The contemporary ceramics and glass dealer Adrian Sassoon knows his place. It’s among fine 18th-century furniture, Islamic artworks of mythical significance, and historic German paintings, sculpture and silver. “The traditional antique and fine art dealers,” he says. “With different tastes, perhaps, but the highest standards.”
The London dealer has been coming to Tefaf in Maastricht for 17 years now, and although the work he sells is exclusively made in the present day, he insisted from his first appearance at the fair that he had a spot among dealers of the most venerable historic work.
“Because what I have to offer,” he says, “is also part of history. In my view, museums are rarely collecting for a contemporary gallery, but to extend the historic story of how materials — clay, glass, metal — are transformed by skilled artists. The work I sell has a place in those continuing collections.”
Not that this is his only constituency. Individual collectors are important too, and Tefaf offers plenty. “People who are in tune with historical decorative arts completely understand what we are offering,” says Sassoon. “They will simply be passing by, and suddenly appear on the stand, attracted by something both recognisable — a glaze, a form, a type of glass — but completely new.”
This year, nonetheless, Sassoon is expecting a visit from an American museum team, coming to Maastricht specially to see a gigantic new work by Junko Mori. It is a sculptural explosion of hundreds of steel elements that the Yokohama-born artist and metalworker has hand-forged in her Welsh workshop and will command a six-figure price. “You could say it’s an antique of the future,” says Sassoon. “It has tremendous originality at its moment of conception and making. It acknowledges the history of art, but has a place in its own time.” Mori has spent hours in museums and collections examining both antique metalwork, as well as historical observations of nature. But although this knowledge underpins her work, the intensity of detail and extreme number of elements make her work particularly lavish and unique.
An antique is generally accepted to be an object more than 100 years old, with particular aesthetic and historical significance. Tefaf is full of them — the fair is where a bronze pin made in western Iran in the early first millennium BC can be found next to an art nouveau Lalique necklace loaded with diamonds and finely carved glass and an early Gauguin flower-painting that already demonstrates a special way with colour.
“We’re very curious to see how we’ll fit in,” says Robbe Vandewyngaerde, the 27-year-old co-founder of Brussels gallery Objects With Narratives. “It’s quite a classical fair.” With this in mind, his gallery is showing the work of the duo Maison Jonckers, where a brother and sister team — Alexandra and Grégoire — are carrying on the work of their father Armand, creating sculptural furniture in bronze, stainless steel and silver, sometimes combined with resin. “Like their father, they want to bring depth and feeling and texture to metal,” says Vandewyngaerde. “They etch into the material abstractly, and create something tactile and use oils, waxes and acids to create a patina. It has an antique sensibility.”
Objects With Narratives has already made a connection between past and present by taking on a historic building in Brussels in which to show work. A former fur showroom and atelier, built in the Beaux-Arts style, its ground floor is decorated with gold leaf and wall panels painted with animal scenes. “It has helped clients imagine how contemporary pieces might work in an older home,” says Vandewyngaerde. “But we heard some of the more traditional dealers at Tefaf were concerned about new work.”
When the London dealer Sarah Myerscough took a stand at the fair for the first time last year, she found the opposite to be true. “The historic dealers were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the work we were showing, how it was made, that it was rooted in classicism,” says Myerscough. “They were impressed.” Myerscough has championed serious craftsmanship and sustainable, natural materials since she opened her gallery in 1998. Gareth Neal, an east London furniture designer who works with historic tools and the latest computer-controlled machinery, is a good example. Myerscough is showing a tall chest of drawers by Neal skewed from its traditional form by being top heavy, and finished in mahogany veneers that are a waste product of the instrument-making industry.
When I ask Christopher Wilk, the keeper of furniture, textiles and fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, about important work being made today, Neal’s name comes up: the designer’s work first entered the collection in 2013. “He is a good designer and a very good maker, referencing traditional forms, but with an innovative edge,” he says. “But we don’t worry at the museum about whether something will be a valued antique. We look for objects that reflect the time in which they are made and have something interesting to say about that time.” Under Wilks’s stewardship, however, curators now have to record exactly why they consider an acquisition to be important. “A hundred years ago, people thought the values of the present moment were fixed, or would continue. But now we think of taste and value as being very relative. We live in a postmodern world.”
Collectors, on the other hand, may be looking for work that will hold its economic as well as cultural value. Which is perhaps why Marc Benda, of New York gallery Friedman Benda, is bringing a selection of glass works by Ettore Sottsass (the Italian designer who died in 2007) to Tefaf. The pieces — which include totemic vases in rich blues and reds — were made in Sottsass’s later years, and are in the €40,000-€90,000 range. “They are very ambitious sculptures,” says Benda. “They represent a culmination of his practice, and are already considered important. They are beyond a matter of taste. They are canonical works.”
David Gill, however, who introduced contemporary collectible design to London’s Fulham Road — long the domain of old-world antiques dealers — in the late 1980s, has faith in the eye of the individual. He has produced extremely demanding pieces over the years with designers including the late Zaha Hadid, and is showing work by the German furniture maker Valentin Loellmann at Tefaf. Loellmann is an outlier who creates otherworldly works by fusing metal and wood into pieces that have an almost ineffable sense of history. “Curious collectors embrace the new,” Gill says. “And if they go with the challenge, they are rewarded years later.”
March 15-20, tefaf.com
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