Bridge Art Fair in London
The Bridge Art Fair will take place for the very first time from October 11-14, 2007 in London at the luxurious Trafalgar Hotel in Trafalgar Square.
Bridge will take over the entire 120-room hotel, with an estimated 70-90 international exhibitors transforming the Trafalgar into a contemporary art center.
The art fair brings together over 60 galleries, artist collectives, alternative spaces and consultancies for London’s art fair weekend, filling the Trafalgar Hotel with emerging and renowned artists from both the largest art capitals as well as unexpected hotbeds of artistic activity. Like a group portrait, the collected spaces represent some of the brightest and freshest faces in contemporary art. Shanghai, Los Angeles, Paris, Düsseldorf, San Francisco, Williamsburg, Chicago, London, Tokyo – Bridge London will be a true, if not temporary, portrait of what’s relevant to artists and viewers today.
Showcasing multimedia installations, but like an installation in the neighborhood itself, little tree gallery in San Francisco’s SOMA district is a storefront gallery that welcomes viewers to experience the energy that they promote. Many of the galleries that Bridge reaches out to are from similar neighborhoods, raw and at the fringes, that foster growing creative practices. Such is the case with London’s Vertigo Gallery, Chicago’s NavtaSchulz, and Los Angeles’s Billy Shire Fine Arts. If there’s an immediacy to the vision, you know that Bridge will be covering it, and that the Trafalgar Hotel will be your behind-the-scenes tour.
From each city or scene you can expect not only the flagship style – say, contemporary figurative painting from Düsseldorf’s Galerie T40 – but also the unexpected underbelly – Paris’s Galerie 13 Sévigné is sure to make you see Parisian style in a whole new light. Promoting the cutting edge can take various forms, from presenting activist art at Miami’s Hardcore Art Gallery, to some of photography’s most tightly-focused representatives at New York’s Foley Gallery.
A healthy dose of surrealism couldn’t hurt, too – it seems to be practiced everywhere to great effect. Randall Scott Gallery from Washington, D.C. represents artists with a slyly subtle surrealism of the everyday, as does Tokyo’s Wada. Pop-culture infused with the surreal (for isn’t so much of our everyday, our Pop, so disturbingly strange?) is well-represented at Bridge, from Paris Hilton’s cadaver at Brooklyn’s Capla Kesting to the outrageous and the audacious at Berlin’s Styrchnin Gallery. If seeing is believing, you may need to look twice. Double-takes are free of charge.
Bridge is pleased to host galleries with a renowned retinue of artists, and who are renowned institutions in their own right. Toomey Tourell Gallery in San Francisco consistently shows provocative mid-career artists, such as Lynda Benglis and Germán Herrera, who flirt with popularity but always undercut our notions of normalcy – we welcome such diversions. Influential twentieth-century masters are also represented, including Vic Muniz and Basquiat at New York’s Michael Petronko Gallery as well as London’s Goethe Gallery, thus grounding much of contemporary art’s witty conceptualism and painterly force. But if it’s only the alternative, the emerging and the atypical that will satisfy your head, seek no further than Los Angeles’s Bert Green Fine Art, Calgary’s Newzones, and London’s sTART SPACE – you’re bound to be overwhelmed, and we think that’s what you need.
Bridge London, 11-14 October 2007
The Trafalgar Hotel
2 Spring Gardens, Trafalgar Square
11 Oct 2007: Public Reception, 5pm-10 pm
12-13 Oct 2007: General Admission, Noon-8pm
14 Oct 2007: General Admission, Noon-6pm
Admission: £10
Bridge Art Fair London 2007 Exhibitors:
Galerie 13 Sévigné, Paris France, Galeria Jorge Alcolea, Madrid Spain, Allegoric, Chicago, IL, Art Vitam, Miami Beach, FL, Boreas, Pittsfield, MA, Galerie Hitomi Bushi d’Eau’, Paris, France, Capla Kesting Fine Art, Brooklyn, NY, Ch’i Contemporary Fine Arts, Brooklyn, NY, Cynthia Corbett Gallery, London, UK, DFN Gallery, NY, NY, Galerie Burkhard Eikelmann, Düsseldorf, Germany, Electric Works, San Francisco, CA, Enviedart, London, UK, Mimi Ferzt Gallery, NY, NY, Foley Gallery, NY, NY, Four Four, London, UK, GARDENfresh, Chicago, IL, Gillock Gallery, Evanston, IL, Go Go Gallery, Miami, FL, Bert Green Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA, Greene Contemporary, Sarasota, FL, GV Art, London, UK, Goethe Gallery, London, UK, Nohra Haime Gallery, NY, NY, Hardcore Art Contemporary, Miami, FL, Galerie Huebner, Frankfurt, Germany, I-MYU projects, London, UK, Galerie Jürgen Kalthoff, Essen, Germany, Kiddersmith Gallery, Boston, MA, little tree gallery, San Francisco, CA, lorch+seidel galerie, Berlin, Germany, Mumford Fine Art, London, UK, NavtaSchulz Gallery, Chicago, IL, Newzones, Calgary, Canada, Novembro Arte Contemporãnea, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Michael Petronko Gallery, NY, NY, Procuniar Workshop, NY, NY, Red Truck Gallery, New Orleans, LA, Randall Scott Gallery, Washington, DC, Roentgenwerke, Tokyo, Japan, Sesame, London, UK, Shine Art Space, Shanghai, China,SPUR Projects, Portola Valley, CA, sTART SPACE, London, UK, Studio HD, Coral Gables, FL, Styrchnin Gallery, Berlin, London, NY, Galerie T40, Dusseldorf, Germany, TAG Fine Arts, London, UK, Think Art, Chicago, IL, Toomey Tourell Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Vertigo Gallery, London, UK, Galerie Vivendi, Paris, France, Volakis Gallery, Yountville, CA, Wada Fine Arts, Tokyo, Japan, Walsh Gallery, Chicago, IL, Galerie Olivier Waltman, Paris, France, Wendt Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA, Artspace Witzenhausen Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Zebra Projects, London, UK.
For more info visit http://www.bridgeartfair.com.
