Fringe of the Frieze
(Artkrush, Oct 2007)
Title: “Fringe of the Frieze”
Publication: Artkrush (now defunct, a branch of Flavorpill)
Date: Oct 2007
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Since its debut in 2003, the Frieze Art Fair has grown to be one of the world’s biggest contemporary art events and has bolstered London’s rising status as an art destination. Rivaling the main fair, a number of satellite events spring up during Frieze Week, hoping to draw on the same massive audiences to promote more alternative artists, galleries, and projects.
The Zoo Art Fair began in 2004 as a forum for young London galleries and has since expanded into a full-blown international mixer — this year with 61 exhibitors hailing from cities from Birmingham to Tokyo. This elder statesman of the alternative fairs is sponsored in part by the Saatchi Gallery (named one of the “Honorary Zoo Keepers”) and takes over the Royal Academy of Arts this year to showcase galleries like London’s own Blow de la Barra, Rio de Janeiro’s artist-run A Gentil Carioca, and Los Angeles’ Chinatown spaces Chung King Project and the Happy Lion. Zoo also presents special exhibitions featuring the dark, comic paintings of American Jason Fox and unsettling watercolors by British artist David Lock.
The New York- and Miami-based PULSE Art Fair arrives in London for the first time this year and, true to its roots, displays American and international galleries in the Mary Ward House. Look out for LA’s Shoshana Wayne, home of Shirley Tse — known for her obsessive Styrofoam installations — and New York new-media stalwart bitforms, repping Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Alexander Ochs Gallery’s new outpost White Space Beijing hosts highly collectible photographer Rong Rong and his partner Inri.
Year_06, the “project-based art fair,” heads to Southbank’s historic County Hall for its second edition, Year_07. Organized by Keith Talent gallery, Year_07 features up-and-coming galleries like London’s Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, showing an epic, surreal animation by Heather & Ivan Morison; g-module, a Parisian outpost for edgy Americans like doodler Scott Teplin; and London’s Carter Presents, displaying graf-painter Will Tuck and conceptualist Katie Paterson, who once invited gallery viewers to hear a melting Icelandic glacier by phone.
Also promoting overlooked galleries, the Bridge Art Fair takes over the rooms of the Trafalgar Hotel with more than 60 exhibitors. Many deal in established names like Roy Lichtenstein and Keith Haring, but others, like Miami’s Hardcore Art Contemporary, go farther afield with Latin American artists such as Juan-Si González and Andres Michelena.
DesignArt London provides the first form-and-function supplement to art for art’s sake. At Hanover Square, 20 leading design galleries present a timeline of postwar design, leading from Le Corbusier and Jean Prouvé to Marc Newson and Zaha Hadid. Hidden treats include Pearl Lam’s Contrasts Gallery, with witty twists on Orientalist furniture courtesy of designers Peter Ting and André Dubreuil.
With all the price tags and “sold” stickers fluttering through the air, it’s refreshing to see one fair where nothing can be bought: the Free Art Fair. Conceived by artist Jasper Joffe and held at the Portman Village, the fair displays works by artists like Bob & Roberta Smith — who offer a bottle of urine, apparently — and critic Matthew Collings, only to give them away on the last day (queuing required). As all these “alternative” events grow more established with every passing year, it’s interesting to see which subversive happenings will rise to the surface next. (SC)
The Frieze Art Fair, Year_07, DesignArt London, Bridge Art Fair, and PULSE are on view October 11-14. The Zoo Art Fair runs from October 12-15, and getting an early start, the Free Art Fair is on from October 8-14. For more information on cultural events in London, check out our sister publication Flavorpill London.