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.