Every big international art fair worth its salt needs an alternative. In London during Frieze week, the Sunday art fair is a small fair where collectors and curators can discover younger galleries and their emerging artists, both young and old.
Thirty galleries, including eight from the east and west coasts of the US, are presenting their artists’ work in the cavernous former engineering hall of the University of Westminster, which is a 20-minute walk from the Frieze London tent. This year, the Liverpool Biennial and Glasgow International also have booths selling edition prints.
Some of the hottest works—in every sense of the word—are the blazing basketball hoops on light boxes by the collective New York Sunshine. They can be found at the booth of Brussels- and Luxembourg-based Stems Gallery, where they were selling fast ahead of the fair’s opening to the public today, October 5. Co-founded by young brother-and-sister gallerists Guillaume and Pascaline Smets, they say that the fair always attracts London and international collectors, curators, and art advisors.
Here are our picks of the best artists to watch at Sunday 2018.
LUC DELEU & T.O.P. OFFICE
Tatjana Pieters, Ghent, Belgium
The 70-something Belgian architect-artist Luc Deleu, who created T.O.P. office in the early 1970s, has two sculptures and works on paper at Ghent’s Tatjana Pieters’s booth. Deleu takes President Trump’s proposed US-Mexico border wall and transforms it into an exquisitely detailed work of conceptual art. Eight Walls (2018) features scale models of prototype sections of the wall. They are presented on the base of an architect’s drawing board, which is typical of his work. Nearby is a map of the US and Mexico separated by a green colored strip of land, which Deleu proposes becomes a neutral zone where migrants from anywhere can settle. He has calculated that the “green zone” would measure around 40 square miles. Deleu has another work on show that also explores the idea of barriers: a scale model of a barricade made of rubble and scrap wood, again rendered in painstaking detail. The artist’s works in the booth range from €2,000-€11,000 ($2,300-$12,000).
BEL FULLANA
Galeria Fran Reus, Palma, Mallorca
Two very large canvases by the Mallorca-based artist Bel Fullana, born in 1985, provide a visual tonic for a flagging collector. The 2017 winner of the island’s Prize Ciutat de Palma, Fullana paints in a childlike fashion. They recall Rose Wylie’s new work, the 80-something British artist enjoying her moment in the main fair at David Zwirner’s stand. Both are interested in young girls with exhibitionist tendencies. Fullana, who studied in Barcelona, has taught herself to paint and draw using her left and right hands. The ambidextrous artist’s engaging paintings and collages include La novia de Boby (Boby’s girlfriend) (2016), in which a carefree young woman rides what could be a small horse or a large dog under palm trees. Measuring 51 inches tall, the painting is Wylian in scale. The young Spanish artist’s paintings at Sunday are each priced £4,200 ($5,460).
NEW YORK SUNSHINE
Stems Gallery, Brussels and Luxembourg
The collective New York Sunshine recently art directed a campaign for Virgil Abloh’s Off-White fashion brand that featured a basketball hoop floating in the ocean. So it is no surprise that the collective’s dramatic images of burning hoops on a Long Island beach are selling like hot cakes at Sunday. Three of the light-box works from a series called “Booth C16” had sold and one was on hold three hours after the fair had opened to invited collectors on Thursday. Led by creative director John Margaritis, born in 1989, the on-trend collective is also showing Handle With Care (2018), a wall-mounted installation of melted glass “basketballs,” priced at $27,000. The light boxes are $6,000 and each comes in an edition of five with one artist’s proof.
VLATKA HORVAT
Renata Fabbri, Milan
The Milan-based gallery Renata Fabbri’s booth is a gender-balanced double hander with works by two established artists: the sculptor Florian Roithmayr, who has shows at the Camden Arts Centre in north London, and Vlatka Horvat, who has had solo shows in the US as well as Europe. She has also taken part in the Istanbul Biennial, the prestigious Aichi Triennale in Japan, as well as the “Greater New York” survey. So neither artist can really be called “emerging.” Horvat works across sculpture, photography, and performance. London-based after spending the past two decades in the US, the Croatian-born artist is showing sculptural abstracts from her “Frame Works” series at Sunday. She creates the geometric works from materials including discarded cardboard and colored felt. Her redacted family photographs from the “Past Is Another Country” series refer to the experience of being stranded in the US during the breakup of Yugoslavia. Her prices at Renata Fabbri range from £2,000 to £4,000 ($2,600-$5,200).
SANDOR BARTA
Ivan Gallery, Bucharest
The Budapest-based, Romania-born artist Sandor Barta has had dozens of solo shows in Hungary and Romania but is relatively unknown outside of Central Europe. Ivan Gallery hopes to change that. It is presenting the artist’s Dadaist collages and drawings. Barta, who prefers to work on a small scale, also creates absurdist installations using plastic toys. Born in 1962, he studied at the National University of Arts Bucharest in the mid 1980s. His politically-engaged work is subtly subversive and often satirical. His framed works at Sunday are priced at £1,200 ($2,000) each.
Sunday runs October 5-7, Ambika 3, University of Westminster, 36 Marylebone Road, NW1 5LS