Fairs
Amsterdam 2024: Fair Director’s picks
In advance of Affordable Art Fair Amsterdam 2024, Fair Director Blythe Bolton has narrowed down a selection of artwork top picks.
Blythe Bolton
Tuesday 1 October, 2024
Do you remember how exciting it was, as a child, to see a rainbow? Or how important the answer to ‘what’s your favourite colour’ felt?
We’re tapping back into that intuitive curiosity about colour with a fair full of pigment-packed paintings, kaleidoscopic installations and a crowd of colourful characters.
I’m especially excited to share with visitors a spectacular aerial installation from artist Tomislav Topic, whose passion for colour has been inspiring me this year to consider not only how we see, but how we feel colour.
We’re also delighted to welcome, for the first time to the fair, Margitte Verwoedt. Margitte will be our resident art advisor, on-hand to offer expert advice to those who might appreciate a little extra art-collecting guidance. She’ll also be hosting a couple of fascinating talks that I’m sure you’ll love.
There’s lots to look forward to. Here’s a selection of some of my other top picks for the fair:
True Blue Brilliance
Oceans and skies, peace and serenity, are all connections colour theorists tie to the colour blue. It’s always a hue that puts me at ease and here are two paintings where we see it blended to beautiful effect.
Illustrious Japanese artist, Tsuyoshi Maekawa, will be presented at the fair this year by LADS Gallery who join us for the first time from Osaka. Using techniques including sewing, folding, cutting, tearing, and colouring textiles, he creates subtly sublime works that radiate calm, especially in-person.
Another glorious work that sang out to me from this year’s applications is this abstract painting from Alex Voinea. I’ve lived with one of Alex’s artworks for almost 8 years now and its energised, technicolour swirls still light me up.
Winged Magic
Blue tits, goldfinches, pheasants – my grandparents are or were obsessed with taking care of the birds that lived in their gardens. The older I get the more I feel the warmth of that caring connection looking at lovingly rendered bird motifs.
I love the witty visual equation in this photographic work, titled ‘The Full Weight of Relativizing Reinforcement III’ by Hans van Asch. The lyrical bird outweighing the solid metal feels like a powerful philosophical reminder to let nature be our priority, however challenging or impossible that might seem.
Eva de Visser brings together flawless yet free figurative painting with the enchanting invitation of wildlife into interior settings. With decadent blues and glowing oil-paint atmospheres, her works are the sophisticated Cinderella scenes that I love to let my imagination wander in.
Peach Perfection
Pantone’s 2024 colour of the year has been Peach Fuzz and it shows up glowing in these two enigmatic paintings.
Instantly recognisable to long-time fans of the fair, Rotterdam-based painter Silas will be back at the fair this year with Jaski Gallery. These desolate landscapes and otherworldly beauties are always full of mystery. Adamo has a particularly intriguing aura to me.
New to the fair, Keikio Aikawa’s ‘Nameless and characterless reality’, while in a completely different style also takes us to a complex place and seems to ask more questions than it answers.
Would you rather have your portrait painted realistically or in the abstract? Something to think about.
Opposites Enhance
Blue and orange, yellow and purple, red and green, opposite colours often ignite each other and these two landscape works from Jasper van Ham and Arvydas Kašauskas are great examples of these colour dynamics at play.
Blending memory and imagination, the landscapes of Jasper van Ham are rich in layers and full of feeling. Their freshness and luminosity make me feel like I’m on holiday.
It’s unusual for me to get so excited by technical aspects of an artwork but I love the red underpainting in this country idyll from Latvian artist, Arvydas Kasauskas. Van Gogh was a pioneer of using vivid colours as underpainting and, along with the Cezanne-like constructive brushstrokes, the painting feels deliciously reminiscent of that Post-Impressionist period.
Surreal Safari
I sometimes say to people that one of the biggest obstacles to enjoying art and feeling welcome in ‘the art world’ is the idea that art is all about the artist. Every viewer brings their own unique experiences to the lens of interpreting a work. For me in this selection, it’s the movies I grew up loving.
Amsterdam treasure Bas Kosters’ work, Fluid Teewee, caught my eye not only for the signature textile cartoon quality but also because its pink puppet-like quality put me in mind of the unforgettably odd creatures in the Labyrinth movie David Bowie starred in back in the 90s.
Similarly Hanae Sasaoka’s Party Time scene brings me right back to the world of The Wind in the Willows and the early Disney Alice in Wonderland. Based in Amstelveen, I’m also looking forward to seeing Hanae’s new series of ceramics which are sure to be a delight for art lovers drawn to dream worlds and whimsy.
Natural World Wonders
Speaking of ceramics, these ceramic mushrooms also shown at Émigré Collection by the artist Kyoko Suzuki would make for a fantastic addition to any interior. I can imagine a line of 3 or 4 hanging beautifully in a slice of narrow wall or bringing another dimension to a salon-style gallery wall.
New to the fair, I wouldn’t be surprised if Anne Carnein’s botanical 3D works sell out within hours of the fair opening. They elegantly express an almost divine reverence for the beauty of nature in the same way that a Mary Oliver poem might. I urge you to go and take a look at these up close.
Femme Fabulous
Womanhood is a subject I, perhaps predictably, never tire of and these three give me the Iris-Apfel style inspiration that I love to be reminded of. Visions of women strong, serene and perfectly in harmony in their canvas spaces, and having one of these on the wall is a bit like having a friend at home with you. I would love to have one of these paintings hanging by my desk.
If I could only have one…
There are two versions of a still life by Piet Mondriaan featuring a ginger pot against a grey background and I think they’re probably responsible for sending me off down an arty career path. To this day, whenever I see the combination of that turquoise in the bottom box against grey, it sends me back to an art class full of teenagers.
There’s more to my love of this serene still life by Antonio Matallana than that, though. Aside from the artist’s exquisite technique in egg tempera which is a notoriously difficult medium to master, it is a perfect composition. Perfectly balanced, perfectly harmonious, just perfect in every way. As someone 20 years younger than me might say, it’s ‘giving’ Wes Anderson vibes.
Further, it reminds me of one of the aspects of art that I love so much – the unexpected ways it can connect two subjects that have absolutely no relationship to one another in a way that is entirely unique to the viewer. In this case, Antonio Matallena’s five inanimate objects capture one of the great loves of my life, the iconic British pop band of the 1990s, Take That.
This family of objects to me revealed themselves to be Mark, Jason and Howard (the stacked boxes, supporting each other, stronger together), Gary Barlow (the yellow Crayola box, front man and songwriter) and to the right, slightly adrift and formatted differently, Robbie Williams. Could it be magic? I don’t know, but it’s fun for me to think about.
I hope to see you at the fair losing yourself in art and boxes that remind you of boy bands. Join us from 9 – 13 October 2024 at De Kromhouthal.
Lead image: Tomislav Topic, Kagkatikas Secret, 2018, Paxos (GR)