London (Frieze & Sluice) Art Fairs

Sluice 3rd floor view

Art Fairs bring new customers to buy new art work. The whole idea is to sell. So when an art fair happen it brings a new proposal outside what is already in vogue. It bring wide range of new proposals; new ideas working together with references of the past. Some artworks that we are able to find within take inspiration from contemporary everyday life, others are developed on lost and old narratives and stories. Artist make new proposals and conscriptions about things that are in the process of take-off, such as the one we can find at Sluice Art Fair. The inspiration on an leading art fair, such as is Frieze, comes from resemblances to paintings, techniques and forms easily associated by collectors, buyers and advisors. We can take also, as examples, the new comer Strarta Art Fair, held one week before at Saatchi Gallery, or PAD London (Art and Design), held during the same week, in Berkeley Square.

A market is an essential element to the dynamics and to keep society alive and thriving. Market in the system of infrastructures that allow multiple and vary relations to exchange things between different parties. Without it society and will perish on the long term. A distinctive image is created by those two market proposals. An illusion of worlds and desires comes to mind. We can find a wide range of witty environments and places. Some carved into to the multi-layered society others printed like cocktail bars on our imagination. A mixture of natural forms and experiences from all over the world. In particular, an artwork reflects on the artists skillfulness to understand his or her surrounding environment in very different ways.

Working simultaneously in very different projects we can perceive the worriers that artists go to collaborate with each other. In the long term, they will became the face (brand) representing each art fair. Sluice is an alternative environment, a laboratory that bringing together artists projects such as Filmarmalade, The Modern Language Experience, Transition Gallery, Division of Labour. The overall idea is to develop a collectors base and interest to pick up on what is being done by amazing artists and offered by the art market. At Frieze, saw a marvellous work by Sandra Gamarra (Genesis 1:26. Then God said: "Let US make main in Our image according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." 12 Oil painting on newspaper, various sizes 8 of 40x29cm, 44x29cm, 58x35cm and 2 of 47x32cm, 2013, between £10-50k), yesterday - "that was sold this morning, _____ saw it, pay for it and took it with him. We had to replaced it for some beautiful works by Alix [Monologo con un cuervo, photograph, 47x47cm, 2011, under £10k] and Gonnord [Sorraia I, photograph 148x110cm, 2013, under £10k]", expressed the enchanting and passionate Juana de Aizpuru (Galeria Juana de Aizupuru, from Madrid, Spain). Adding, further, collector here know what they are buying. You can't bring whatever you think and expect to sell. They don't take a pig in a poke.

Frieze is where bright young projects are on display assembled together with masters and artists that are already inscribed in the art history books. When we came to an art fair we shouldn't create a dialogue between what we see and what we want to be appearing. Everyone brings their own boxes full of trinkets and learning dynamics about creative processes.

Since we are a generation of physically and online shop-keepers. We move around connections between individuals. Where a need to create is imperative. In terms of selling and buying, they all have to pay their bills, like any normal human being.

Dora García, The Joycean Society (installation 100x70cm, £10-50k), 2013 at Galería Juana de Aizpuru

For an art fair like Sluice the level of risks is higher, because it is focused on a unique segment of the market. Frieze was there, but through its deviced practice and positioning went to play a different game. They create the scene when on an international framework the environment was already in place. Both through connections (physical and online), pushing barriers and because the world became more fragmented with its particular structure where different things can exist at the same time while sharing the same space. The end game is what and where we hope to be at the end of it. An art fair is a Life Style where we buy and sell things. Being these things sensibilities, experiences, settings, engagements, bodily printings, i.e., artworks. For a moment Sluice artworks recall Cosmococa (Block-Experiments in Cosmococa – program in progress (1973–74)), by Helio Oiticica and Neville d'Almeida shown by A Gentil Carioca (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) stand, at Frieze, proposals merging individual life-experience with art.

We have the choice to pic up things, objects. What was not real ten, twenty years ago. Although we still have the same gate-keepers and spaces. But we came to expect the unexpected. We, sellers and buyers, navigate in communion voluptuously and inconspicuously through that territory. Collecting history and stories connecting origins, ways of living and bring.

