November 2008

Explore the Apollo archive

Look back over two vibrant years of Apollo: browse every issue from January 2006 to the present day.

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.

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