There are just a few days left until London Art Fair opens its doors to launch the international art calendar for 2023. With so much to see and experience at LAF23, Fair Director Sarah Monk has put together her highlights to give you a glimpse of the outstanding work that will be on display. See her top picks below.
‘The Fair’s Encounters section is not to be missed this year and a great place to discover new galleries and exciting new artists from across the globe. First time exhibitor Otherlandz has a strong synergy with this year’s Fair and like Photo50, shares a strong focus on diasporic heritage, exploring issues surrounding identity, belonging and womanhood.
Otherlandz presents a selection of UK based women artists with cultural roots from across the globe, who investigate the reclamation of the female body image across a range of artists mediums. I am particularly looking forward to seeing their 3metre long textile artwork by artist Renin Bilginer.’
‘The presentation focuses on emerging African artists from three different countries. Each artist uses paint as a visual language through which to explore their identity in an ever changing environment.
The Cameroonian artist Moses Mous is preparing a set of new works specifically for the Fair. It is the first time that he has shown his works physically in London. It is also the first time that Osman Salifu will exhibit their work physically in London.’
‘Based in Kemptown, Brighton, Koop Projects is a neighbourhood gallery with an international outlook. The gallery supports creative projects that emphasise the role of contemporary African art and promotes sustainable art practices. Born 1980 in Harare, Zimbabwe, artist Georgina Maxim creates works from cotton and wool threads and pre-worn items of clothing, reforming the garments into textile sculptures. The practice of handing down clothing in Zimbabwe is a ritually symbolic gesture. Maxim plays with and respects these traditions as well as modifies them, creating purely abstract forms. In 2019, Georgina Maxim presented an installation for the Zimbabwean pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale.’
‘For the 2023 edition of London Art Fair, Candida Stevens invited 12 artists to make a work in response to the question, ‘If you could save one place’. This sparked a range of responses from the artists. Interestingly only a few of the works made are place specific. Several refer to home, others to a moment, others refer to a notion, others to an environmental phenomena that they have personally witnessed.
This vibrant painting by Charlotte Evans is one such example. A house move, cultivating a new garden which was visited by huge and delicate monarch butterflies, now endangered, brings home that climate change is disrupting their migratory paths, there’s deforestation of their chosen overwintering forests in Mexico, and increasingly a loss of native wildflowers they depend on for food, here.’
‘For forty-one years Gilden’s Arts has been researching and promoting works on paper. It is often on paper that we can see the artistic idea as it generates. Studying sketches and drawings one can really understand and appreciate the thought process that results in major paintings or sculptures. Their stand at London Art Fair will be divided into two sections, “Classical Modern” and “Post-War Art” and will enhance the importance of the influences and the connections between them.
Pierrot and Harlequin is a classic example of Picasso’s early work as an artist and is part of the very rare series “Dix Pochoirs” of ten works by Pablo Picasso, the complete portfolio of which can be found in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.’
GBS FINE ART
‘LAF regular GBS offer a platform for artists, who, irrespective of fad and fashion, produce work of clarity, accomplishment and resonance. The centre piece of their stand at the Fair – The Aylesbury Fragments by Harriet Mena Hill, is a great example of this.
The Aylesbury Estate in Walworth in south east London, was home to some 7500 people. Built between 1963 and 1977, its 2700 dwellings were first regarded as a flagship example of post-war clearance and modernist urban planning. The idyll did not last long and now a major – and in many ways contentious – regeneration programme is well under way, involving demolition on a huge scale. Harriet Mena Hill started working on the estate running art projects with residents in 2018; as demolition progressed, she started collecting concrete debris from the sites, recycling it as a series of “portraits” of the disappearing estate.’
DARL-E AND THE BEAR
‘Another LAF newcomer, Darl-e and the Bear’s presentation centres on the work of contemporary female artists.
Drawing from archival photographs and personal documents relating to the early exploration and colonisation of New Zealand, Robyn Litchfield reimagines and examines the experience of those early forays into a hitherto unknown space. Her paintings envisage how sublime encounters with places; pristine and untouched might encourage contemplation and self-reflexivity.
