Zoo's Coup

LONDON—Zoo has scored a coup with its brilliant change of venue from the London Zoo, with its caged bears as neighbors, to a grand Victorian, neo-Renaissance building in Mayfair on Burlington Gardens, the backside of the Royal Academy.

There’s lots of history here, since the building is the former Museum of Mankind and just last year served as the elegant backdrop for Charles Saatchi’s kind of raunchy blockbuster show “USA Today.”

Following in that tradition, the works presented at Zoo are appreciably buzzier and fresher to market than most of the higher-priced wares at Frieze. “They’re showing artists here that haven’t been seen before, and it’s really fresh,” says London art advisor Wendy Goldsmith, “and some of it is really challenging.”

Despite jammed, mazelike corridors and relatively skimpy stand size, dealers seemed overjoyed with the new quarters, the quality of work being shown, and the warm response from jostling visitors.

Scott Zieher of New York’s ZieherSmith, a Zoo veteran, was delighted with the new surroundings, saying “other than the Grand Palais in Paris, I can’t imagine a better venue. There’s something romantic about it to me.”

The gallery reported good early sales, with a trio of hyperactive paintings made especially for the fair by Eddie Martinez already sold at prices ranging from $5,500 to $12,000. Zieher cited the gallery’s decision to quote their prices in dollars. “It seems a lot cheaper to Londoners,” he joked. 

Works by ZieherSmith artists Javier Pinon and Andre Pretorius also sold in that modest range, including, at $12,000, Pretorius’s slick and clever Opening Night, featuring a preening crowd of young revelers.

Commerce was also fast and easy at London’s Riflemaker, one of the standout booths at Zoo. A pair of abstract, color-charged “Diadem Paintings” in acrylic on board by Marta Marce from 2007 sold at £14,000 a piece, while four jaunty portrait drawings by Julie Verhoeven in acrylic, gouache, and pencil sold at £2,500 each.

Several collector candidates hovered before Gavin Turk’s large-scale, Fright Wig x 35 from his controversial “Me as Him” series, a 98 by 71-inch work appropriated from Andy Warhol’s “Fright Wig” self-portraits of the mid-1980s. The gallery already had one on reserve at £50,000.

Turk, by now an established secondary-market fixture, was more the exception at Zoo, with lesser-knowns taking up much of the real estate.

At London’s TI + 2 Gallery, a fuzzy, Benday dot-covered painting by former Spanish pop star Jose Maria Cano captured the newspaper photograph view of Kate and Gerry McCann, the now-notorious couple recently implicated in the much-covered disappearance of their daughter. A source told ARTINFO that the buyer of the £22,000 canvas was British supercollector Vanessa Branson, a supporter of the embattled couple.

The gallery also sold A World Apart, a remarkable transparent sphere comprised of fluid, turbine, and glass by Petroc Sesti, for £32,000. Smaller and more intimate objects by Alastair Mackie also found buyers; his heart-shaped sculpture in wood pulp and wasp spit (!!) sold for £3,500.

There was also an abundance of ambitious installations, including a claustrophobia-inducing arrangement of carved stone heads on plinths by London-born artist Daniel Silver at IBID PROJECTS Contemporary Art. The heads, both male and female, are based on mug shots of American prisoners on death row and created onsite at a stone quarry in Zimbabwe. Fourteen of Silver’s 80 such sculptures are represented here at prices ranging from £4,000 to £6,000 ($8,100 to $12,000). Five sold in the opening moments of the sponsor preview.