From 17 – 21 January 2018, London Art Fair will return for its 30th anniversary edition. Launching the international art calendar, the Fair offers exceptional modern and contemporary art from leading galleries around the world. Alongside this, it continues to provide insight into the evolving international market through specially curated spaces Art Projects and Photo50, presenting innovative developments in contemporary art and photographic practice.
London Art Fair 2018 invites collectors and visitors to discover work by artists from the 20th century to today, ranging from Modern British masters to exciting new talent. In celebration of their landmark 30th year, London Art Fair will feature a unique exhibition in partnership with Art UK. Bringing together thirty artworks from the nation’s public art collections, Art of the Nation: Five Artists Choose will recognise the extraordinary diversity and importance of the UK’s publicly-owned art.
2018 Exhibitors
131 exhibitors will participate in this year’s Fair, attracting galleries from across five continents to the capital. New international exhibitors for 2018 include Artco Gallery (Germany); Galeria Miqueld Alzueta (Spain); La Lanta Fine Art (thailand); Stoney Road Press (Irelan) and YIRI Arts (Taiwan). Returning for this year is Maus Contemporary (USA), who will exhibit within the main Fair having debuted in last year’s Art Projects. Other highlight stands include a collaboration between Skipwiths (UK) and Berwald London (UK), contrasting the work of contemporary Asian artists with a collection of Chinese ceramics carefully built over thirty years.
The Fair will feature work by a host of renowned artists including Andy Warhol, Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso, Frank Auerbach,Banksy and Damien Hirst. Several galleries will be celebrating the work of influential 20th century artists through solo presentations – The Redfern Gallery (UK) will be showcasing the work of Paul Feiler during his centenary year, whilst Waterhouse & Dodd (UK) will bring together a selection of private works by David Bomberg ahead of his major retrospective at Pallant House Gallery, marking the 60th anniversary of the artist’s death.
These eminent artists will be exhibited with the next generation of international art talent,including New Zealand-born artist Holly Zandbergen. Winner of the Prudential Best Young Artist Award 2015, Holly has recently completed her first solo exhibition at Rebecca Hossack Gallery (USA & UK), depicting the dramatic landscape of her native mountain ranges. Contemporary Collective (UK) will be displaying the work of BP Portrait Award nominee, Sophie Derrick, who transcends the genre of portraiture, using her face as the canvas. Combining photography with painting, she fuses the digital with the tangible to create alluring works. ﬔe theme of digital art will be seen across many exhibitors who look to explore the impact and evolution of digital technology. Paul O’Dowd, of CFPR Editions (UK), has a particular interest in how a robot could be programmed to use common artists materials and is planning on showcasing the robot’s unique results at the fair.
Curated Spaces
Over the past three decades, London Art Fair has continued to evolve to reflect the changes in contemporary practice and collecting within the art world, as presented in the critically acclaimed Art Projects and Photo50.
Established in 2005 to support emerging galleries and encourage innovative presentations at the Fair, Art Projects will include 33 exhibitors presenting solo and group shows. CANAL (UK) will showcase three contemporary artists responses to the work of Claudio de Sole, reflecting the artist’s fascination with the worlds of astronomy and astrology. Meanwhile Iniva (UK) will explore the legacy and preservation of digital art through the work of Donald
Rodney, highlighting his pioneering approach to the body and its ‘interface’ with the world. Paper, who represented last year’s winner of the De’Longhi Art Projects Artist Award, will be returning to the fair in collaboration with LLE. They will be joined at the fair for the first time by Darger HQ (US), who are crowdfunding to bring Midwestern artists to the UK and into contemporary art discourse.
A major feature of Art Projects is Dialogues, which invites pairs of galleries to create a shared presentation, encouraging inventive collaborations and new relationships. This year Dialogues will be curated by Misal Adnan Yildiz, former Director of Artspace NZ and Artistic Director of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. It will feature five partnerships between local and international galleries, each focusing on the representation and recontextualisation of the female.
Photo50, launched in 2007, provides a critical forum to examine and debate some of the most innovative and distinctive elements of contemporary photographic and lens-based practice. ﬔis year’s Photo50 exhibition, entitled Resolution is not the point., is curated by Hemera, the first collective to take on this role. ﬔe exhibition will explore photography and lens-based media as a catalyst for interdisciplinary exchange and collective action, featuring a number of collectives, including (play)ground-less and Foundland Collective, as well as acclaimed artists Larry Achiampong and David Birkin.
Marking the fifth year of the Fair’s celebrated Museum Partnership initiative, these two spaces will be complemented by the one-off exhibition Art of the Nation: Five Artists Choose in partnership with Art UK, the online home to every public art collection in the country. Curator Kathleen Soriano has invited five leading contemporary artists – Sonia Boyce, Mat Collishaw, Haroon Mirza, Oscar Murillo and Rose Wylie – to choose their favourite 30 works from the platform, which will be brought together for the first time at the Fair. Each artist’s selection consists of 20th and 21st century works which speak to a personal theme – from Mat Collishaw’s look at the world of violence and despair to Haroon Mirza’s commentary on the notion of choice, by using Google’s search algorithms to make his selection. the exhibition will bring together works from some twenty-five collections across the UK including Heritage Motor Centre, Warwickshire; New Hall Art Collection, Cambridge; Rugby Art Gallery and Museum Collections; South Shields Museum and Art Gallery and the University of Hull Art Collection.