Processes such as scraping into the paint, layering and erasure reference the destructive and constructive nature of being in a state of liminality.’
ROWNTREE CLARK
‘Alan Davie was the first British painter – and perhaps the first of all European artists – to realise the vitality and significance of American Abstract Expressionism. When a retrospective of Davie’s work was held in 1958 at the former Wakefield Art Gallery, it was seen by a young David Hockney. The influence of Davie’s mark making, surface texture and empty space resound throughout Hockney’s early paintings at the Royal College of Art the following year. This influence was explored very successfully recently in an exhibition ‘Alan Davie & David Hockney: Early Works’ held at the Hepworth Wakefield in 2020.
Hockney paid particular attention to the surface and impasto Davie created in this early Fifties works of which ‘Domain of the Serpent 1951′ is a prime example. Not seen in a generation, the work comes to market from a Family Trust and represents a rare opportunity to acquire a major work of British Abstraction from its chief protagonist during its genesis in the early 1950s.’
JILL GEORGE GALLERY
‘Jill George Gallery will be presenting a specially commissioned major installation, ‘Geisha and Samurai’ by the renowned sculptor/potter, John Bedding.
These exquisite new works ‘that will stand like sentinels and ladies overseeing visitors to the Fair’ are inspired by the two great iconic classes of Japanese culture and influenced by the traditional images and designs of the fabrics and garments they wore.
The bodies of the two larger pieces are ‘slab built’, neither ‘thrown’ nor ‘coiled’ and then encircled to create cylinders, supported by tops and bases before the shoulders, arms and heads are applied. These all require multiple firings, sometimes as many as four before the final finishing.’
SHTAGER GALLERY
‘For the 2023 edition of PLATFORM, art historian and author Ruth Millington presents 8 galleries whose artists collaborate with inspiring individuals, reframing the muse as an empowered and active agent in the story of art.
The personal and political intertwine in many of the artworks on show. Shtager Gallery is exhibiting Katya Granova, who works from family archive photographs as a means of “‘connecting’ with her family history and a different era”. There’s a hauntingly nostalgic atmosphere to paintings such as Grandma reading her speech, in which the artist addresses conflicting political positions within the family. “Painting her past gives access to those complex feelings”, the artist explains.’
Reconnect with leading galleries from around the world this January and enjoy an outstanding celebration of Modern and Contemporary Art.
An opportunity for you to discover and engage with iconic modernist names, through to contemporary and emerging artists.
Browse over 100 participating galleries through the button below.
The gallery is delighted announce the opening of their new gallery in Hampshire with an inaugural ‘Winter’ exhibition.
Jenna Burlingham Gallery has expanded with a move to a much larger building, Rope House, on the same street as their original space in Kingsclere. This was once a 19th-century rope merchant’s home and workshop and now has the feeling of an informal townhouse. With open galleries at ground level and drawing rooms upstairs, paintings, prints, sculptures and ceramics are displayed throughout as part of interior settings.
Sumi, or Japanese ink, has been used for Oriental calligraphic works and paintings for a long time. The need for works in Sumi, an art form backed by a long unbroken history, remains strong.
In contemporary art, which is filled with an indiscriminate mix of materials and representation techniques, works produced based on Sumi are specifically referred to as “Sumi_ism” and at #7 exhibition a collection of works from Reiko Tsunashima and Sogen Chiba, Mizuho Koyama are displayed from this field.
Kerlin Gallery are delighted to present ‘Stuck on dawn,’ Marcel Vidal’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.
Celebrated for his diverse practice and immersive sculptural installations, the exhibition brings together three series of work in Marcel Vidal’s first exhibition dedicated exclusively to painting.
A review of Ikon’s artistic programme in the 1990s, presenting work by 40 artists who showed during this period. With Elizabeth Macgregor as Director, Ikon’s outlook was increasingly international, whilst also showing an eclectic mix of British artists including Basil Beattie, Permindar Kaur, Keith Piper, Yinka Shonibare, Georgina Starr and Mark Wallinger.
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The festive season is here, and the countdown to London Art Fair 2023 is officially on. If you didn’t make it to Miami Art Week, don’t worry, there’s plenty of top tier art events taking place on our doorstep this
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