Independent Brussels: a new way to do art fairs

A popular New York art fair which sets out to challenge the long-established model for showing art, has arrived in Brussels this weekend for its first European show.

Independent was started in 2010 by gallerist Elizabeth Dee, who was tired with the non-evolving model for art fairs. The result is a fair organised from the point of view of the gallerists and the artists rather than the convention organisers.

Co-director Olivier Pesret says: "The way the fair is set up is you walk into the fair and you have something that is very open, we work with architects and every year we change radically the floor plan.

"At Independent nobody is left in a corner because there is no aisle, you have to cross every booth, you're able to move freely within the art. The booths are very open and so sometimes you don't really know where one gallery stops and the other starts."

He says it is a truly curated fair - galleries participate by invitation only and there is no selection committee. "After that we have an ongoing conversation with every single one of them about what they want to show.

"A few months before the fair we know what everyone is bringing and we start allocating booths. This is a two-way process so if they don't agree where they are being located we go back to the drawing board until we find the best solution for everyone."

Pesret says the choice of Brussels was an obvious one: "Since the beginning in New York, half of our exhibitors were coming from Europe and the rest from the US and we wanted to be closer to home for the European galleries and we wanted to give the Americans the opportunity to come show in Europe in a different city, a city that they're not familiar with.

"We wanted to establish ourselves in a city where we could have a positive impact. Belgium has always been such a a great region where there has been support for the arts for centuries and it's also been especially true for contemporary art.

"And so you have a great number of artists that are establishing themselves or their studios here. You have some great institutions that have popped up over the last 10 years and you have a great collector base so all these put together make for a great terrain where we are able to establish our platform."

Pesret and co-director Liv Vaisberg are based permanently in Brussels. "We didn't want to be an American fair that just comes five days a year and leaves," he says. "That's why we also have a space called Independent Régence in a 600m² gallery space where we do a gallery residency.

"We invite galleries from our network that do our fairs to come to Brussels and put on a show. We take care of everything so that all they have to do is concentrate on the show. Independent Régence is a place for us to give back to the Belgian public and to have international galleries come year-round and present artists that are not represented in the country."

Independent Brussels: Thursday 21 April 14.00-19.00, Friday 22 April and Saturday 23 April 12.00-19.00. Admission free.
Vanderborght building, Rue de l’Ecuyer 50, 1000 Brussels