Marseille’s Art-o-rama Lets Galleries Outgrow the Fair That Made Them
Art-o-rama, which ran this past weekend in the south of France, encapsulates a spirit of experimentation. Marseille as a city is gritty and chaotic by reputation; it serves as a fitting backdrop for a looser take on solo and duo presentations. Held at the Friche la Belle de Mai, a multipurpose cultural space that flanks the Saint Charles train station, the 20th edition of the fair presented an international selection of 37 galleries from 18 countries. Among the participants were 19 first-time exhibitors; more than half of those had opened within the last five years. There were only three Marseille spaces, reflecting that the local scene is still nascent, plus a sprinkling from Barcelona, Paris and London, as well as more far-flung representation from Lima and Tokyo.
Cable Depot, a gallery based in Sofia, showcased Liz Elton’s work made from biodegradable compost bags, an ephemeral piece that will ultimately disintegrate. Across the fair, Gallery Hayashi + Art Bridge presented an artist duo that extended their project Secure Shell, featuring a massive, unwieldy installation of stacked industrial materials, military green mixed with yellow warning signs.
Not everyone was peddling extremes. Dittrich & Schlechtriem from Berlin generally focuses on the German market, regularly attending Art Düsseldorf and Art Cologne, but their participation in Art-O-rama was uniquely immersive: photographer Lukas Städler’s work was made over the previous month in Marseille itself. Städler “did shoots here, he developed the film here, he did the prints here, we shipped the frames here,” Owen Reynolds Clements, a gallery representative, told Observer. “It’s a nice way of engaging and having a product at the end, instead of just shipping prints from Berlin and then putting it on the wall.” Work was priced from €3,500 to €5,000.
According to Reynolds Clements, Art-o-rama being held in August created circumstances where the artist and members of the gallery could participate in and contribute to the culture of the city: “We’re producing not just artwork, but a moment.” “The fair lends itself to that because of the timing and location and the vibe.” Regardless of outcomes, “it’s an investment in [Lukas Städler] and in the gallery. Of course we aim to sell the works, but we’ve built something else around it.” It’s the kind of endeavor that could only happen during this summery stretch of the year, he added. “For Basel, we can’t take a month off and live in Switzerland.”
Meanwhile, Clara Darrason, a gallery open by appointment in Paris, offered another angle on the city, with works underpinned by the urgency of “ecological considerations.” The south of France battled with the rampant fires this summer that pulverized local landscapes; driving outside of Marseille, the blackened carcasses of trees lined the roads. Artist Julia Gault made an in situ work in clay evoking parched earth (Vague de Chaleur or Heat Wave), complemented by perforated copper tubes typically used to channel
Darrason, who was participating in her very first fair, said she has a very “decentered gaze” relative to France’s Paris-centric sense of the art world, since she grew up in the region. She also previously lived in New York, where she had a Brooklyn DIY space that offered carte blanche to artists.
It was also the first fair for Ukrainian-born gallerist Viktoriia Velychko, whose Velychko Gallery is based in Paphos, Cyprus. Velychko created an artistic residency there in 2022 that “became a real shelter” as the full-scale invasion by Russia accelerated in her native country. Her format has been nomadic but she is settling into a permanent space in October. Since creating the residency, she realized she wants “to deal only with socio-political art. I try to make it sellable, which is a very, very difficult balance.” Focusing on “displacement and the soft power of colonialism,” Velychko noted how Cyprus itself “is still occupied, and was always part of somebody’s empire.”
In the booth, Reassembled Light of Colonialism, a work by Kyiv-based Olga Stein, was made from cumulated antique lamps that represented wealth during the rampant poverty of the Soviet Union era; the piece was priced at €8,000. Stein shared the booth with works by Michalis Papamichael, whose paper-light replicas of domestic interiors—doors of a wardrobe, a piece of floor—were colored using natural pigments native to Cyprus. His pieces were priced at €2,400. (The works did not sell during the fair but received “significant interest.”)
Velychko was drawn to Marseille over Athens—which has more obvious regional proximity to Cyprus—as a Eurocentric point of reference, though her dream is to participate in LISTE. “Many galleries come from Art-o-rama to LISTE,” she remarked.
One of the only American galleries present was Good Weather, which has locations in Chicago, Little Rock and North Little Rock. It presented work by Brooklyn-based Raque Ford, and the artist’s text-driven works sold well, with three smaller pieces ($2,700 each) purchased and a fourth on hold. Ford’s large poem ($12,000), sprawling across the length of the booth, also sold.
Founder and director of Good Weather Haynes Riley has participated in Art-o-rama for several years and was on the selection committee. “My first year, I was able to sell to collectors from Madrid, Bucharest, Brussels and France,” he recalled. “It’s a nexus here. The people might not be into the artists you’re showing that year, but they have met you and follow your program. Then the next year, they find an artist they are interested in. Continuing to return to a place—putting three or four years in—is a smart investment as a gallery.”
He noted that, in a landscape where “art fairs have become badges or signifiers of success for galleries,” small fairs provide a softer start. “Most fairs that can produce these opportunities at low costs for galleries are real opportunities to know if you want to be in this long-term—and not just put you out of business because it costs an arm and a leg to do them.” He first experienced this accessibility at NADA Projects in New York and at Material Art Fair in Mexico, which let galleries be “relational, instead of transactional” because “fairs like this offer opportunities that are lower-risk to go to a new place to meet new people.”
Director of Art-o-rama Jérôme Pantalacci admitted that the Marseille fair could not exist as such without public funding, collectively from the city, region, department and Ministère de la Culture. “In France, existing outside of Paris is complicated,” he said. “Our goal is to provide support for emerging artists—international and local, since the art market is global anyway.”
Art-o-rama, and fairs like it, are essential because it’s “a low entry level to be in a new place, to test something out,” Riley said. His own offerings are starting to supersede the Art-o-rama buyer’s budget, tipping into the $10,000-$20,000 range—as the gallery grows, the artist’s market grows. Scaling their success, Riley noted that Good Weather is “sort of growing out of the fair, which is what you want galleries to do.”
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