Market Round-Up

The 2010 Art Car Boot Fair is gearing up to be the  art world’s summer playground with lots of artful dodging and weaving, bartering and frivolity than ever before and serious art bargains to boot!

New! This year! A Wrestling Ring centrepiece featuring bouts of old school wrestling interspersed with some arty in-fighting and inbetween-bout secret auction thrills as this year’s crowds snap up Lucha Libre inspired original artworks from the UK’s most famous artists, the freshest talents and the coolest trend setters. Plus they’re upping the stakes with lots of artful games and gaming.

Now in its second year, the newly expanded Russian, Eastern, Asian & Oriental Fine Art Fair will feature 50 leading international galleries, showcasing 1000 years of art from across the Eastern world.  In the hotel foyer will be a mosaic life sized baby Asian elephant made by the artists Carrie Reichardt and Nick Reynolds. The sculpture is on loan from the London Elephant Parade and is one of the most significant pieces of contemporary 3D mosaics currently on show in the UK.

Two of our stallholders have contributed to the Elephant Parade Project.  Carrie Reichardt aka The Baroness and Marty Thorton Pop Artist have created

I’ve always kept my own personal museum.  Based around my family and the sentiment that we’ve attached to certain things, be they baby shoes, tummy button clamps, teeth, hair, passport pictures I’ve rarely thrown things away, not because I’m an obsessive horder but because I’ve always seen the value of collections of objects and how they lend themselves to art. This can be most obviously photography and portraiture collection shown at The National Portrait Gallery, The Wellcome Institute to  Joseph Cornell’s boxes and Damian Hirst’s collection of formaldehyde animals.

Friends of Portobello was recently formed to prevent Portobello’s diverse character and rich retail life from ever becoming another ‘clone town street’. More than ever, Britain’s best shopping streets are fast becoming identi-kit high streets with big name chain stores flexing their muscles over small, independent shops. We don’t want Portobello Road to progress this way.