Last autumn saw the battle of the art fairs in Vienna, as the city hosted the inaugural Viennacontemporary and the decade-old Viennafair within weeks of each other. This year only Viennacontemporary will go ahead after Viennafair was cancelled in the wake of disappointing sales.
Despite Viennafair’s demise, its old management team is still in business. After failing to secure their venue and scheduling of choice for Viennafair, they were in fact behind the launch of Viennacontemporary in 2015. Reed Exhibitions licensed the Viennafair brand to new management last year.
Viennacontemporary has retained most of its former exhibitors and collectors. There has been a slight rise in the number of participating galleries (105 compared with 99 in 2015), and the second edition continues to focus on Eastern European and younger art. A third of the exhibitors come from Austria, a third from Eastern Europe and the rest from elsewhere.
The fair’s biggest collectors hail from Austria, Germany and Switzerland, as well as Belgium, Eastern Europe and the UK. But the galleries, VIP programme and city at large are also beginning to draw the US market, says the fair’s director, Christina Steinbrecher-Pfandt.
“Vienna is an art lover’s town,” says the London-based dealer Hidde van Seggelen. “Viennacontemporary is the kind of fair where dealers end up discovering and buying work from artists they had never heard of before—it’s very playful.” He plans to show films and drawings by the Dutch artist Ansuya Blom, some of which were inspired by the diaries of Franz Kafka.
The fair’s special programme includes the return of Zone1, a section dedicated to solo presentations by young Austrian artists, as well as a focus on Albania and the ex-Yugoslavia countries.
Galleries from Finland, Denmark and Sweden will also make an appearance in a new section, Nordic Highlights. “It’s something we’ve been thinking about for a while, since the Finnish director of Gallery Taik Persons, Timothy Persons, joined the fair’s board,” Steinbrecher-Pfandt says. Other special presentations include Cinema, dedicated to film and video art, and The Art Newspaper Media Forum, a series of talks addressing the future of art publishing.
• Viennacontemporary, Marx Halle, Vienna, 22-25 September