“The warfare in Ukraine feels a lot nearer to us right here than additional west,” says Markus Huber, managing director of the Vienna Modern honest, held 11 to 14 September within the Austrian capital and now in its eleventh yr. As previously, the honest focuses on Japanese Europe, with galleries from Poland, Ukraine, Slovakia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Croatia and from Austria itself among the many 97 exhibitors from 24 international locations.
“I left Ukraine after the warfare began, three years in the past, and now stay and work in Vienna,” says the artist Kateryna Lysovenko, who gained the honest’s Münze Österreich Prize for her large-scale, brightly-hued figurative work. She is represented by TBA gallery from Warsaw, based only one yr in the past. It was one in every of ten galleries in an space dubbed Zone1, dedicated to rising artists who’re both Austrian or who work there, curated by Aliaksei Barysionak. “Sure, this can be a very problematic time for the area,” he says. “However I need to give a voice and an area to artists who’re from this zone.” Certainly, all of the galleries from Central and Japanese Europe expressed their dismay on the disaster on the jap borders of their area, however appeared decided to proceed to advertise their artists. “If Ukraine falls, Russia gained’t cease. We mustn’t surrender, as a result of in any other case Putin will simply proceed on to Berlin!” mentioned Lysovenko.
As for gross sales, expectations weren’t excessive. Earlier than the beginning of the honest, Markus Huber had warned exhibitors that companies in Austria had been seeing important downturns, which could properly influence on them as properly. “The scene is basically shaky,” he admitted. By the second day some galleries had offered no works in any respect, and those who had offered tended to be at very low value factors.
Ani Molnár Gallery of Budapest reported 4 gross sales on the primary day, together with a geometrical portray by Tamás Konok for €14,500. Sofija Milenoković of the Serbian Rima Gallery offered 4 works by Nina Ivanović, fabricated from painted wire based mostly on panorama images, at costs between €800 and €2,000; the most important work, priced at €7,000, had not discovered a purchaser on the second day.
Vienna Modern additionally has a piece for extra historic works, Context, and inevitably one sales space was dedicated to Hermann Nitsch, the chief of the Vienna Actionist college, whose guts-and-gore, “6-day play” had its final iteration this yr. 4 works, usually in splashed scarlet and gray, had been priced between €65,000 and €250,000: none had offered by the top of the second day.
Among the many non-eastern European exhibitors was Jerome O Drisceoil, proprietor of Dublin’s Inexperienced on Pink Gallery, displaying Alan Butler’s Procedural Landscapes for Android ( Yosemite Nationwide Park v. 1 (2023), a generative digital work in an version of three, was priced at €9,000 and Damien Flood’s portray Everlasting Backyard (2024). “Most cubicles listed below are dealing with Japanese Europe, I’m right here to get them to take a look at Eire too,” says O Drisceoil cheerfully, regardless of having chalked up no gross sales. He provides that he had extra success on the similar honest previously.
“Vienna is a bridge between western and jap Europe,” Huber says: “Central and Japanese Europe will stay our fundamental focus. Once you suppose that 85% of vacationers come right here for tradition, it will be important that we should always have a powerful honest within the area,” he concludes.