So, if we consider the economic depression that started in 2008, creativity arouses. People move around. Exchanges and unexpected and bizarre ideas and decisions take effects. A new identity is re-created. Inspiring a new generation of sellers and buyers that will push a set of perimeters in the next ten years. Those that we might see at what will Frieze represents to us nowadays. Social media although still being a swamp is what drives what we do. From personal life comments to professional interests to bring a working tool to promote and brand ideas - it is where ideas became visible.

Note: Tickets to Frieze London are now completely sold out! Sluice after party on Sunday evening... that should rock & quick

Frieze Art Fair

Helio Oiticica & Neville d'Almeida, Cosmococa, 1973 (A Gentil Carioca)

In the 1970s, during the Brazilian military dictatorship, and while living in New York, film-maker Neville d'Almeida and artist Helio Oiticica engaged in an experimental collaboration with reserve roles: Block-Experiments in Cosmococa – program in progress (1973–74) [Cosmococa = Cosmologia + Coca] is composed by a series of nine proposals for 'supra-sensorial' environments - each incorporates slide projections, soundtracks, cocaine powder used as pigment in drawings and audience participation - reflecting on know nine figures from popular culture (Luis Buñuel, Yoko Ono, Marilyn Monroe, John Cage, Jimmi Hendrix, Mick Jagger). This multimedia installations (CC1-CC9, of which the first 6 were realized), what Oiticica call's of "quasi-cinema" works, are in essence exploratory cinematic proposals that merge individual life-experience with art. An analysis on modes of spectatorship, languages, formats, and duration that invites the viewer to take an active role.

Professionals at work...

Ryan McGinley, You and My Friends 6 (228.6x228.cm), 2013 (Alison Jacques Gallery)

Professionals at work...

Professionals at work...

The artist is present...

Galerie Buchhloz stand

Stuart Shave/Modern Art stand

Marilá Dardot, The Landscape is Moving, 2013 (Galeria Vermelho)

Jeppe Hein, Geometric Mirrors VI, VII and VIII, 20011 (303 Gallery and Johann König)

Jeppe Hein, Geometric Mirrors VI, VII and VIII (detail), 20011 (303 Gallery and Johann König)

Frieze 180º view

newsfromfrieze201110

newsfromfrieze201110

For the first time, since I started to visit and follow commercial playgrounds for art, did an art fair looked so in vain (in particularly this one); in spite of all the brigth and colorful art works filling stands and crowds of collectors, advisers, artists and other professionals bumping into each others along narrow but comfortable corridors. Frieze VIP preview, this afternoon, presented the usual head-shots: Norah and Norman Stone, Daria (“Dasha”) Zhukova or even Paula Rego were just some of the VIP amongst an international flux of art aficionados.

If there is a crisis, it definitely stayed outside the big white tent installed at Regent Park. Frieze this year was looking into the bright side of life. “We’re always a little tense at the start,” said also Akio Aoki of Vermelho (H6), although he was more encouraged when, by the middle of the afternoon, nine of the artworks brought from Brazil into London had found buyers.

Between 2001 and 2008, galleries tended to bring with them fresh art works, directly from the artist studio, to the most important international art fairs; since 2009, for those who follow the programme delivered by those international commercial spaces, it became more evident that many of the works on show at the fair tended to reflected a long-run bet done by the galleries throughout their annual schedule of exhibitions. Which is good for the artist, since galleries have to liaise more with them; focused more on building an artist career, on one level, and strengthening his or her work, on the other. While, to collectors, they start to see new and more thoughtful work.

The down side of it is in that it is true that «in a recession, more challenging work is harder to shift», and this fact was even more perceptible as I strolled from one stand to the next. Nothing catchy, visually memorable - as the works by Murakami, Hirst or Koons who have market a decade - but instead pieces that anyone could buy for the right price (for more info on prices please read The Art Newspaper Fair edition).

In a quick chat with Brazilian artist, Ernesto Neto, we both come to the same conclusion, that this year it was more into looking for forms rather than into content: brightly coloured and with curveous lines, artworks that reinforced the feeling that the art world exists in a cheerful and leading parallel universe.

LEFT: Wangechi Mutu, 'Venus Trap' (mixed media collage, 22.9x29.8cm), 2011 at Victoria Miro (G5); RIGHT: Christian Jankowski, 'Christian' (The Finest Art on Water), 2011 at Frieze Projects (P5).

