LONDON—The Frieze Art Fair is about new art; it’s also about new galleries. This year, to keep the lineup fresh, the fair, which has a total of 151 booths, has circulated in 12 new galleries and alternative spaces.

The newcomers range from established galleries who have been to other major fairs but are just stepping into the London fair market, to up-and-comers looking to reach a new level of collector, to nonprofit spaces whose financial statements are as miniscule in comparison to those of the other galleries in attendance as an art journalist’s income is to that of a major collector’s.

Casey Kaplan of New York has done Basel, Miami, the Armory, and Düsseldorf, but this year the gallery will only be at Frieze and both Basels. Kaplan reported swift sales of Trisha Donnelly’s Satin Operator (12) (2007) for $16,000; Jonathan Monk’s Neon Piece (2007) for $25,000; Brian Jungen’s Antler Study (elk) (2007) for $50,000; and Simon Starling’s Infestation Piece (Maquette) (2007) for $60,000. The works went to unidentified collectors from the U.S., the U.K., and Norway.

Shaun Caley Regen of Los Angeles gallery Regen Projects said that while previously she had tried to limit herself to two fairs a year (Basel and Basel Miami Beach), after “seeing who was here during the first two hours” of last year’s Frieze, she knew she had to be in London as well. She was pleased with the results so far, claiming she saw “most of her favorite collectors within the first hour,” but she declined to offer specifics on sales.

Sao Paolo’s Casa Triangulo, which has previously done ARCO, Miami Basel, arteBA, and Sp Arte (Sao Paolo), reported several sales to American, British, Italian, and Brazilian collectors. Albano Afonso’s Portrait of Goya (2007), a photo collage that combines an image by Goya and a portrait of Afonso, and comes from a series in which the artist melds his image with those of greats from art history, was sold to the 21c Museum Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky.

Experiments and New Collectors
For Zeno X of Antwerp, veterans of Basel, Basel Miami, and the Armory Show, Frieze is a chance to experiment. According to director Frank Demaegd, the London fair is attractive because it’s a chance “to give a platform to our younger, not-so-established artists.” While big-name artists including Luc Tuymans, Michael Borremans, and Johannes Kahrs had works in a small area of his booth, the majority was given over to the New York-based Chinese artist Yun-Fei Ji.

Two hours into the professional preview, Demaegd reported selling three of four Yun-Fei watercolors and the one print on view, at prices between $25,000 and $55,000. The artist’s work is a surrealist combination of traditional stylized Asian landscape motifs with symbolic forms like living skeletons and hippopotamuses meant evoke the anomie, materialism, and turbulence of contemporary life. Halfway through the fair, the Yun-Fei works will come down and another young artist in the Zeno X stable, Maria Serebriakova, will be placed center stage.

For other galleries, Frieze represented a chance to reach a new level of collector. Eivind Furnesvik, director of STANDARD (OSLO), described his deliberations over parting with Gardar Eide Einarsson’s Suicide Mirror (2007), a framed horizontal mirror that rests on the floor and leans back toward the wall. (The work takes its inspiration from the mirrors in Japanese subway stations that are meant to discourage potential suicide jumpers, but in form and look it also recalls classic works of Minimalist painting.) The work, valued at $18,000, had already drawn interest from two collectors, but, Furnesvik explained, one was Norwegian and the other already owned several works by the artist. So the dealer was planning to hedge his bets and hold out, hoping that an institution would snatch up the reflective work.

“If you sell to the first collector who comes along you’re not doing a good job for the artist,” he said, explaining that a primary purpose of coming to a fair like Frieze is to meet new people, rather than sell to people you already know. Furnesvik was hopeful that a more prestigious buyer would come along, but he also was uncertain what Frieze held in store. “It remains to be seen if it’s bigger than Basel,” he said. “I doubt it. That’s the biggest fair in the world.”

STORE of London, which was at the satellite fair Zoo last year, was also looking to deal with a new level of collector, but was wary about the new clientele. “The A-list collectors—that’s what Frieze is about,” said co-director Niru Ratnam. (In addition to having more money, the A-listers, according to Ratnam, “are better behaved than at the junior fairs.”) The risk for a small gallery like his, however, is that it becomes “too conventionally White Cube-y.” He cited Chris Evans’s Militant Bourgeois—in which sculpted strands of smoke emerge from a smokestack and are meant to riff on the notion of the starving artist—as the sort of riskier piece that might not sell at the fair. So far it hadn’t.

Another Frieze newcomer that sees risks in participation is KHOJ, one of the two nonprofit spaces at the fair this year. According to director Pooja Sood, the Delhi-based institution has until now supported “process-based projects” and worries that “if we get seduced, we may push artists away from this.”

Then again, she came to Frieze because she also understands that her small art space, which supports artist projects through private funding (there is no public funding in India, she says), must begin to understand the market and open conversations with the international art world if it is going to survive. “Money is not a dirty word,” she said ambivalently, “but I’m not sure where this will lead us.” KHOJ reported selling some works from a series on the life cycle of picked marigolds—a sort of Indian version of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?"—for $2,000 a piece.

Frieze’s other nonprofit exhibitor, L’appartement 22 of Rabat, Morocco, seemed to have come simply in an effort to survive. Founder and artistic director Abdellah Karroum runs the space out of his apartment, which, according to artist Seamus Farrell, is no bigger than the small booth the space was allotted in the back of the fair tent. Farrell, a Paris-based Irish artist who is a sometimes-assistant for Joseph Kosuth and travels often in Africa, had a few works in the booth, including a wall painting and an engraved glass piece he created at the fair site. The rest of the works were carried with the display team in their bags from Morocco. The price points were low (in the $1,000 range), but for the Moroccan artists, Farrell explains, those numbers were quite high. Any profits made at the fair, he suggested, would go straight back into Karroum’s project fund, perhaps to pay for frames for his next show.

Aside from a few places selling kitsch, Morocco has no real contemporary art galleries, Farrell said, so spaces like Karroum’s apartment are the only place cutting-edge art can be seen. “But this is changing,” he added. Karroum has yet to capitalize financially on the artists who show with him, but he has been recognized by the art world: He was not in attendance at Frieze because he’d been selected to help adjudicate prizes at the Venice Biennale.  

L’appartement 22 was found by the Frieze organizers and invited to attend, and, like KHOJ, spared the arduous application process for the galleries. Farrell, though happy to be there, had a cynical take on this. “People are always looking for trends. First it was the Chinese. Not they’re trying to look at the Arabs.”