From the January 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
BRAFA Art Fair
BRAFA is celebrating its 70th edition this month, underlining its reputation as the congenial elder statesman of the European art-fair circuit – though that’s not to say it’s running out of energy or ideas. ‘There’s always an evolution in the fair, year after year,’ says director Beatrix Bourdon. ‘But not revolution’ – and one would be hard pressed to name a fair with a more stable regime than the one here in Brussels. With security comes freedom – ‘you don’t have to be scared’ of trying things out, Bourdon says. As a non-profit organisation, BRAFA also doesn’t have to worry too much about profit margins – when Bourdon talks of ‘turnover’, she means in the roster, with 16 first-time exhibitors among the 130 galleries taking part.
Among them is the Old Master dealer Colnaghi, offering a terrific watercolour by Jacob Jordaens in which the viewer is induced to imagine their neck craning upwards while a band of five musicians, two parrots, a monkey and a dog peer down from a rostrum. Stoppenbach & Delestre and Galerie Nathalie Obadia also make their debuts, boosting the fair’s offering of French 19th-century and contemporary art, respectively. ‘The selection of the new galleries is very eclectic – from archaeology to today,’ says Bourdon; she points to the antique Portuguese silverwares brought by Lisbon-based J. Baptista as something entirely novel this year.
A rostrum of musicians in a loggia (c. 1635), Jacob Jordaens. Colnaghi
BRAFA never divides itself into thematic sections; works from all times and places rub shoulders, a means of encouraging surprise encounters. Visitors wishing to avoid spoilers can look away now – but the standouts at this year’s edition include a masterpiece of Venetian quattrocento woodcarving, attributed to Michele Linder, as well as the only known automaton in the shape of a book. With a mechanism that could be activated to reveal a magician, this was the Swiss writer Maurice Sandoz’s favourite in his prodigious collection of automata; used as a guest book for visitors to his villa on the banks of Lake Geneva, it includes signatures from Anna von Bismarck and Charlie Chaplin.
This year brings a new collaboration with the KIK-IRPA (the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage) – the organisation behind the restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece – which is presenting its conservation practices at the fair through archival displays and daily workshops. Its stall is adjacent to that of the King Baudouin Foundation, which shows off the most recent additions to its collection of some 27,000 treasures – among them an exquisite Brussels Tapestry of c. 1530 depicting Solomon and Bathsheba, and a 17th-century still life by Judith Leyster. This year’s guest of honour is the artist Joana Vasconcelos, who is displaying two large-scale textile Valkyries. ‘We were looking for something with a lot of colours – and Joana herself is a very colourful woman!’, Bourdon says. For anyone wishing to escape the January gloom, Bourdon reminds us that the Eurostar is very convenient.
BRAFA takes place at the Brussels Expo from 26 January to 2 February.
Gallery Highlights
Baptism of Fire: Terracotta Masterpieces Spanning Three Millennia
Until 17 January
Colnaghi, London
Roaring into action with a panther’s head fired in southern Italy in the fifth century BC, this short history of the medium of terracotta proceeds to a sublimely baroque pair of angels by Francesco Moratti of Padua, with meticulously rendered wing-feathers and flamboyantly beatific expressions. It ends with Picasso’s bas-relief homage to Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, completed in 1964.
Joseph Kosuth: The Question
24 January–15 March
Sprüth Magers, London
Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965) – a chair, its photograph and a text defining ‘chair’ – is a foundation stone of conceptual art. In the six decades since, the artist has continued to make his home in the gap between language and the reality it is supposed to represent. This 80th-birthday retrospective includes major works from the 1960s such as Self-Described Twice [pink] (1966), alongside more recent formulations.
Fetishism Corrected #2 [Blue] (1988), Joseph Kosuth. Photo: Jen Ziehe; courtesy the artist/Sprüth Magers; © the artist
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
18 January–1 March
Corvi-Mora, London
Born in London and of Ghanaian heritage, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye paints portraits of imagined figures that are as allusive as they are elusive, captioned with enigmatic titles that induce the viewer to supply their own narratives for these cryptic, open-ended scenes. Her position at the forefront of contemporary British painting was secured with her major Tate survey in 2022–23; this is her first significant showing of new work in London since.
Lehmbruck/Leroy
Until 15 February
Michael Werner, New York
This show can be described as something of a curatorial caprice. It is a pairing of artists with ostensibly little in common – one a German sculptor, the other a French painter, the former dying in 1919, when the latter was only nine years old. Their work, however, shares the demand for a peculiar form of attentiveness in the viewer, one described by Joseph Beuys (speaking of Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s sculptures) as ‘intuition’.
Fairs in Focus
Master Drawings New York
1–8 February
Various venues, New York
New York’s finest purveyors of works on paper play host to colleagues from across the United States and Europe for the latest edition of this event. First-time exhibitors include the manuscript specialists Les Enluminures, bringing a miniature from a 15th-century Book of Hours illuminated by the Berlin Master of Mary of Burgundy. Another highlight is a brush drawing, Bahram Gur facing the Dragon, produced in Iran in c. 1675 and brought by Sam Fogg.
Civilisations
22–26 January
Various venues, Brussels
Combining art from Africa, the Americas, Oceania and Asia, as well as works of classical Western antiquity, this biannual event returns to the galleries of the Sablon district of Brussels – home to the Royal Museums – for its winter edition. Expect carefully curated displays from expert dealers in their respective disciplines – don’t miss African art specialist Bernard de Grunne’s presentation among the Belgian 19th-century paintings at Galerie Jean Nélis.
From the January 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.