London Art Fair 2024 is ready to kick start the new art season, showcasing premier galleries from the UK and beyond. Offering a diverse array of modern and contemporary art, curated displays, and a dynamic program of talks, tours, and performances, the Fair caters to both seasoned and budding collectors. This year, as part of its annual Museum Partnership, London Art Fair collaborates with Charleston, former residence to 20th-century pioneers in art, literature, and thought. Charleston will present its distinctive collection of art, textiles, and ceramics at the Fair.
CURATED SECTIONS
London Art Fair aims to reflect contemporary practice & collecting trends within the art world through sections curated in collaboration with leading experts.
Museum Partnership
London Art Fair has partnered with Charleston for its annual Museum Partnership. Situated in the South Downs National Park, Charleston was the modernist home and studio of painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and the regular meeting place of some of the 20th century’s most radical artists, writers and thinkers, known collectively as the Bloomsbury Group. It is where they came together to imagine society differently and has always been a place where art and experimental thinking are at the centre of everyday life.
At the Fair, Charleston will present select works by Bloomsbury group artists, including Vanessa Bell’s portrait of Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant’s fireplace screen and painting of the farmhouses at Charleston, as well as Omega ceramics from a private collection.
Platform
Inspired by London Art Fair’s partnership with Charleston, the 2024 Platform section of the Fair brings together art that shines a light on queer love and life selected by guest curator Gemma Rolls-Bentley, whose group exhibition ‘Dreaming of Home’ is currently on view at Leslie Lohman Museum of Art in New York City.
In the early 20th century, the historic house and artist studio became a queer space for members of the Bloomsbury Group, including Bell’s sister Virginia Woolf. The name of Platform’s exhibition, A Million Candles, Illuminating Queer Love and Life, takes inspiration from a quote from Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando, an imaginative biography of her lover and muse Vita Sackville-West in which the protagonist changes sex from male to female.
Rolls-Bentley brings together art from ten galleries that reflect the resilience, beauty and passion of queer love and life. Tin Man Art will present oil paintings by multidisciplinary artist Zach Toppin, who reimagines queer histories in order to construct new pathways of understanding, while Brushes with Greatness Gallery will feature work by James Dearlove, whose paintings explore both the desire and the disquietude in the human experience through his own experience as a queer man, and Soho Revue will focus on Nooka Shepherd’s tarot etchings. Meanwhile, Janet Rady Fine Art will present work from Bahraini artist and photographer Ghada Kunji’s FaRIDA series, an exploration of her pain in relation to others.
I’m delighted to be working with the London Art Fair to curate Platform 2024 in response to this year’s partnership with Charleston. I’m fascinated by the historic house and the stories of the creative community that thrived there. As a queer person I find something extremely validating and nourishing about spending time in a place that’s so rich with LGBTQ+ history because our histories are so often erased or difficult to uncover. I’m taking an artist-led approach to curating the section of the fair and I’m excited to present art that comes from a wide range of diverse perspectives as we illuminate queer love and life at a time when LGBTQ+ life is facing increasing challenges in the UK and globally.
Curator Gemma Rolls-Bentley
Encounters
Established to support emerging and international galleries, with participation in the section subsidised by London Art Fair, Encounters returns to showcase the freshest contemporary art from across the globe, as well as more established galleries wishing to present new bodies of work by mid-career artists exploring new mediums or themes.
Encounters acts as a platform for these galleries to test the market before progressing into the main Fair, which two have done this year. In 2024, Cross Lane Projects will be presenting Landscape of the Gods in the main Fair, and April Contemporary will present On Being, gathering together artists who question what it means to be human, how we live and who we are as a society.
Highlights include a presentation by Ricardo Fernandes that will exhibit three Brazilian artists – Juliana Sícoli, Lucia Adverse and Sylvia Morgado – and explore female resistance through the prism of art and the dynamic interplay between their respective works.
Saul Hay Gallery will present a collection of painting and sculpture where artists ask the viewer to reflect on how Brutalist and Modernist architecture has shaped not only our towns and cities but also our lives, featuring work by Harriet Mena Hill and Jen Orpin. Outside In, a charity that works with artists that face significant barriers to the art world (including health, disability, social circumstance, and isolation) will be showcasing an exhibition curated by Director Marc Steene featuring artists the charity supports, including Rakibul Chowdhury, Chaz Waldren and Victoria Bowman.
This year, Encounters expands on how an ‘encounter’ can refer to an unexpected meeting, perhaps one that leads to the discovery of an unknown artist or, alternatively, an unexpected style or subject from a well-known artist. The gallery presentations in Encounters show an exciting diversity in artistic approach, theme and geographic origin, drawing on practices and narratives that remain underrepresented in mainstream art discourse.
Curator Pryle Behrman
Prints and Editions section
For the first time at this year’s edition of London Art Fair, the Fair is introducing a new Prints and Editions section, featuring galleries whose displays will focus on limited editions. The section is aimed at nurturing collectors who will want to grow their collections in years to come and will feature prints from both emerging and household names in printmaking. Featured galleries include Enitharmon Editions, the exclusive publisher of Caroline Walker’s lithographs, which focus on the everyday lives of women.
Alongside her new suite of four lithographs will be featured artists’ books, which are in the tradition of the livre d’artiste, containing loose-leaf signed limited edition prints, etchings and photogravures by artists such as Sonia Boyce, Anthony Gormley and David Hockney. The section will be accompanied by a curated series of events including printmaking workshops and ‘Meet the Artist’ events.
Photo50
Photo50 is the Fair’s critical forum for examining distinctive elements of current photographic practice. For 2024, Photo50 will be curated by Revolv Collective presenting works by artists such as Joshua Bilton and Hannah Fletcher exploring the subject of labour and its diverse representation within the context of the land, looking at practices expanding the possibilities of photography. Grafting: The Land and the Artist will feature the work of eleven artists and a duo, some of whom will show works created especially for the exhibition, to look at land as a site of work, resistance, action, co-dependence, regeneration and communion.
2024 GALLERIES
This year will see the participation of over 120 galleries from around the world, including Japan, Portugal and Turkey, with new exhibitors Bluerider Art, Stowe Arthouse Gallery, Liss Llewellyn and Common Sense Gallery; alongside returning names such as Gilden’s Art Gallery, Jill George Gallery and Jonathan Clarke. The Fair will feature work by some of the world’s most renowned artists working across a variety of media, including sculpture, prints, paintings, photography and ceramics, from artists including Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Bridget Riley and David Hockney.
London Art Fair’s specialism in Modern art continues to be strongly represented through the participation of some of the UK’s leading galleries in the field. Alan Wheatley Art will be showcasing Modern British paintings and sculpture from the latter half of the twentieth century with a particular emphasis on Post-War British art, featuring never-before-seen paintings by Alan Davie to mark the tenth anniversary of the artist’s passing. Meanwhile, Christopher Kingzett Fine Art will focus on British art of the 1950s and 60s and will exhibit a bronze sculpture of a bird by Dame Elisabeth Frink among other pieces by the artist.
Twelve international galleries will be exhibiting at London Art Fair 2024. Common Sense Gallery’s presentation will bring together four female multimedia artists, including Caribbean artist Pauline Marcelle and London-based artist Lauren Baker, whose work ranges from figurative to still lives, to abstract oil on canvas, to totem sculptures. Meanwhile, Gallery B·R’s presentation will promote the artistic production of Spanish artists, featuring work by Aythamy Armas and Jordi Alcaraz.
LONDON ART FAIR, 17th-21st January 2024, Business Design Centre, londonartfair.co.uk/tickets
