that the appointment of Ms. Siddall, who will also retain her position as director of Frieze Masters, will “give us the opportunity to focus on the future and to explore new projects for Frieze.”

For the entirety of its 21-year run, the Outsider Art Fair has been held during the winter months. This year, the show, which highlights Outsider, Self-Taught, and Folk Art, will take place in the spring, from May 8 through May 11 at Chelsea’s Center 548, the former home of the Dia Art Foundation in New York City. The show will coincide with the New York edition of the Frieze Art Fair.

Eleven galleries who have been with the Outsider Art Fair since the first show will return this year including American Primitive, Ricco/Maresca, Marion Harris, and Carl Hammer. In total, 46 exhibitors from around the globe will participate in the 2014 Outsider Art Fair.

Founded by Sanford Smith, the Outsider Art Fair was acquired by Wide Open Arts in 2012. Since its inception, the Outsider Art Fair has been dedicated to showcasing works by artists who have been obscured, neglected, or overlooked.

The inaugural Frieze Masters fair is already drawing comparisons to TEFAF Maastricht, the pinnacle of Old Masters fairs that takes place annually in the Netherlands. Featured alongside the contemporary art world staple, the Frieze Art Fair, Frieze Masters has been watching the sales add up.

Highlights include a Louise Bourgeois bronze, Avenza Revisted (1968–69), that was sold by New York’s Cheim & Reid gallery for $1.5 million, Bruce Nauman’s installation, Parallax Shell (1971), along with the drawing for it, which was sold by Sperone Westwater (New York) for $2–3 million, and Pablo Picasso’s Homme et Femme au Bouquet (197) which brought in around $9 million during the fair’s preview thanks to Wan de Weghe Fine Art (New York).

Concluding on October 14, Frieze Master still has plenty of time to keep the sales coming.

Committed to showcasing the best in contemporary art, the The Frieze Art Fair decided to mix things up in honor of its tenth anniversary. Taking place from October 11 –14, the fair will exhibit ancient works at the simultaneous inaugural show, Frieze Masters. The fair will feature 96 galleries offering works from the last 4,000 years. While the inclusion of non-contemporary work encourages crossover collecting, it also allows patrons to explore the past’s influence on contemporary art.

Between the Frieze Masters’ exhibitors and the 175 contemporary galleries participating in the fair, there will be a total of $1.5 billion worth of art in London’s Regent’s Park. After last night’s exclusive VIP preview, it seems that collectors are anxious to buy.

One of the first pieces to sell at the fete was Pablo Picasso’s Homme et Femme au Bouquet priced at $8.5 million. An unidentified U.S.-based collector snapped up the painting at Frieze Masters. Over at the contemporary fair, Paul McCartney’s 2012 mixed-media sculpture, White Snow Head, sold within the first ten minutes of the preview for $1.3 million.

Attracting thousands of visitors from around the world including big name collectors such as Martha Stewart, PPR chief executive officer Francois-Henri Pinault, and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, it will be interesting to see the effect the fair’s widened scope will have on sales.

Contemporary art fairs have in the last decade become so routine that they must work to give visitors unexpected or memorable experiences. Think food from a trendy Brooklyn pizzeria, a talk by French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman on Andre Malraux’s “imaginary museum,” and car rides home in BMWs playing audio works created by artists and writers such as Rick Moody.

The first New York edition of the London-based art fair Frieze, which opened Thursday and runs through Monday, offered all of the above in an unusual location: a 250,000-square-foot white tent designed by the Brooklyn firm SO-IL set up on Randall’s Island, a small land mass east of Manhattan that is home to a track and field stadium and various athletic fields.

Inside the tent, the event worked against expectations in other ways. Many of the galleries’ booths — there were about 180 — seemed less congested than the one-stop-shopping mini-emporiums of other big fairs. The buzzword for this approach is “curated,” suggesting (if not always delivering) a museum-like emphasis on quality over quantity.

Yes there were the familiar, high-impact sort of attention-getters that work so well in fairs: a bright sun of a yellow disk sculpture by Anish Kapoor that plays an optical trick, receding before your eyes, or a jacked-up and radically rebuilt low-rider (a mix of a 1987 Trabant and a 1973 Chevrolet El Camino) that artist Liz Cohen rigged to give passengers a very bumpy ride.

