London Art Fair highlights
The London Art Fair returns for its 25th year with a heady concoction of established artists and newcomers.
This year’s fair showcases work as disparate as holographic portraits of movie stars to artwork mimicking the hit television show Take Me Out, as well as the usual series of brilliant print works and installation pieces.
More than 100 UK and international galleries are displaying work, including 30 up-and-coming galleries exhibiting new work as part of the Art Projects section.
Famous faces with work in show include Francis Bacon, Damien Hirst and Banksy. Peter Blake is presenting a neat new work, London River Thames Regatta, referencing last year’s Jubilee pageant.
We really enjoyed Jealous Gallery’s prints, with some great work from the likes of Ann Gee Chan, Joel Clifford, Adam Bridgland, Simone Lia and Ralph Steadman.
Another highlight was Rob Ryan’s illustrations at Tag Fine Arts.
Marrying the seemingly rather incongruent worlds of art and football, Ghanain artist Atta Kwami was commissioned by the National Football Museum to create a series of works. These small colourful pieces celebrate the contributions to the Premier League and Europe of 12 African footballers, each of which is represented through shape, colour and marks – ‘looking for the poetic rather than the obvious qualities’, according to Kwami.
A significant number of artists used London as a backdrop to their work, including Simon Patterson, who revisits his famous The Great Bear Tube map after a commission from the London Transport Museum to celebrate the London Underground’s 150th birthday.
The Fair’s annual showcase of contemporary photography, Photo50, is this year entitled A Cyclical Poem. According to its curator, Nick Hackworth, it ‘is a partial and elliptical look at the relationship between photography and a cluster of themes: time, memory and repetition’.
The London Art Fair runs from 16 – 20 January at the Business Design Centre, 52 Upper Street, London, N1
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