Art Brussels opened to the pubic this Friday, in the city’s vast former industrial space Tour & Taxis. The fair has reduced its gallery offering to 140 this year (compared to 2015’s 191) and has created a more clearly defined sectioning of works, with areas such as Discovery dedicated to new artists, and Rediscovery, unsurprisingly, containing older works, from 1917 to 1987. Here are just a few of Elephant’s top booths.
Chateau Shatto, LA
The Los Angeles gallery are displaying two of their four represented artists at the fair, Helen Johnson and Parker Ito. Ito’s intensely coloured wall-hung works, depicting cityscapes and bright lone flowers with many surface interruptions, sit well alongside Johnson’s long paintings, which are hung from the rafters and contain a similarly dynamic aesthetic that is punctured with moments of humour–cartoon faces fighting for space alongside softer marks.
Lyles & King, New York
The young NY gallery picked a two-man show for their first European fair to date, displaying the work of Chris Hood–interviewed in the current issue of Elephant–and Phillip Birch–of whom you can read more here. Though on the surface these artists have very different practices, Hood exploring the ‘untruth’ of images in the present day, Birch taking an uneasy look at the post-human body, they go very well in this booth. Both artists deliver a strong visual impact, and their use of fleshy tones and organic lines play well off one another.
Galerie Bernard Ceysson, Saint-Étienne, Luxembourg, Paris, Geneva
We’re noticing a theme going here, as Galerie Bernard Ceysson’s booth delivers as powerful a punch as the first two, with deep colours, thick lines and beautifully clashing patterns. Displaying the paintings of Claude Viallat and Bernar Venet alongside younger painters Trudy Benson, Lauren Luloff, and, again, Chris Hood, the large space allows for an interesting exploration of new abstraction alongside these pioneers of the Supports/Surfaces movement.
