From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
It is fair to say that Dubai does not have a rich tradition of public museums, which makes its most significant fair, Art Dubai, all the more important for the cultural life of the city. ‘In a way, Art Dubai is a once-a-year pop-up museum,’ says executive director Benedetta Ghione. ‘It comes into town and showcases the best of the best – and that has an impact.’
Over the past 18 years, Art Dubai has grown steadily: its first edition featured 40 galleries; this year some 120 will take part, including 20 debutants. The programme continues to reflect the cultural make-up of Dubai – a place of ‘micro communities’, as the fair’s artistic director, Pablo del Val, describes it – by bringing together a vast global range of galleries and artists. Del Val stresses that Art Dubai offers something of an alternative to the ‘white cube’ format of Western contemporary art spaces, and to Western traditions of making and displaying art. And because the price ranges here tend to be lower than at some more established fairs, galleries and collectors have more freedom, del Val tells me – they use the event as an opportunity to ‘test things out’.
‘When you think of Dubai,’ Ghione says, ‘the future comes to mind,’ so it is apt that this city should host a fair with such a strong digital art programme. This year’s Art Dubai Digital, curated by Gonzalo Herrero Delicado, features innovative projects such as Carbon Wake by the artist BREAKFAST, a kinetic installation which transforms real-time energy data from cities around the world into visual stimuli. Keeping a sense of excitement is key for del Val, who believes in the fair’s potential to fill a gap – digital art is not a staple of many big art fairs – and to help change stereotypes about Dubai, too, a city ‘much more sophisticated’ than some may expect.
Regular visitors will be well acquainted with the Bawwaba section (the word means ‘gateway’ in Arabic), which began in 2019 and concentrates on work from the Global South. This year, the curator, Mirjam Varadinis, has tried to move away from this categorisation, preferring a thematic grouping around the idea of ‘displacement’. One of the central works in the display is by the Lebanese artist Omar Mismar, whose work often meditates on conflict and exile (shown by Secci gallery). Mismar’s poignant mosaic Ahmad and Akram Protecting Hercules (2019–20) shows two men sandbagging a mosaic of Hercules to safeguard it from bombing during the Syrian civil war.
Art Dubai has also been working tirelessly to uncover alternative perspectives on modernism through its Modern section. This year, look out for Vigo Gallery, which is bringing a selection of paintings by the Sudanese artist Ibrahim El-Salahi, one of the foremost exponents of African modernism.
The fair’s largest section, Contemporary, hosts its widest range of local and international exhibitors. For del Val, perhaps the biggest selling-point is that ‘the best Indian galleries’ exhibit here: a highlight is Chemould Prescott Road, based in Mumbai, which is exhibiting work by Lavanya Mani, including her elaborately dyed quilt work The Ark (2018–19). At most art fairs, Ghione says, ‘you see the same people over and over again’. Art Dubai harnesses its city’s particular mixture of vibrancy and diversity to produce a fair with freshness – as Ghione puts it, ‘a slightly different type of world’.
The General (2002), Ibrahim El-Salahi. Courtesy Vigo Gallery/the artist
Art Dubai takes place from 18–20 April at the Madinat Jumeirah.
Gallery highlights
Ian Hamilton Finlay: Fragments
30 April–24 May
Victoria Miro, London
The culmination of Finlay’s lifelong interest in stone-carving is Little Sparta, the seven-acre garden at his home near Edinburgh that the Scottish artist and poet decked out with inscribed headstones and sculptures. Finlay’s stones, including riffs on works by Jacques-Louis David, feature heavily in this exhibition – one of several shows marking the centenary of his birth this year – along with wall paintings, tapestries, neon sculptures and more.
Songs before Sunrise
4 April–17 May
Sprüth Magers, London
The artists assembled in this show seem so eclectic as to defy curatorial logic – but then perhaps that is fitting for an exhibition interested in dream logic and the amalgamation of past and present. Among the works on display are Eugène Carrière’s enigmatic portrait of his eldest daughter (c. 1890), a foggy blue Symbolist-inspired canvas from 2024 by Oliver Bak and Rosemarie Trockel’s 2011 copy of a Toulouse-Lautrec nude with a single spot added.
Beyond the Fringe: Painting for the Market in 17th-century Italy
23 April–22 May
Nicholas Hall, New York
Seicento Italian art is often seen as being dominated by commissions rather than independent work. The 30 paintings assembled here tell a different story, giving an insight into ‘popular’ taste at the time. The pezzo forte is a piercing portrait of a boy in a feathered hat, mouth agape, which was once thought to be by Caravaggio but is now attributed to an unknown French pupil of Carlo Saraceni.
Thomas J. Price: Resilience of Scale
24 April–14 June
Hauser & Wirth, New York
In his imposing bronzes, the British artist challenges western traditions around monument-making and individual greatness by memorialising ‘ordinary’ people and situations: Time Unfolding (2023), one of five sculptures in this show, is a nine-foot-tall statue of a woman looking at her mobile phone. Also on display is a work from 2023 comprising 18 photographs of hands leafing through a catalogue of classical statues.
Time Unfolding (2023), Thomas J. Price. Photo: Chris Roque UAP; courtesy the artist/Hauser & Wirth; © the artist
Fairs in focus
EXPO Chicago
24–27 April
Festival Hall, Navy Pier, Chicago
This year’s edition of Chicago’s modern and contemporary fair is its second instalment under the aegis of Frieze, which, it seems, has been busy developing the fair. Alongside 100 returning exhibitors and familiar sections are a new partnership with the Galleries Association of Korea, which is bringing 20 leading Korean exhibitors to the fair, and the Contrast section, curated by Lauren Haynes, which is being unveiled here for the first time.
Art Brussels
24–27 April
Brussels Expo
Some 165 galleries are coming together this month for the 41st edition of Art Brussels, the second oldest contemporary-art fair in the world. Established galleries return this year in the main section, Prime, but part of the event’s longevity also comes from knowing how to keep things fresh: the Discovery and Invited segments, respectively, champion emerging artists and young, innovative galleries who are making their debuts at the fair.
From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.