Camille Moreno in Conversation with Hugo Barclay

Somewhere along the line, or maybe even from the beginning, owning art has been something accessible to only a few. But what if it wasn’t? Curator and Art Fair Director Hugo Barclay discusses how the Affordable Art Fair opens the proverbial “kept” gates to an underserved audience and awakens the collector in all of us.

Photograph of Hugo Barclay by Isabel Del Rey.

Camille Moreno: I’ve attended the Affordable Art Fair at Hampstead Heath in the Spring. What differentiates the two fairs?

Hugo Barclay: The essence of the brand is very consistent across all of our eleven fairs. We have eleven fairs worldwide, three in the UK, and of the three in the UK, we have two in Battersea. Our focus is consistent across all of them. One thing that galleries tell me is that there tend to be more international galleries in Hampstead than in Battersea, but just by a few percentage points. International galleries love coming to Hampstead because there seems to be a really cosmopolitan local scene.

We see between 16-18,000 people that come to all of our events per fair, and Battersea has a big south London audience. It's not binary, like only south London people come to Battersea, and north London people come to Hampstead, but Battersea has been around for 20+years, whereas Hampstead is a bit younger.

Hannah Ludnow, Connection Series II, Screenprint, £300. Columbia Road Gallery. Courtesy of Affordable Art Fair.

CM: Would you say that the artist make up is also different?

HB: It's very diverse across the board. To give you an idea; for this fair we have 113 exhibitors and of the 113, 28% are from outside of the UK. Of that 28%, about half are from outside of Europe.

CM: Is that important for your collectors, to collect art that's from outside of Europe?

HB: Personally, I think it's essential. I recently wrote a letter to the new cabinet. The essence of that letter was to try and address a drop-off of international exhibitors coming into the UK over the last couple of years after Brexit. Brexit has caused a lot [of problems] from a bureaucracy perspective, but also from a price perspective. It's exceedingly more expensive to ship works to the UK, and one of the things that's very close to my heart is to have exposure to art and culture from outside the UK. The world is a big place but also a small place, and there's a huge amount of amazing art from outside of our island.

Katie Kemarre, Untitled, Acrylic on canvas, £350. Coe Gallery. Courtesy of Affordable Art Fair.

CM: Totally! I'm interested in this focus on Aboriginal art that I saw at the Hampstead edition. Is that part of the fair's ethos or was that a natural development?

HB: Yeah, it was very organic. We have two fairs in Australia: one in Sydney and one in Melbourne. Although we have two fairs there, it has still been organic. Rebecca Hossack shows artists from Australia. We also have AALondon Gallery and Coe Gallery, a young gallery from Bristol exhibiting for the first time, but there hasn't been any specific intention to encourage galleries with a focussed programme around indigenous artists, it has just happened organically, but I love it!

CM: What are some of the highlights from this upcoming fair that you would like people to be aware of or that you're excited about?

HB: People come to our fair to see our galleries and the new work from new artists they're bringing, so that's always the number one priority. There are also two other things that I'm particularly excited about. The first is the recent graduate exhibition. We dedicate some space for recent graduates from art schools in the UK. It's really close to the founder's heart, Will Ramsay, it's close to my heart, and it just fits within our mission and our values of accessibility.

This year we're working with the curator Nephertiti Oboshie Schandorf. She's an independent curator, artistic director at Peckham Platforms, and on the board of trustees for Art on the Underground and Artichoke. She and I have curated an exhibition of seven artists that have been selected from different art schools across the UK.

Secondly is our moving images section upstairs showcasing digital arts. Obviously, the rise in NFTs over the last 18 months has shined a spotlight on digital art as a medium and it's never been a massive focus, so we wanted to help our visitors be able to appreciate that this is a medium that you can collect and that you can also experience in an actual living room environment.

Instead of just creating a gallery stand with screens, we have actually created mini living rooms, in a simplified way, with furniture. Part of the thinking is that often when you look at video art in big institutions, big museums, it's projected via massive projectors on huge screens. It's either experienced in that way, which is phenomenal, or it is experienced in extremely immersive environments, which are really impressive, but both of those ways don't necessarily bridge the gap between the medium and an actual collector being able to have it in their home. We hope this section will be able to bridge that gap, to make it just a little bit easier for our visitors to visualize having it at home.

Karina Abramova, Las Palmas Doradas, digital video and NFT.

CM: You seem to be fostering accessibility. Not just for artists but also collectors and people who might not know that they can be collectors.