Crise, qual crise?

Espíritos em alta, preços em baixo, negócios a acontecer: estas são as características do momento actual

Viagens entre uma tenda montada num jardim (a Frieze Art Fair, em Londres) e um palácio (a FIAC, em Paris), presenças na sucessão de leilões dedicados à arte contemporânea e moderna nas mais prestigiadas casas leiloeiras mundiais destas duas cidades, aliadas às visitas aos múltiplos eventos paralelos que entretanto decorriam; após três meses de pausa, o mundo da arte contemporânea nestas últimas semanas esteve sem tempo para respirar.

Apesar das mudanças decorridas no mercado da arte, o universo artístico esperava com cautelosas expectativas o regresso do Outono. Durante a vernissage da Frieze (14 de Outubro), por entre copos de champanhe a circular nos corredores da feira de arte contemporânea, Miguel Nabinho, director da Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporânea, visivelmente satisfeito afirmava já ter vendido uma peça de Pedro Cabrita Reis – a qual irá fazer companhia ao tapete The Walthamstow Tapestry (2009) de Grayson Perry, adquirido por €164 mil (£150 mil) à Galeria Victoria Miro, de Londres – ao conceituado arquitecto inglês Norman Foster.

O galerista de Lisboa não era o único com este sentimento, também outros negociantes de arte, como por exemplo a galerista Juana de Aizpuru, de Madrid, e o galerista Eduardo Brandão, director da Vermelho, de São Paulo, compartilhavam da mesma sensação – os espíritos em alta, os preços em baixo e os negócios a acontecer. Apercebia-se junto das pessoas uma sensação de calma e do retorno da normalidade comercial ao mercado.

Em oposição a toda a euforia correlativa dos investidores e especuladores que caracterizava as edições anteriores, nesta edição da feira as pessoas estavam mais calmas. Mais reflexivas no momento da compra, isto enquanto em anos anteriores, na primeira meia hora, corria-se para comprar peças com valor extravagantes, para as bolsas nacionais, de artistas como Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami. Na edição deste ano foram vários os casos onde coleccionadores regressavam aos stands para confirmar informações e interesses nas obras expostas pelos galeristas. Alexandra Pinho este ano enriqueceu a colecção do BESart - Colecção Banco Espírito Santo com a aquisição de um conjunto de cinco imagens da fotógrafa brasileira Lucia Koch.

Para os gestores de fundos de investimentos em arte assistiu-se a uma correcção do valor das peças apresentadas: em geral os preços estavam cerca de 40% mais baixos em comparação com anos anteriores, como as esculturas em porcelana de Rachel Kneebone, com preços entre os 27.500 euros e os 60 mil euros. Ainda de acordo com galeristas e analistas presentes na Frieze Art Fair, esta conseguiu também atrair coleccionadores que só recentemente entraram no mercado, com a vantagem de encontrarem preços baixos e uma grande variedade de obras disponíveis.

Entretanto para responder à fraca adesão do mercado norte-americano e alemão, ou à ausências de galerias como a Chantal Crousel, de Paris, a organização da Frieze decidiu este ano transformar a secção da feira anteriormente dedicada a espaços emergentes na Frame. Por €4.3 mil (£4 mil) de aluguer do espaço (mais despesas de deslocação e estadia) esta nova plataforma comercial permitiu a jovens galerias apresentarem exposições individuais de artistas menos conhecidos a preços acessíveis.

Os espíritos estão definitivamente muito melhores do que no ano passado, via-se mais vivacidade no caminhar das pessoas. E se em 2008, em pleno fervilhar da crise económica e financeira mundial, a ausência de peças em vídeos era assinalada, a selecção de obras para a edição da Frieze este ano, pelas galerias participantes não era especialmente comercial. As feiras e as galerias estão a reinventar-se, a adoptarem uma identidade própria para sobreviverem à crise económica.

Published at NS'199/IN#095, Mercado da arte (68), (Diário de Notícias N.º 51343 e Jornal de Notícias N.º 152/122), 31 de Outubro de 2009 Portugal Courtesy: Linda Nylind/Frieze 2009