“The idea emerged from the feeling that we needed to try to do something different to grow as galleries,” Rosales told ARTnews. “We thought, instead of saying that a fair does not work for us, we should try to do something else ourselves.”

Even the fair’s name fits that spirit, taking it from the common art world adage “see you in June,” a reference to Art Basel, as well as being a play on Death in June, the name of a neo-folk band led by English musician Douglas. Upon the suggestion of a “well-placed” colleague, they add “Art Fair” to their project’s title.

The fair’s bunker was recently transformed into an exhibition space by Pritzker Prize–winning firm Herzog & de Meuron, and that is reason enough to visit. The elevator ride down three levels builds the suspense of seeing the wares brought by the 12 participating galleries, nearly half of them for the first time: Cento (Glasgow), Lagune Ouest (Copenhagen), Magician Space (Beijing), PALAS (Sydney), and Property Holdings Development Group (Hong Kong).

“It’s actually our first fair ever, and we could not be more excited,” Cento cofounder Grace Johnson said. The gallery is presenting a solo show of British artist Rhett Leinster, whose work incorporates paper he makes himself and pigment that he often grinds himself. These pieces draw inspiration from images found online that Leinster transforms into something else, like a bird that now looks like a landscape.

This year’s fair also decreased in size, having four exhibitors fewer than in 2023. “We could decide to cut the program in half, give each other more space, and just do the project with five galleries,” Rosales said, noting that the fair has a cost-sharing model that prioritizes the exhibitors’ needs.

Tokyo-based dealer Yugari Hagiwara (of Hagiwara Projects) is showing small works by British artist Gabriel Hartley, whose layered and textured paintings and ceramics call for slow contemplation. “I did well last year, so I am happy to be back,” Hagiwara said.

In her VI, VII booth, Rosales is showing Yu Shuk Pui Bobby video’s Genetic Salon I & II (2021–22), which questions perceptions around gender, the body, and identity, as well as a series of digital prints on porcelain inspired by Hong Kong memorial placards (ceramic tiles with portraits of the dead loved ones left at their graves). Rosales has also brought three abstract compositions by Norwegian painter Jorunn Hancke Øgstad, who uses fabric dye, resin, and plastics to mimic watercolor, spray paint, and print processes.

Frankfurt-based gallery Parisa Kind has returned to the fair, with a presentation that includes figurative ink-on-canvas works by German artist Isabelle Fein and a new series of abstract paintings by Benjamin Echeverria, who has recently begun depicting large dots, using the lids of paint cans to determine the shape of his patterns. 

What explains the loyalty of returning exhibitors? There is a certain sense of intimacy that pervades the fair. “It is a pretty cool fair,” said Frankfurt dealer Jacky Strenz, who has curated her booth as an homage to artist Lin May Saeed, who died in 2023. In her practice, which spanned various mediums, Saeed dedicated her work to advocating for the respect of animals. 

“We are a great group of galleries,” Kind said. “We hang out all the time. There is no competition between us. We help each other out. It does not feel like old friends getting together—we are old friends getting together.”

The small selection is partly due to the space: galleries at June show their artists’ works in an underground bunker initially developed for nuclear fallout. It’s a far cry from the antiseptic convention halls. In this context, one feels they can give their full attention to the art on view.

Back upstairs from the bunker are special projects like “I was born to just hang out” by DARP, an artistic and alternative living collective from Derbyshire whose installation of seated wooden figures in T-shirts invites audiences to chill for a moment. A selection of NFTs curated by Jared Madere was also on view as part of June Art Fair’s crypto-art initiative Juneart.io. Flashing by on a TV monitor overlooking the kitchen garden outside the bunker was a surprising range of work Wretched Worm, who came up in the net-art movement; abstract painters like Joanne Robertson and Jake Cruzen; and more.

Below, ARTnews has put together a selection of the five best booths at June Art Fair.

News

Joe Thompson, who has served as director of MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, for 32 years, will step down on October 29. [ARTnews]

After planning for a socially distant event in October, Photo London will hold its fifth edition online after all. [The Art Newspaper]

As part of an initiative spearheaded by design professor Friedrich von Borries, the University of Fine Arts Hamburg in Germany will offer three individual grants to applicants who pledge to reduce their consumption or adjust other behaviors that impact the world as a whole. Submissions to the so called “doing nothing” grants will be on view in an exhibition opening in November. [DW]

Viktor Babariko, a collector in Belarus and a rival of the country’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, has been arrested. [The Art Newspaper]

Art & Artists

Carolina A. Miranda examines the history and enduring legacy of the Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War, of which artists were key participants. The Moratorium “marked a transformational moment for art in Los Angeles,” Miranda writes. [Los Angeles Times]

Here’s a Q&A in which Sharita Towne, who created the initiative A Black Art Ecology of Portland, and Intisar Abioto, who has photographed Black residents in Portland as part of a seven-year-long project, discuss social justice and art in the Oregonian city. [The New York Times]

A look at the life and career of Ruth Asawa, whose pioneering wire sculptures landed on new stamps from the United State Postal Service earlier this month. [ARTnews]

