Fairs and Markets

ESSEX organiser Robert Bailey travelled North at the end of December and saw the new year in at Harrogate where from January 2 to 4 he held his Harrogate Pavilions Antiques and Fine Art Fair.

Organisers of Spain’s top antiques fair Feriarte, held last November 22 to 30 at Madrid’s Juan Carlos I Exhibition Centre, report the 200 exhibitors between them sold 6317 items. The gate was 37,147.

LAPADA have confirmed that they will proceed with their new 2004 fairs programme but have put the Cheltenham event back by two weeks.

THERE will be even greater English trade interest in one of the big success stories of recent years on the New York fairs scene – The New York Ceramics Fair. The fair, which has expanded from four to five days and will run at the National Academy of Design Museum, 1083 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street, from January 14 to 18 with a preview party on the evening of January 13.

THERE is a deal of trade excitement at the latest initiative of that accomplished organiser Fran Foster, who from January 28 to February 1 launches the National Fine Art and Antiques Fair at The National Exhibition Centre, Birmingham.

TO many Americans, Manhattan’s annual Winter Antiques Show is the most prestigious fair in the land. It is certainly the most venerable since from January 16 to 25 (after a charity party on January 15) it celebrates a half century at New York’s Seventh Regiment Armory, Park Avenue at 67th Street.

STAYING in New York, dealers in Japanese works of art Flying Cranes Antiques hold a selling exhibition of Japanese Ikebana baskets at their galleries within the Manhattan Art and Antiques Center, 1050 Second Avenue at 56th Street, until January 31.

THE veteran New York firm of fair organisers Wendy Management, a family firm who started putting shows together in 1934, are going rapidly upmarket, and they are taking some well-known European dealers with them.

AFTER what was for most a disappointing November Olympia fair, the last chance for many dealers to save another difficult year was the Winter Antiques For Everyone at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre from November 27 to 30. And for plenty of the 600 or so exhibitors it did just that.

LAST week, after two years of renovations, Judith and Phil Carrigan officially opened their Uzella Court Antiques Centre and Fine Art in the centre of Lostwithiel, Cornwall. The centre is housed in a partly medieval building which has been a shop of one sort or another – most recently a butcher’s – since 1850.

The Art Deco Fair at Battersea Old Town Hall in South London is to have a new lease of life now ownership has passed to Nottingham-based Nick Cox of Abbey Fairs from Welsh-based organiser Anne Zierold. Abbey host their first Battersea fair on February 15 and Nick, who organises four other Deco events, promises some drastic changes “to bring the fair into the 21st century”.

LONDON dealer Caroline de Kerangal is happy dealing from home and a couple of times a year at the decorative fair in Battersea Park, but she occasionally gets the urge to work from a shop, and it appears to be a seasonal thing.

Return to original Art College venue: FACED with the unexpected loss of their 2004 fair venue, the organisers of the 20/21 British Art Fair have struck a deal for a new space at short notice. Next September 15, the five-day fair will return to its previous venue, The Royal College of Art.

JUST in time for Halloween, a warm-blooded and unidentified mortal paid $10,000 (£5920) for this box of tools designed for vampire killing, pictured right. Sold as part of Sotheby’s New York 19th Century Furniture and Decorative Arts sale on October 30, a label on the kit says: “This box contains the items considered necessary for persons who travel into certain little known countries of Eastern Europe where the populace are plagued with a particular manifestation of evil known as Vampires.”

REGARDED by the professionals as the place to spot trends, New York’s double weekend Triple Pier Antiques Show, on November 8 and 9 and then November 15 and 16, pulled in its best crowds since the 1990s and private buying proved very strong.

SINCE the Second World War, Switzerland has been the world’s premier marketplace for antiquities, so it is no surprise that it is this discipline which not only dominates but defines Cultura, the international Swiss fair in Basel which ran at the city’s exhibition halls from November 14 to 19.

West End public relations firm Focus PR have been appointed to head up communications services for next summer’s Fine Art and Antiques Fair at Olympia.

Plans are serious but it will take years to fulfil them: Olympia’s owners have assured the Antiques Trade Gazette that plans for a large casino at the West London exhibition complex will not affect the Fine Art and Antiques Fairs.

AXA Art have struck a three-year deal to act as principal sponsor for the TEFAF Maastricht fair from 2004. The sponsorship is a natural fit for the global art insurer, many of whose leading clients are exhibitors at what is acknowledged as the world’s top art and antiques fair.

NORTH Yorkshire organisers Galloway Antiques Fairs have events coming thick and fast this month and less than a week after shutting up shop at Dunscombe Park in their home county, they head north for The Scone Palace Antiques Fair, Perth from November 14 to 16. The popular Scottish fixture has been fully booked for some time with 33 exhibitors.