The ironically named SUNDAY Art Fair comes to town...
While most of the art world is fixated on Frieze, another art fair opened on Thursday just a short walk away. SUNDAY Art Fair is in London for the first time in the cavernous underground hangar that is P3 Ambika, just a short walk from Regent's Park along the Marylebone Road.
Whilst Frieze, frankly, does my head in, I rather enjoyed SUNDAY. Like Zoo Art Fair – the absence of which this year SUNDAY sort of fills – the whole atmosphere is calmer, more considered and less overtly obsessed with sales.
Having said that, a host of big-shot collectors are in attendance, including David Roberts, Jill Bernstein and Anita Zabludowicz, who even worked on her own stand for a bit to advise potential customers about purchasing contemporary art.
But there's also a sense of fun, which Frieze never seems to manage, created in part by good old Fiona Banner making cocktails at Ryan's Bar over in the corner. A project put together by Ryan Gander, the bar sees various arty types making cocktails at £50 a pop – but these are no ordinary cocktails; they're art cocktails. So Banner's involves pouring a glass of champagne whilst wearing boxing gloves. Customers are also required to wear boxing gloves to drink them. Artists huh? Zany...
Anyway, what about the work? Well despite the easy atmosphere and clean, clear layout, there isn't so much that stands out for me. In fact just two works really. The first, at Arcade, is by Kit Craig, who currently also has a solo show at the gallery – in fact I tried to go last weekend but got lost on the way (plus, they're shut on Sundays anyway – as indeed is SUNDAY, ironically). I first saw Craig's work at Zoo in 2009 and it's genuinely exciting to see the direction of development.
The work – I forgot to ask the title – consists of various delicate pencil and watercolour drawings, the wooden frames around which extend into elongated pyramids, which then intersect into another similar work, and so on until they link up to form a large floor-based oval structure. At one point, the flow is interrupted by a stack of white jesmonite slabs. It's the grandest, fullest realisation yet of Craig's Escher-esque geometric art/maths aesthetic. What I love about his work I think is the sense that there's curiosity and thorough research behind the concepts and the forms – it requires knowledge of a system to realise its limits, knowledge to examine what can't be known.
I also really like Pavel Büchler's work over at Berlin's Tanya Leighton – he also has a solo show on right now at Max Wigram, on New Bond Street. The work that catches my eye consists of a series of parallel pencil marks on paper. The actual pencil used lies at the bottom of the frame, worn down, worn out, spent. Entitled 'The Shadow of Its Disappearance', the pencil documents its own changing, shortening shadow, its own neatly contained and trivial death – a de-marked demise at once contained and overflowing into now.
SUNDAY Art Fair is at P3 Ambika until 16th October 2010.
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