Other galleries resisted the art-fair overload by giving over their booths to a single artist.  David Kordansky Gallery in L.A., for instance, dedicated its main walls to a handful of abstract oil paintings by artist Jon Pestoni, whose richly layered surfaces work the territory between the aggressive markings of Gerhard Richter and the imperfect geometries of Mary Heilmann.

Gallery director Stuart Krimko said they could have squeezed in more work by more artists but decided to focus on Pestoni instead as a prologue to Pestoni's first solo show in his hometown of L.A., at the gallery in November. “There is a typical art fair experience the bling people expect,” said Krimko. “But part of doing the art fair now is challenging expectations. So we wanted to do something more serious.”

At the very least, the booth isn’t just about making sales off the wall. Krimko said the gallery sold the nine available paintings by the artist for $14,000 to $22,000, based mainly on jpegs, after announcing its representation but before the fair even opened.

The solo show idea also won over New York gallery owner Andrea Rosen, who devoted the lion’s share of her booth to new work by L.A. artist Elliott Hundley, with a sampler of other gallery artists around the corner. “Doing a one-person show as opposed to having a piece here and there, you have a chance to make a real impression,” she said.

London’s Frieze Art Fair opened its doors to VIP guests on Wednesday in an optimistic mood, defiantly showcasing the beautiful, the bohemian and the bizarre despite the volatility in world markets and concerns over the impact on the art world.

High-profile collectors and celebrities such as Russian entrepreneur Evgeny Lebedev and model Elle Macpherson gathered in Regent’s Park at London’s leading fair for the sale of contemporary art, which traditionally sees millions of pounds change hands.

This market has enjoyed several years of strong growth, especially at the top end, but amid global economic uncertainty and in the wake of a few weak London auctions last week, dealers are anxious to see if sales of contemporary art will hold up.

“The market feels sound. For people who have accumulated wealth contemporary art is, in a way, one of the most sophisticated ways of enjoying it...But people do say that the middle part of the market is suffering,” said Nicholas Logsdail, owner of London’s Lisson Gallery, which made five sales in the first three hours.

The White Cube gallery reported brisk trade, selling Antony Gormley’s “Spy”, a rusted steel standing figure, for £300,000 as well as Andreas Gursky’s “Cocoon II” for €600,000. An untitled 2011 painting by Mark Bradford also sold for $400,000. New York’s David Zwirner Gallery, meanwhile, sold a 2003 work by the German painter Neo Rauch for $1.35m to a US collector.

Hiscox, the insurers, have estimated that the five-day event will showcase $350m worth of art, $25m less than last year, displayed by 173 galleries from all round the world, including dealers from Colombia, Peru and Argentina for the first time. As in previous years, the fair also includes a sculpture park.

Many of the pieces on display use the internet and social networking to examine the role of information. A project by the German artist Oliver Laric will exist online only – he is filming the fair and creating an archive of slow-motion footage.

Matthew Slotover, co-founder of Frieze, said: “More galleries applied than ever before to take part. When the markets turned down in August we were worried but good art always sells. This is about getting quality works through the door.”

Laurence Tuhey, associate director of the Timothy Taylor Gallery, said there had been significant interest in the New York-based artist Kiki Smith. Her stained glass piece “A Behold” sold in the afternoon for $125,000. “We had expected doom and gloom but the energy at the start of the fair was really good,” he said.

The founders of the Frieze art fair have announced a new Frieze for New York, an attempt to transport the success of the contemporary art fair in a tent, which in 10 years has become a major fixture in the London art calender, into the heart of one of the richest art markets in the world.

The New York fair, launching next year, will pack 170 American and overseas dealers on to Randall's Island, a park overlooking the East river, with visitors travelling by ferry. The temporary home will be designed by the awardwinning Brooklyn architects SO-IL.

The fair regularly sells out more than 60,000 visitors' tickets each October. In 2004, art worth more than £20m was sold but the level of sales has not been disclosed in recent years – the organisers insist the figures are misleading as thousands of collectors come for the fun of the fair and the deals are actually done afterwards.

The fair has become famous for spectacular annual installations: last year Simon Fujiwara burrowed into the ground to create a fake archaeological excavation partly revealing a Roman city lavishly supplied with art dealers and brothels, apparently newly discovered in the heart of Regents Park. This year, 171 exhibitors from 33 countries have applied for space.