Fairs and Markets

AFTER this year the 20/21 British Art Fair will move from the Royal College of Art in Kensington Gore, London SW7 to the Commonealth Institute, Kensington High Street, W8.

Victoria Borwick, director of all fine art and antiques fairs at Olympia for the past eleven years, will leave the company after the November Fine Art and Antiques Fair. In a move which stunned the Trade, Mrs Borwick was told last week by Andrew Morris, the chief executive of Earls Court and Olympia, that her role as director of the fairs was redundant.

LONDON organisers Brian and Anna Haughton managed to clinch a deal with Sotheby’s late last week which will allow their New York flagship event, The International Fine Art and Antique Dealers Show, to go ahead.

New York: Due to immense logistical difficulty, particularly shipping, in the wake of last Tuesday's tragedy in New York, London-based organisers Brian and Anna Haughton have today announced a cancellation of their International Art and Design Fair scheduled for September 29th to October 2nd at New York's 7th Regiment Armory on Park Avenue.

AT the second outing Antiques For Everyone – Glasgow confirmed its status as Scotland’s top fair and certainly enough business was achieved by enough of the 170 exhibitors at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre to indicate a secure future for this new fixture.

TOP German dealer Konrad Bernheimer, who has galleries in Munich and London, is the driving force behind a new international, prestige fair at the Haus der Kunst, Munich scheduled for a 2003 launch.

ANOTHER New York City fair will be inaugurated this autumn when The Connoisseur’s Antiques Fair is launched by veteran New York organiser Sanford Smith at the 69th Regiment Armory, Lexington Avenue and 26th Street, from November 16 to 19.

SOTHEBY’S launch their new saleroom at Olympia in West London on September 18 with the auction of the Ian Grant Collection, removed from 41 Ladbroke Square.

UK: SOTHEBY’S have announced their intention to reorganise their Summers Place, Billingshurst, West Sussex operation to “take advantage of the new Olympia saleroom”. The restructure involves ending all general sales at the end of November and specialising in garden statuary, in which the rooms have established a leading reputation, and modern and vintage sporting guns and rifles.

After 15 years of holding picture sales at Billingshurst, Sotheby’s (20/15/10% buyer’s premium) will, from December this year, be holding all their mid-range art auctions in their new saleroom at Olympia.

NOWADAYS Antiques For Everyone seems to be antiques for everywhere, which proves that a successful formula will travel. At the beginning of July Fran Foster of Birmingham’s Centre Exhibitions, the organiser who pioneered that formula, for the first time took her fair to Manchester; then from August 2 to 5 she was back at her Birmingham base for the summer version of the thrice-yearly Antiques For Everyone at the NEC.

UK: Potential clash with summer Olympia - Date changes at two of next year’s Antiques For Everyone fairs have thrown the early summer fairs schedule of a number of dealers into disarray.

UK: THE Antiques Trade Gazette has been given an exclusive preview of Sotheby’s new saleroom at Olympia. With 120 men a day working onsite to meet the September 3 deadline, prior to the first sale on September 18, one can see it is going to be very impressive indeed.

ESSEX organiser Robert Bailey holds his main South of England summer fair at, appropriately, Sotheby’s South, one mile north of Billingshurst in West Sussex, from August 17 to 19.

dmg world media have continued their expansion in the United States with the acquisition of the Metrolina Antiques and Collectibles Fairs from GAH International Limited in Charlotte, North Carolina.

UK: EARLY notice that, for the fourth season, The Cotswolds Antique Dealers’ Association is holding a series of selling exhibitions in members’ shops and this year they will take place in eight towns between October 13 and 27.

AFTER Grosvenor House, a number of leading dealers’ next major fair is at Basel – Cultura, which will be held from October 13 to 21 at Hall 3 of Messe Basel where some 85 exhibitors from Europe and the US will stand.

NEW YORK dealer Jerome Eisenberg will launch a new international fair at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan this year and intends to become a serious player in the increasingly competitive top end of the American fairs scene.

UK: THE quarterly London Coin Fair, affectionately known just as the ‘Cumberland’ on account of its venue, that was held last Saturday (June 23) was the last to be held at the Marble Arch Cumberland Hotel, it has just been announced.

UK: IN a very busy month for the ceramics world ahead of June’s International Ceramics Fair in London, a couple of unusual items led the first day of this Staffordshire sale although neither was from the Potteries.