While lower-priced items did especially well, Art Forum also offered a strong market for blue-chip art. Eigen + Art, based in Leipzig and Berlin, had one of the most impressive booths, with a large Neo Rauch painting, Fluchtversuch (2008), gracing one wall. The work sold to the private Berlin collection Pietzsch for €500,000. Gallery partner Kerstin Wahala said while most of the collectors at the fair were European, she had seen a few Americans. “The last few years we missed the European collectors,” she said. Eigen + Art also showed a provocative series of large photographs of female nudes by Martin Eder called “The Poor People,” priced €18,000 each, in an edition of 3; none had sold during the preview.

Contemporary Fine Art, one of the largest galleries in Berlin, with a staff of 20, had a surprisingly small single booth (many of the more established galleries have double booths). But in this case, size didn’t matter. Hanging on the outside wall was a grouping of small paintings from 2008 by Daniel Richter priced at €25–40,000, seven of which sold at the preview. Inside the booth, red dots were seen under many Georg Herold works, including the sculpture Lost Intolerance (2006), which sold for €65,000 to a Danish museum, and the wooden-beam work Balken im Rucken (1998), which went for €45,000. The gallery's Philipp Haverkampf said that Art Forum was “never the strongest” and was “a very German fair,” although he did see more Americans coming back from previous years. He said that the market was a bit slower this year, which allowed collectors to make more careful decisions: “The time when people are running around in sneakers might be over.”

New York collectors Susan and Michael Hort might not have been wearing sneakers, but they were making the rounds at a brisk pace nevertheless. They purchased several untitled works by Marc Bronner, all in the €2,800 range, from Berlin’s Galerie Crone and were also spotted at the fair’s Freestyle Gallery, a section featuring younger artists and less-commercial work, where a funkier flavor reigned and one could lounge on enormous throw pillows and sip espresso. The Horts purchased three oil-on-canvas paintings by Alexander Tinei, including Girl (2008) for €2,000, at the booth of Budapest’s Deak gallery.

Also reporting quick sales during the preview was New York’s Freight + Volume, which sold Canadian artist Kim Dorland’s painting Jesus Saves (2008) for $12,000 in the fair’s first two hours. Another Dorland painting, Herd (2008), priced at $14,000, was on reserve to a German collector who owns a castle (the gallery wouldn’t divulge his name). At the booth of Padua's Perugi gallery, young Italian artist Laurina Paperina’s violent, yet hilarious and compelling, animations were doing brisk business. Two of her 8-video installations sold for €3,700 each during the preview. Owner Andrea Perugi said that one of the artist’s best-known collectors was Takashi Murakami.

Alex Redding of Nosbaum & Reding from Luxembourg said that while sales are lower in Berlin than at some other fairs, people there have a greater knowledge of art. The gallery presented a solo exhibition of the young Austrian artist Christoph Meier, whose works would fit in well at the recent, much-talked-about “Unmonumental” exhibition at the New Museum in New York. The artist’s Dish Fountain (2008), which looked like a hot dog (or wurst?) cart with boiling water, was on offer for €4,200, and was reportedly also drawing interest from the German government.

All in all, the consensus among the dealers ARTINFO spoke with was that Russian and Asian collectors were scarce at the preview, but that with confident, educated European collectors and a few choice Americans making the rounds, Art Forum was doing just fine in these times of economic uncertainty. And word has it that next year the fair will once again take place before Frieze and FIAC, just like old times.