The London Art Fair‘s Art Projects section, featuring emerging artists and galleries, offer some of the freshest perspectives, concepts, and mediums at the fair this year. Here are some of the most exciting booths you’ll find this weekend and the artists and galleries you should follow!
Kyung Hwa Shon, WW Contemporary Art
Kyung Hwa Shon, winner of the prestigious SOLO Award, and WW Contemporary Art Gallery ran the show. The artist is presenting two of her new works: The City of Fragments and The Trace of Stillman. Shon’s work is more than just visual. Her psychological and meticulous exploration of the relationship between the city and the imagination confronts the evolution of a character in a novel, Paul Auster’s “City of Glass.” Brilliant in every way, the Korean artist was a Starr Scholar at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and currently studying for a PhD in Painting at the Royal College of Art.
“I left this [blank] space [in The City of Fragment] so the viewers could imagine and write their own story with my work, like a reader would do in a novel with the characters,” Shon said. Until 2015, the SOLO Award had only been open to British artists—Shon, although Korean, qualified being a UK-based artist. Now, starting in 2016, the SOLO Award is calling all international artists working in any medium and offering a £2000 and a solo exhibition.
Stathis Lagoudakis – Beardsmore Gallery
With this Greek artist, craftsmanship is as its best. The architectural designs by Stathis Lagoudakis immediately caught my eye—the centerpiece of this booth is an immense aluminum sculpture, which undoubtedly must have required a lot of engineering and dedication. His other sculptures are entirely cut out of watercolor paper and painted with gouache and ink. Other works like the Aluminum Folded Reliefs have been digitally designed on Rhino CAD. Lagoudakis says, “They are sensual in a way. My sculptures invite you to the space and remind you how you can get ‘cut’—how sharp love can cut you.”
Bartosz Beda – Bogota Arte Contemporáneo Gallery
“For my series Flat Emotion, I was inspired by a friend living in Los Angeles. I wanted to show the pain that an artist has to go through,” Bartosz Beda told me. Terribly attractive, these paintings create a wide range of emotions in the viewers. The two paintings Flat Emotion II and Flat Emotion III are the last two paintings by the artist, which he presents with passion. Currently based in London and showcased all around the world, Beda explores the inner monologue of his characters, translating them into his paintings.
Guem MinJeong – Hanmi Gallery
This Korean artist’s work is theatrical, turning her films into art. Creating video sculptures, Guem MinJeong transports the viewers into another dimension. With Love, the melting book sculpture, she invites the viewer to feel at home and spend time reflecting on life. Not only is it rare to find a piece of artwork that blends itself with video, sculpture and painting as well as hers but it is a unique experience for the viewer at the Hanmi Gallery booth. Being the only dark room at the fair, the breathing door invites the viewers to come in and explore.
Josefina Nelimarkka – NContemporary
“The ontology of wet painting explores the material, natural and conceptual fluidities. A wet painting is energy as much as method.” – Josefina Nelimarkka
This Finnish artist allows the viewers to enter her world. A box filled with pigmented water is suspended with ropes over the canvas and creates the art “live.” Exploring the material and the essence of fluidity, the artist will come and change the water as the days go by, forging a very unique piece for the occasion. See the process, understand the art.
John Greenwood – C&C Gallery
Are we in a Tim Burton movie here? Nope! This is John Greenwood’s world: a surreal and grotesque fantasy. John Greenwood gained fame in 1992 when his work got featured alongside Rachael Whiteread and Damien Hirst in the first Young British Artists show.
At London Art Fair, his artwork features a Fruit de Mers from 1999 and, literally fresh out of the artist’s hand and still wet (!!!), the Mother, Father, Ripe and Spangled series. Through comedy and fantasy, this virtuoso explores seduction and repulsion with familiar objects captured and seen as still-life paintings.
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