Art and its echo
This year’s Hamburg Fine Art Fair offers visitors an unrivalled opportunity to compare themes in art across the centuries, writes Claudia Herstatt.
Claudia Herstatt, Monday, 25th August 2008
It must be extremely rare for an art fair to be welcomed within a museum, yet in Hamburg it is now taken almost for granted. The Hamburg Fine Art Fair takes place for the eighth year at the city’s Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, from 25 to 28 September. The 28 dealers – eight of whom regularly exhibit at tefaf in Maastricht – are offering works ranging from antiquity to the present.
The fair initially took place in the museum’s historic Hall of Mirrors, which it quickly outgrew. It now takes place over two floors in the Schümann Wing, opened in 2000; the collection of musical instruments on show there is reorganised to make space. The rooms, flooded with light, are ideal for the purpose and the small format ensures that the emphasis is on the quality of the works. In the evenings, the fair hosts receptions, including events tailored for younger generations of collectors.
Each year the fair has a different theme, chosen to be in keeping with the museum surroundings. Last year’s theme, 20th-century Chinese art and design, will this year be followed by ‘Crossover’. It is intended to encourage exhibitors to dispense with customary divisions between works of art, so that, for example, Old Master paintings will be shown next to contemporary photography; classical and modern art with non-European works; and objects from antiquity alongside 18th-century art.
As the fair’s organiser, Christine Gräfin Adelmann, explains, the ‘Crossover’ theme ‘has spurred exhibitors to create historically based and meaningful new encounters between art and crafts, photography and sculpture’. This gently didactic approach suits the museum setting, striking a balance between artistic and commercial interests.
For example, a nautical theme has inspired a charming comparison by the Jablonka Gallery (Cologne and Berlin) and the Cologne-based antiquities dealer Gordian Weber. Jablonka is showing Philipp Taffe’s painting Live by the Edge of the Sea (2004), a tight arrangement of underwater crustaceans that forms an intriguing parallel with Weber’s Roman relief of a nereid and two tritons, from the third quarter of the 2nd century AD.
LATEST NEWS & COMMMENT
Manhattan transfer
The Lower East Side, once home to immigrants and aspiring artists, is no receiving the uptown treatment.
Shakespeare in stone
The National Trust's plans to acquire Seaton Delaval Hall are a tribute to a genius who has inspired writers and artists for centuries.
In pursuit of collectors
The Fitzwilliam Museum is celebrating the centenary of the directorship of Sydney Carlyle Cockerell with an exhibition that makes clear that he was in many ways the first modern museum director.
Comments
Post a comment