1703 Art Fair announces the list of participants
All events
The third edition of the Contemporary Art Fair 1703 will take place in Saint Petersburg from June 5 to 9, 2024, at the Manege Central Exhibition Hall, where galleries from Russia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates will display a wide range of works by contemporary artists, including paintings, sculptures, graphics, photography, installations, and digital art.
The new season of the 1703 Fair has a higher participation rate, with 45 exhibitors in total. Among them are 41 galleries, art groups, and art platforms from Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Samara, Kaluga, Nizhny Novgorod, Istanbul (Turkey), and Dubai (UAE), carefully selected by the expert council after screening 218 applications. They will populate four sections: “The Base”, “The Algorithm”, “The Project”, and “The Material”. Such a division of space will allow galleries to offer a smooth exhibition experience and visitors to map their personal routes while browsing and picking items for their collections. Private, corporate, and institutional collections, are going to be exhibited in a non-profit section. Fourteen galleries, including Dubai’s Inloco open storage, will participate in the event for the first time.
“The Base” will feature 26 galleries with their own exhibition spaces and permanent program. Among them are established and iconic galleries who have earned recognition over the years: Marina Gisich Gallery, Triumph gallery, pop/off/art, Lumiere Gallery, 11.12 Gallery, KultProekt, Pogodina Gallery, Е.К.ArtBureau, NAMEGALLERY, DiDi Gallery, and many others. The galleries offer various avenues for their creative thoughts processes: artists turn to the topic of memory, reflecting on the process of living through time (DiDi Gallery), demonstrating a wide range of emotional experiences, from existential fear to a ringing sensation of pure joy (Marina Gisich Gallery), and using various narratives to establish a dialogue with the creative medium itself (szena gallery). Some of the exhibition booths will allow visitors to catch a glimpse of Saint Petersburg: pop/off/art brings the works of recognized Saint Petersburg artists united by the theme of a horizontal line as the city’s image, while Pogodina Gallery will attempt to initiate a dialogue between Moscow romantic conceptualism and St. Petersburg neo-academism. visitors will be able to see artists from other regions: Victoria Gallery will bring artworks of Samara artists from different generations, Pro Art’s Gallery will show the best actors of the Kaluga art scene, and the 9B Gallery booth will house a product of collaboration between five young Nizhny Novgorod artists – participants of the Gallery Workshop. Foreign artists will not be strangers at the fair: the Turkish Ambidexter gallery and Dubai's Inloco open storage will feature some, with Triumph gallery and Lumiere Gallery following in their footsteps.
Exploring the cultural code and traditional techniques while looking for inspiration will be a main feature of a number of booths: Myth Gallery from St. Petersburg will reiterate its last years’ experience by bringing in a solo stand with a narrative from Russian culture, Futuro Gallery from Nizhny Novgorod will present a new approach to the traditional art of tempera painting, and FINEART GALLERY will bring its “Epics digests”, where they show paintings as illustrations to fairy tales and epic stories.
Galleries and platforms specializing in new media, NFT and digital art are presented in “The Algorithm” section. There are four of them in this edition: Inloco open storage, Masters Digital Gallery, VS Gallery, ITMO University Art & Science Center. The display of virtual art in a real environment requires a delicate architectural approach, and the organizers of the Fair deal with such a complex technical challenge with flying colors.
Online galleries, art platforms and groups that profess unconventional gallery formats and have no permanent exhibition space will populate “the Project” section. . Six of them will bring their artists to the 1703 Fair for the first time. These are Jessica gallery, “Tochka” architectural photo gallery, ART OF FOTO gallery, and ZERNOGALLERY from St. Petersburg, SUBSTATION and Roza Azora from Moscow. They will be complemented by participants from previous seasons — ARTZIP and Palto.
"The Material" section brings three galleries under its wings: 3L Gallery, PALATY, and Space Four Concept Store, which professionally work with diverse materials such as glass, textiles, and ceramics, and present collectible design and three-dimensional. The exhibits of the section participants aim to disclose the idea of “the art of dialogue and a dialogue through art” (3L Gallery) and describe the position of a modern individual, their collective and individual experiences gained through their habitat (Space Four Concept Store).
The main program will be complemented by the traditional non-profit section “Collections”. This year, four independent projects from corporate, private and institutional collections will take part in the section, presenting different approaches and successful cases of collection-building. Guests will be able to experience selected works from Gazprombank’s corporate collection, a unique non-profit project “1024” brought by multidisciplinary artist Evgenia Tut from the Limonov Art Foundation, works by graduates of the
the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts and Dmitry Margolin's installation “Ones upon a time in a seemingly ordinary garden…” from Pop-Up Gallery, curated by Ksenia Goschitskaya.
The year-round lecture series under the auspices of the 1703 Fair will culminate in a set of events at the Manege Central Exhibition Hall during the show itself. These events will be brought by the Masters school, a permanent partner of 1703. Gallery owners, curators, collectors, artists, architects, designers, and other experts in the field of contemporary art and culture will give lectures and take part in discussions on how to promote cultural projects, art in the regions, interactions between art and business, and new trends in the industry. A special feature of this edition of the 1703 Fair will be an increased number of art mediation sessions for visitors, as they were very popular in previous years. A tour of the fair in the company of an experienced mediator is a great opportunity to immerse yourself in the atmosphere of the exhibitions, learn more about the participants, booth concepts and artistic avenues.
This year, the focus has shifted towards building and growing a collectors’ community around the main event. To support that goal, a series of invitation-only events supported by exhibition partners will be held for professionals of the art world on the eve of the Fair, and special art consultations will be organized at the Fair venue itself to help select artwork for a collection and learning more about the galleries.
The venue of the 1703 Fair remains unchanged, but the halls of the Saint Petersburg Manege will be transformed to mark the occasion. Guests of the event will first arrive in an ante-room, reminiscent of a snow-white city square lined with cafes, a lecture hall and bookstores, with the suite of gallery stands separated by a large architectural facade with a screen.