From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

For its 27th edition, Asian Art in London (AAL) is going back to basics. Gone is the division into two legs, one for Indian and Islamic art and one for East Asian art, introduced in 2020 in response to Covid-era travel restrictions. Now, Henry Howard-Sneyd, the event’s chair, tells me, ‘We’ve picked a 10-day period when we think the most people will be in town and able to pack everything in.’

That there is a lot to pack in shouldn’t be surprising: the event covers the artistic history of half of the world’s population. But this year the organisers have made things easier for visitors and exhibitors by arranging for Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Bonhams to provide gallery space for private dealers visiting from overseas. Making use of the auction houses’ well-fitted, well-lit and well-insured galleries is a pragmatic solution to the nightmare of finding suitable exhibition space in London these days. It is also testament to what Howard-Sneyd calls ‘the symbiotic relationship between dealers and auction houses’ – something he exemplifies as Sotheby’s chair of Asian art for Europe and the Americas, and as AAL’s co-founder.

Tibetan gilt bronze figure of Buddha Vairochana (15th century), Tibet. Courtesy Roseberys Fine Art Auctioneers & Valuers

The partnership has enabled first-time exhibitors Thang Long Art Gallery to travel from Hanoi, with a display at Bonhams of Vietnamese art since the end of the French colonial era in 1954. There is more Vietnamese art – a market which, according to Howard-Sneyd, is ‘bubbling to the surface’ – from Raquelle Azran, one of 11 exhibitors at Sotheby’s. This wide-ranging display also includes arms and armour courtesy of Runjeet Singh and contemporary East Asian art from ArtChina and Ming Gu Gallery. Sotheby’s also hosts a single-gallery presentation by newcomers Sundaram Tagore Gallery, featuring five contemporary artists from across Asia. At Christie’s, Taipei-based Mo Hai Lou International Art Research Group is showing contemporary works from China and Japan. Beyond the auction houses, the highlight at Eskenazi is a Yuan dynasty guan jar – according to the gallery, one of the rarest porcelain objects it has ever exhibited – and a display of ‘Objects from the Tang and Song’ by first-timers Paul Ruitenbeek Chinese Art at the Maas Gallery in St James’s.

When AAL started in 1998, it was among the first dealer-led events, pulling together a one-stop shop for collectors and museum professionals interested in this market. Things have changed enormously since then, Howard-Sneyd tells me – China replaced Europe and the United States as the dominant force around 2005 and following its post-Covid slump, is now being replaced by collectors from the Indian subcontinent. The trick for AAL is to keep innovating – to which end the event has struck up another new partnership this year, presenting an inaugural one-day symposium at SOAS, with panels on subjects that range across the continent and through time. Howard-Sneyd says he hopes it might ‘demystify’ the subject of Asian art for a younger audience – and so keep growing an area of collecting which, despite its pedigree, is ‘still developing’.

Asian Art in London takes place from 30 October–8 November.

Gallery highlights

William Eggleston: The Last Dyes

Opening 16 November
David Zwirner, Los Angeles

In the 1940s, Kodak developed dye-transfer printing – a laborious process in which three separate colour-filtered images are superimposed. When Kodak stopped making dye-transfer materials in the early ’90s, William Eggleston – the first art photographer to use the process in the 1970s – bought the excess stock. He has now used it all up, meaning that these new prints of major works from the ’60s and ’70s will be the last.

Alex Katz: Flower Journals
Until 21 December
Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg

In 2022, Alex Katz embarked on an unusual collaboration, illustrating a series of journal entries written in 1971–72 by his late friend Joe Brainard (1941–94), which detailed the two friends’ lives as part of the New York School. Katz’s drawings are each of a single flower, delicately rendered in charcoal. Close cropping imparts a dynamism to the pictures, but they are produced with a meticulous eye for the flowers’ anatomy.

Marlene Dumas: Mourning Marsyas
Until 16 November
Frith Street Gallery, London

These are new paintings by the South African artist – although she says that ‘There is nothing new’ about them, ‘Neither in their themes, nor in their process of becoming’. Certainly, these works are evidence of the uncanny knack Dumas has honed over the decades for producing images that appear both as timeless ciphers and excoriating political commentary; ‘Mourning Marsyas’ uses Ovidian myth to reflect on the destruction in Gaza.

Alain Jacquet, James Rosenquist
29 October–21 December
Perrotin, New York

A collaboration with Kasmin Gallery, this is the first major double-header exploring the links between Alain Jacquet and James Rosenquist, who made defining contributions to Pop art in France and New York respectively. The show teases out the differences in their approaches – Jacquet’s cool silk-screens (Fig. 2), which he called Mec Art (a pun on ‘mechanical’ and the French slang for ‘guy’), and Rosenquist’s more romantic abstractions.

Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1964), Alain Jacquet. Photo: Claire Dorn; courtesy the artist’s estate/ Perrotin; © Alain Jacquet/ADAGP, Paris/ARS, New York 2024

Fair in focus

PAN Amsterdam
24 November–1 December
RAI Amsterdam

A panoramic snapshot of the Dutch art market, this fair brings together 125 exhibitors offering everything from antique tobacco and snuff boxes to Andy Warhols. The latter come courtesy of MPV (Mark Peet Visser) Gallery from Oisterwijk, which presents a complete signed and numbered series of Warhol’s Reigning Queens prints (1985) – depictions of Elizabeth II, Margrethe II of Denmark, Beatrix of the Netherlands and Ntombi Twala of Swaziland, Pop-ifying the genre of royal portraiture. The tobacco and snuff boxes come from an important private collection, presented by A. Aardewerk in its display of 17th and 18th-century Amsterdam silverware – part of a special focus on the city as it prepares for the 750th anniversary of its founding, next October. Other highlights include an 18th-century Dutch celestial globe, made by father and son Gerard and Leonard Valk and offered by Antiquariaat De Roo, as well as the Maene-Viñoly Concert Grand – a recent collaboration between master piano-maker Chris Maene and architect Rafael Viñoly, on sale for €600,000.

Poster for Dutch Masters painting exhibition at Kunstsalon Wolfsberg (1913), Jan Sluijters. Photo: Galerie Stylo

From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.