24 January 2006

London Art Fair 2006 review

The London Art fair 2006 took place at the Islington Design centre between the 18 January 2006 and 22 January. I went on both the Friday and the Saturday to give myself a good look round.

The fair was extremely busy and I didn't get to see everything there. Highlights of the fair for me included the following:

1) The paul stolper stand. This included some fantastic new Damien Hirst prints together with some lovely Susie Hamilton canvasses.

2) A fantastic exhibition of some of Bill Brandt most iconic photographs. I forget the name of the gallery that was doing it but it was truly wonderful.

3) The quite stunning art project from the ingleby gallery by Jeffrey Blondes of a tree filmed and painted once a week for all 52 weeks of the year. Visually quite amazing.

4) The small paintings on the Advanced Graphics stand by Ray Richardson one of my favourite current figurative painters.

5) Some high quality works dotted around by, amongst others, LS Lowry, Mary Fedden, Craigie Aithchison, Donald Hamilton-Fraser, Maggi Hambling and many others.

6) For my daughter who loved it the large resin cast model of 5 foot high jelly baby. She kept on asking us to return to this every five minutes and stroked it and hugged it.

7) The display of Whitechapel editions. These have surely got to be the bargains of the current art worls, especially the works by artists such as Alex Katz and Julian Opie.

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