HB: Exactly. I think actually there's a mixture of people who come through our doors. Some might identify as collectors but there's also a pool of the audience who might not, however they do have the disposable income to be able to purchase art. They go to museums, they go to exhibitions. They may even buy art regularly, this art is hung in their home and it's enjoyed. But they don’t necessarily identify per se as someone fostering a collection. It's important to create a platform that is accessible so that wherever you are on your journey of appreciating and buying art, you can come to our fairs and find something that hopefully you can afford. That’s why we cap everything at £7,500. It doesn't mean that everything is £7,500. You can come to buy an edition print for a couple of hundred pounds, and then obviously there's everything in between.

CM: There's almost a stigma attached to collecting art, as though it's something unattainable that's necessarily very expensive. People just assume that they wouldn't be able to do that–or maybe the market paints it that way.

HB: A lot of the main art news will write stories around blue-chip artists and the top 0.001% of works selling at Sotheby's and Christie's. That's a very specific market for a very specific audience, which has its place, and it captures the appetite of where art can go and can be, but there is also another market that the Affordable brand fosters.

Corne Eksteen, Metaverse Prototype I, oil on canvas, £1500. Barnes Collective. Courtesy of Affordable Art Fair.

CM: Seeing that the fair is now 20 years old, have you had to re-evaluate the cap? Do you look at the market each year and evaluate it? How many times has that cap had to be adjusted?

HB: It's only been adjusted once. It used to be £5,000 and was re-evaluated a few years ago. With inflation, one has to re-evaluate, but it's not really looked at on a yearly basis. We work closely with our exhibitors to get a pretty good idea of how they’re feeling. We listen to what they want and we try to curate the right platform that works for them.

CM: This fair is in a building/structure. Do you feel like it affects the vibe at the fair versus being in a tent/temporary that is flat? Do the levels actually have an influence on the feeling at the fair?

HB: If galleries are on multiple levels then yes, there's an influence and an impact on footfall. If you're a visitor at a fair your average dwell time will probably be between 2 and 4 hours, depending on if you have lunch, if you come with your family, this and that. We're humans, we get tired. The nice thing about Battersea is that the upstairs is a mezzanine, so we have our food and beverage partner upstairs and we have our moving images section as well. Since it's not actually for our exhibitors, there's no bias on that front.

Laura Jane Scott, Grid 20 Yellow, Household Paint On Board,£385. Kittoe Contemporary. Courtesy of Affordable Art Fair.

CM: How do you develop and maintain relationships with the sponsors?

HB: With all of our sponsors, we don't just get sponsorship for the sake of getting sponsorship, it's about finding the right type of brand that has the right alignment with us. Accessibility is one thing and then a shared audience is another.

Our lead sponsor is a company called JM Finn, they're wealth managers based in London. They see value in our audience because they want to get closer to arts and culture, so there’s a correlation with our audience.

With our alcohol sponsors, because obviously alcohol is synonymous with art, this year we have Silent Gin as our spirit sponsor and Moth Cocktails are our cocktail sponsor.

On the sponsorship side, we work region by region. A perfect example of that actually is Dorset Hotels, our hotel partner. They first started working with us in the Affordable in Singapore and it worked really well for them. After that, they set up a global partnership across multiple fairs.

They work with a creative agency showcasing some art and there’s a sponsorship from Dorset Hotels this week in London as well as a few weeks ago in Hong Kong and New York. So that's a perfect example of how a brand can sponsor a global affair with a global presence.

Joe Webb, Stirring up a Storm, silkscreen edition, £225 unframed. Turner Art Perspective. Courtesy of Affordable Art Fair.

CM: Any final insights about this year’s fair?

HB: Something that I started in Hampstead this year, and that we're continuing for this fair, is something called the Curatorial Excellence Awards, which is an award for the gallery that is presenting the best-curated presentation. We're really conscious of raising the level of presentation for our galleries, and one of the things that we're doing to do that is that we started this award that encourages galleries to curate the best possible stand.

This is judged externally by three judges. There's Harriet Bridgeman, who has a CBE from Bridgeman Images, there's Aisha Morris, who's a curator at Tate Britain, and myself.

That's really important for us to try and encourage a well-executed stand because that helps visitors experience art in the best possible way.

Gregory Prescott, Black Hat, Fine Art Photography, £150, £445. S&P Gallery. Courtesy of Affordable Art Fair.

The Affordable Art Fair is open through 23 October at Evolution London in Battersea Park. For tickets and visitor information, click here.

Camille Moreno

Features Co-Editor, MADE IN BED