The Market

June Art Fair, which had its inaugural edition in Basel last year, has opened its online-only sale on Hauser & Wirth’s website. Emerging dealers participating in the fair have seen early sales of works by Jannis Varelas, Cassi Namoda, and others. [Art Market Monitor]

Exhibitions & Performances

Artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s musical piece Il Cielo in Una Stanza (The Sky in a Room) will run for the duration of one month in a Milanese church starting on September 22. The presentation is meant to recognize individuals’ trials and triumphs during the pandemic. [The Art Newspaper]

Finally, a piece on how museums around the world dedicated to Pablo Picasso are making the artist’s work readily accessible online. [The Wall Street Journal]

Held in partnership with ArtReview magazine, the fair is now live on Hauser & Wirth’s website. Due to run through August 31, the fair includes 17 emerging international galleries hailing from 12 countries spanning Europe, North America, Asia and the Middle East. “With this collaboration, we wanted to be able to support the wider artworld ecosystem and provide a platform for younger galleries and emerging artists who are affected by the physical cancellation of so many events in the art world,” said Neil Wenman, partner at Hauser & Wirth, in a statement.

Hauser & Wirth is not the only mega-gallery to have engineered a platform meant to support younger galleries—David Zwirner also recently unveiled a digital initiative intended to showcase works put up for sale by emerging enterprises. Such platforms can have commercial advantages for emerging dealers, especially since a small set of blue-chip galleries with robust online platforms are beginning to emerge as the key drivers of a burgeoning online market. According to the 2020 Hiscox Online Art Trade, 63 percent of the art companies surveyed were expecting mega-galleries to emerge as some of the biggest players in the online art market.

In interviews, dealers participating in June said that a fair such as this one has its benefits. “We do believe that this new model is here to stay, and it will develop over time and generate even more results,” said Nadia Gerazouni, director at Athens’s Breeder Gallery. “With fairs shifting to the virtual online format, the core of the sales tends to be to collectors we know through the gallery’s contacts and the infrastructure it built from its physical presence in major art fairs all these past years. Trust between a collector and a gallery takes longer to build online, and it is not as straightforward as a physical sale would be.”

Gerzouni said sales early on had been swift. The Breeder placed two paintings by Jannis Varelas priced between $$28,000 and $45,000 with European collections during the fair’s preview. After those sales, collectors began inquiring about Varelas’s earlier works, Gerzouni said—a sign that the exposure had already begun paying off.

With work for sale by high-profile artists such as Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Sky Hopinka, and Ulrike Müller, June’s offerings rival what is typically found at fairs like Art Basel and Frieze. Accordingly, it’s attracted galleries who typically show at those premier fairs. Los Angeles’s François Ghebaly gallery is among them, and at June, the enterprise sold out its showing of six oil and acrylic works by Cassi Namoda. Focused on the legacies of colonialism, the figurative works were priced between $4,500 and $14,000.

Vienna dealer Croy Nielsen sold Subaltern Autonomous Zone (2020), a figurative painting by Georgia Gardner Gray, for €20,000 (around $23,500). Tokyo gallery Misako and Rosen sold four abstract paintings by Margaret Lee—a cofounder of New York’s closely watched 47 Canal gallery—from her new series “I.C.W.U.M.” for $15,000 each. And Chicago’s Document gallery sold an untitled edition from 2018 by Sepuya, a photographer who figured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, to an American collector for $5,000 and placed three more works from a related series in an international collection.

Conceptual artworks can be a challenge to sell, but at June, they were already finding buyers. Tokyo’s XYZ collective brought works by Japanese artist Yuka Hasegawa. One piece, a Fendi sweatshirt replica, carried a price tag of $2,600; another, titled Spice Girls, mimed the look of 18th-century paintings and was priced at $3,800.

Compared to something like Art Basel, June is a relatively small fair, but its size works to its advantage, dealers said. “This more boutique-size format is particularly compelling in that it both acknowledges and obviates the fatigue people might be experiencing from online fairs by keeping it tight and small, with solo presentations,” said a representative for Mexico City’s Lulu gallery. The gallery received inquiries for two works by Daniel Rios Rodriguez, including an oil and copper work tilted Quarantine Dream (2020) that was priced at $6,500 and a limestone on terra-cotta piece called Give me the Night that was priced at $7,500.

As the traditional art calendar becomes less relevant and online exhibitions take on greater prominence, emerging galleries are adjusting to the changes. “We have found that the online format takes much longer to confirm sales as the sense of urgency is gone,” said dealer Manuela Paz, of Puerto Rico’s Embajada gallery, which was selling works by Jorge González. “Still, an online fair gives an opportunity and an excuse to present and contextualize an artist’s practice, and partnerships such as the one between June and Hauser & Wirth provide a superior platform to do so, expanding our potential reach.”

Correction, 8/22/20, 12:35 p.m.: A previous version of this article stated that Hauser & Wirth launched the June Art Fair. The fair was launched last year, but not by Hauser & Wirth. This article has been updated to reflect this.