All in Art Market
Paris Gallery Weekend has undergone significant changes in the past decade. Although it is now a city-spanning exploration of dealerships and institutions, the first edition, staged in 2014, consisted of a single group show of artists nominated by their respective galleries. This year’s iteration retained something of that initial concept through an initiative called Cartes Blanches, in which a dozen dealers invited curators to organise exhibitions of whatever they desired in their galleries.
Art Brussels is a fair much like the city it occupies. Perhaps not as iconic or flashy as Paris, New York, or London, Brussels is, nonetheless, a plucky, punchy European capital that refuses to be passed over or cede its cultural centrality to the European art world.
Two years after the pandemic forced the 55-year-old fair to adopt a clumsy hybrid of online sales and a city-wide gallery crawl, Art Brussels has triumphantly returned to Brussels Expo, also known as the Palace of Exhibitions—an imposing, almost Stalinist, Art Deco tower perched upon the Heysel Plateau, on the northern outskirts of the city. From its sprawling terraced emmarchement, visitors on the doorstep of the fair can look back upon a sweeping vista of the verdant surrounding park with the city’s iconic Atomium looming large in the distance.
The fact that this impressive setting is quickly put out of a visitor’s mind is a testament to the quality and vitality of the works on display inside. This year’s edition presents 152 galleries from 32 countries with more than 800 artists on display. Booths are divided into five unequally sized sections: Prime, Solo, Discovery, Rediscovery, and Artistic Project.
The inaugural edition of Art Antwerp opened on Thursday to a modest but determined crowd of collectors and art professionals who filled the halls of the Antwerp Expo event center, on the Flemish city’s southside. A new art fair on the European circuit, Art Antwerp is an extension of Art Brussels, one of Europe’s longest running and most prominent fairs.
The fair features 59 galleries, the vast majority of which are Belgian, with the rest filled out by the bordering countries of France, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, with the exception of one Austrian gallery. Yet despite its size and parochiality, Art Antwerp demonstrated that fairs don’t need sprawling global monoliths to pack a powerful punch. Sometimes, less is more. Indeed, the vast majority of the participating galleries appeared to have brought their A game, with a particularly strong showing of young figurative painters.
The return of Paris’s Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain (FIAC) after a two-year hiatus due to COVID-19 was met with much trepidation. Despite the strong showing at this month’s Frieze Week in London and the relative success of online sales—which have become an absolute necessity for many galleries over the past year and a half—a mid-year review by Dr. Clare McAndrew on “Resilience in the Dealer Sector” found that French galleries had suffered a 6% decrease in sales due to COVID-19 restrictions, various new regulatory constraints (including the fallout from Brexit), and even political uncertainty, as the 2022 French presidential race begins to gear up. According to the report, over half (58%) of galleries from the major European markets of Spain, France, and Germany were skeptical about their chances of growth this year. However, the mood at FIAC’s VIP opening on Wednesday was one of cautious optimism that seemed to persist and evolve into a mixture of lukewarm satisfaction and even relief as the fair’s 47th edition drew large crowds to the Grand Palais Éphémère up through its closing on Sunday.
After a two-year hiatus due to COVID-19, the Foire Internationale de l’Art Contemporain (FIAC), France’s premier art fair, has come roaring back. On a cool autumn day, swarms of masked visitors descended upon the Grand Palais Éphémère (GPÉ), a temporary structure of the same dimensions and footprint as the 19th-century Grand Palais (which is usually the site of the fair, but is currently undergoing renovation). Elsewhere in the French capital, satellite fairs Asia Now and Paris Internationale are back in action, too.
Slowly but surely, life in European cities is returning to normal. Masks are still ubiquitous features of daily life, but since the middle of May, bars, restaurants, museums, and art galleries have opened again to a public eager to reconnect with social and cultural life. The easing of COVID-19 restrictions has come at a perfect time for art lovers. From June 3rd through 6th (and through June 14th online on Artsy), Brussels, Antwerp, the coastal Belgian town of Knokke, and Paris will host a very special edition of Art Brussels, reformatted and renamed as Art Brussels Week 2021.
The inaugural Parisian edition of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair took place at Christie’s headquarters in the 8th arrondissement from January 20th to 23rd (an online version, on Artsy, continues through the 31st). It was the first time since its founding in 2013 that the fair had come to the French capital, a decision that was made following the postponement of its annual February edition in Marrakech.
The seventh edition of Paris Gallery Weekend took place this past weekend, a month and a half later than in previous years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Sixty participating galleries presenting 72 exhibitions are spread across four neighborhoods or, one could say, three temporalities. Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Marais, the 8th arrondissement, and Pantin-Romainville symbolically represent the past, present, and future of the Parisian art market.
