Fair creates market for art
Five-day Auckland festival celebrates artists of New Zealand and wider Pacific rim
After the annual Auckland Writers Festival, it’s now a big week for the region’s visual arts community. Stephanie Post, co-director of Auckland Art Fair, expects an estimated 10,000 people to visit The Cloud on the waterfront during the five-day event, which began last night.
Post says many visitors will be art collectors and those such as museum directors, curators, writers and gallerists who work in the art world.
“But it is also a really fun and stimulating day out for anyone who likes looking at art and is interested in the world we live in and how artists see it. We make sure that the fair is more than just an exhibition.
“It is a chance to hear artists from all over the Pacific region speak; we have more than 25 artists giving talks.”
During the last fair, in 2016, 40 participating galleries sold art valued between about $2.5 million and $3m.
On average, paying guests spent $4952 on art while VIPs — those with free access — spent an average $7545.
Post says the fair shows New Zealand’s important contribution to the art of the region by displaying in one place the wealth of art being made, commissioned, collected and exhibited here and in the wider Pacific rim.
And many of our artists are excelling on the international stage.
Luke Willis Thompson has been nominated for the 2018 Turner Prize in London but, this month, won the 2018 Deutsche Borse photography prize for his film installation
Autoportrait; Simon Denny last year exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York while Lisa Reihana’s work will be included in the Oceania exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London this September.
That exhibition marks 250 years since Captain James Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific.
As the fair begins, auction house Art + Object is preparing for one of its more unusual sales. It is auctioning the collection of artist and academic Peter James Smith, about 230 pieces that filled the Melbourne home Smith shares with his wife.
Art + Object co-director Hamish Coney says it’s a unique collection because it includes almost exclusively contemporary work, mainly from New Zealand and Australia.
Smith says he grew up surrounded by art, partly courtesy of grandmother Rosa Laing, who trained last century at Elam School of Fine Arts before marrying a farmer and heading north to Ruawai. The mathematician, who also has an MA in fine arts, recalls Laing’s paintings — large and impressionistic — hanging on the walls of the family’s farm homestead.
He thinks his first painting, bought when he left home and started going to the University of Auckland around 1972, was by Colin McCahon, and from the Barry Lett Galleries. “I knew to buy a McCahon even then instead of a pair of shoes and it was the price of a pair of shoes!”
That painting, Light Falling Through a Dark Landscape, is now estimated to be worth $30,000-$40,000. The sale will mean more space for some of the other things he collects including stamps and eye baths.
Peter James Smith speaks at Art + Object at 3pm, Saturday, May 26; All Possible Worlds: The Peter James Smith Collection is auctioned on Thursday, May 31.