On Wednesday, however, at the opening of the Vienna Contemporary fair, Mr. Janda quickly sold two small lyrical mixed-media works by the admired Croatian artist Mladen Stilinovic, who died in 2016. Priced at €12,000 each, they were bought by a Swiss collector. Now in its fourth edition in the spectacular venue of Marx Halle, a cast-iron former meat market, Vienna Contemporary, which ends on Sunday, this year featured some 110 exhibiting dealers, about 40 percent of whom are based in Austria. Unlike at next week’s much bigger Frieze London fair, no American galleries feature on the exhibitor list. For some visitors, the regional nature of the event is a compelling plus. “It’s a local fair. That’s why I like it,” said John Austin, co-founder of Austin Desmond, a gallery specializing in 20th-century art, based in London. “You see things you’d never see at international fairs. You make discoveries, particularly from Eastern Europe.” Mr. Austin, like several other visitors at the opening, was attracted to the booth of A.C.B. Gallery, based in Budapest. A.C.B. was showing Bauhaus-influenced enamel abstracts from the 1960s and ’70s by Ferenc Lantos and Sandor Pinczehelyi, Hungarian artists associated with the neo-avant-garde “Pecs Workshop” group. These were priced at between €12,000 and €30,000, but as yet unsold, according to Rona Kopeczky, the gallery’s co-artistic director. Last year, Vienna Contemporary attracted about 29,000 visitors. The liberal-leaning art world, or at least a section of it, will always show up to a well-organized fair in a destination city such as Vienna, as it will to openings of serious exhibition shows and prestigious festivals, such as Steirischer Herbst. The challenge these events face is to get the rest of the world to show up. Or even the rest of Austria. Powered by WPeMatico The post In Austria’s Art Scene, the Ideas Are Big (but the Turnout Isn’t) appeared first on OriginalArt. via OriginalArt https://ift.tt/2NSr4TC
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