London Art Fair 2020

London Art Fair 2020 is quite extraordinary. The fair brings together more than 100 galleries to Business Design Centre, of which the Southampton City Art Gallery just celebrated its 80th anniversary last year. The collections of the fair include sculptures, paintings, photographs, ceramics etc.

Entering the fair, we started with ground floor galleries. As usual, contemporary art pieces are on the right hand side. If you have a vacant room for some colourful decorations, this may be just right. Otherwise, let’s move on.

This is Newton after Blake by Eduardo Paolozzi.

This work is based on William Blake’s Newton: Personification of Man Limited by Reason. The later is on display with Tate Modern.

The comparison between two pieces of artwork is interesting. Both artists depicted Newton as naked with similar measuring gestures. Yet Paolozzi built up the refreshing mechanical look of Newton with muscles and body parts joined by nuts and bolts, which reflected the mysterious Mathematical Bridge, built by Newton as a self-supporting bridge and rebuilt by his fellows who after taking apart the bridge cannot put it back without bolts. While he sits on some pillars of modern irregular blocks, what he measures is also changed from geometry to architectural models. What does it mean? You can have your own views.

Another one we are interested is the “Ghost Vessel” collected by Southampton City Art Gallery as a gift from the artist, Bouke de Vries, who specialised in ceramic art and cultural collisions.

The white ceramic chips inside the vessel are fragments of a 18th century broken pit excavated from Southampton. De Vries reassembled the fragments and produced a similar shape based on the original form with glass. He then combined the original handle with the modern ghost version to create the conversation about past and now, old and new, value and beauty.

Drummond, as many of you may know, is largely influenced by French Post-Impressionism. He is the founder of Camden Town Group with techniques of Post-Impressionism, tempered by the use of naturalistic perspectives. In the Park is one of Drummond’s most famous paintings.

He set ordinary subjects as unconnected figures to embody the alienation, the artificial landscape of urban life. His use of colour is a tour de force. The rich foreground tones of red and pink are strongly against the cool pastel hues of the background, in this way he accentuated the warmth of human and animal interactions.

Joan Miró is a Catalan painter well known for combining abstraction with Surrealist fantasy and naturalism. Some of his famous works from the 1920s are influenced by Dadaists, Surrealists, and Paul Klee. Day is not a famous one, nevertheless it depicts a childish fantasy with relaxing atmosphere. The artwork itself is full of abstracted symbols and wild lines, presenting interrelated continuity.

If you are a pop art fans, you will not miss this one. “Golden POPek” by Sebastian, references to Jeff Koons’ expensive “Balloon Dog” with a not-so-expensive price.

They are made of similar mirror-polished stainless steel, including the poo. “To stimulate inspiration, evoking a sense of wonder while unleashing creativity in the spectators”, as the artist hopes, we are quite inspired to buy one or two of the small size for our office really.

Wandering in the fair, time went relatively faster as we cannot stop receiving more and new things or ideas into our brain. London Art Fair 2020 is definitely a good start to enjoy a whole new year of art in London. We strongly recommend you visit the fair every year. With some pocket money? Even better.

Below are the selection of our favourite pieces: