Quantity trumped quality at the 2010 London Art Fair, held in January at the Business Design Centre in Islington. 116 galleries exhibited at the UK’s largest Modern British and contemporary art fair, offering paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, ceramics, and mixed media at prices ranging from £25 to £500,000. The spacious, three-floor venue comfortably accommodated the fair’s 23,000 visitors.
One section of the fair, Art Projects, was given over to curated shows by 22 UK and four international galleries, the latter including Foley Gallery (New York), galerie baer (Dresden), Galerie f5,6 (Munich), and Antena Estudio (Mexico City). Art Projects presented solo shows, theme-based group shows, and installations. Foley displayed a selection of Thomas Allen’s witty pulp fiction-inspired photographs, while Golden Thread Gallery featured works executed during, or inspired by, Northern Ireland’s Troubles. Sarawut Chutiwongpeti’s Wishes, Lies and Dreams at HF Contemporary Art purported, without success, to explore the unconscious by means of plexiglass and epoxy bears, monkeys, and skeletons, among other unidentifiable objects.
Another section, Photo50, showcased fifty works of thirteen contemporary photographers selected by a panel of collectors, critics, curators, and museum directors. Highlights here included Flavia Sollner’s Polaroid series The Night and Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s photographs of props produced for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

Whereas Art Projects and Photo50 showed art of what was for the most part better-than-average quality, the main fair appeared preoccupied with quantity: plethoric color-field canvases, Impressionistic figure studies and landscapes, colored-paper silhouettes, and Henry Moore-esque bronze casts. Works that caught the eye did so primarily for their sheer kitschness, such as David Reimondo’s resin-cast bread ‘paintings’ at Albemarle Gallery and Heather Nevay’s blindingly bright pseudo-Symbolist works at Cyril Gerber Fine Art and Portal Gallery. Conservative buyers had myriad ‘safe’ options in the form of sub-par prints, including a set of Damian Hirst skulls at Paul Stolper, a handful of Matisse and Picasso lithographs at Gilden’s Arts, and a sprinkling of Bridget Riley Op Art screen prints throughout.

Overall, the London Art Fair pictured a Modern British art lacking originality and ingenuity. Is this lack of inspiration a function of what artists are producing, what galleries chose to show, or what buyers want? The dearth of red dots beside most works at the fair suggests that it’s not the latter. Fair director Jonathan Burton recently predicted that art sales in 2010 will prove better than those in 2009. Judging from the London Art Fair, however, I’d guess that Modern British art won’t be reaping the improved market’s profits.

Jan 13 -17

ARIEL GOLD