“The war in Ukraine feels much closer to us here than further west,” says Markus Huber, managing director of the Vienna Contemporary fair, held 11 to 14 September in the Austrian capital and now in its 11th year. As in the past, the fair focuses on Eastern Europe, with galleries from Poland, Ukraine, Slovakia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Croatia and from Austria itself among the 97 exhibitors from 24 countries.
“I left Ukraine after the war started, three years ago, and now live and work in Vienna,” says the artist Kateryna Lysovenko, who won the fair's Münze Österreich Prize for her large-scale, brightly-hued figurative paintings. She is represented by TBA gallery from Warsaw, founded just one year ago. It was one of ten galleries in an area dubbed Zone1, devoted to emerging artists who are either Austrian or who work there, curated by Aliaksei Barysionak. "Yes, this is a very problematic time for the region," he says. "But I want to give a voice and a space to artists who are from this zone." Indeed, all the galleries from Central and Eastern Europe expressed their dismay at the crisis on the eastern borders of their region, but seemed determined to continue to promote their artists. “If Ukraine falls, Russia won’t stop. We mustn’t give up, because otherwise Putin will just continue on to Berlin!” said Lysovenko.
As for sales, expectations were not high. Before the start of the fair, Markus Huber had warned exhibitors that businesses in Austria were seeing significant downturns, which might well impact on them as well. “The scene is really shaky,” he admitted. By the second day some galleries had sold no works at all, and those that had sold tended to be at very low price points.
Ani Molnár Gallery of Budapest reported four sales on the first day, including a geometric painting by Tamás Konok for €14,500. Sofija Milenoković of the Serbian Rima Gallery sold four works by Nina Ivanović, made of painted wire based on landscape photographs, at prices between €800 and €2,000; the largest work, priced at €7,000, had not found a buyer on the second day.
Vienna Contemporary also has a section for more historical works, Context, and inevitably one booth was devoted to Hermann Nitsch, the leader of the Vienna Actionist school, whose guts-and-gore, “6-day play” had its last iteration this year. Four works, typically in splashed scarlet and grey, were priced between €65,000 and €250,000: none had sold by the end of the second day.
Among the non-eastern European exhibitors was Jerome O Drisceoil, owner of Dublin’s Green on Red Gallery, showing Alan Butler's Procedural Landscapes for Android ( Yosemite National Park v. 1 (2023), a generative digital work in an edition of three, was priced at €9,000 and Damien Flood's painting Eternal Garden (2024). “Most booths here are facing Eastern Europe, I’m here to get them to look at Ireland too,” says O Drisceoil cheerfully, despite having chalked up no sales. He adds that he had more success at the same fair in the past.
"Vienna is a bridge between western and eastern Europe,” Huber says: “Central and Eastern Europe will remain our main focus. When you think that 85% of tourists come here for culture, it is important that we should have a strong fair in the region,” he concludes.
