The tents are up, the stands are hung, and 350 international art dealers have been attending to last-minute niggles at London’s mega fairs – Frieze and Frieze Masters in Regent’s Park, and the Pavilion of Art & Design (PAD) in Berkeley Square – before they open this week. In addition to the £150 million of contemporary art on the auction block, they boast nearer £1 billion of art from all periods for sale.  In their wake, numerous other events for less expensive art are hoping to catch the attention. Last week, I highlighted the new 1:54 fair for African art. For serious talent-spotters, the small, select and free-entry Sunday Art Fair opposite Madame Tussaud, much favoured by cutting-edge collectors such as Anita Zabludowicz or David Roberts, is recommended.  For the streetwise, urban look, go to the Moniker Art Fair in Brick Lane, east London, which shares the cavernous Old Truman Brewery space this year with The Other Fair. For lower-priced prints and multiples by emerging and established artists, Multiplied, at Christie’s in South Kensington, is worth a trawl.  An avalanche of gallery openings includes three of the most sought-after young talent: British artist Hurvin Anderson, who fills both of Thomas Dane’s St James’s galleries with new work, and Americans Jeff Elrod at the Simon Lee gallery in Mayfair and Mark Bradford at the White Cube gallery in Bermondsey. The openings are not for buyers, though, as everything had been sold already.  The first fair to open its doors, for a select private view on Monday, PAD is perhaps more weighted towards design than art this year. But this allows the viewer space to focus on the art that is there. The modern, post-war era is best represented with an all-white Lucio Fontana painting with Ben Brown (€6 million), an architectural-looking abstract by Pierre Soulages with Galerie Applicat-Prazan (€3.5 million), and Christmas Eve, 1951, the largest early painting, 10 feet in length, by Patrick Heron ever on the market, for which London dealer Offer Waterman will ask a seven-figure sum.  Frieze Masters, which embraces the ancient and the modern, holds it private view this afternoon. Having been adjudged a success in its first year, it has attracted more exhibitors, notably Richard Green, whose range of stock has allowed him to meaningfully juxtapose pairs of still lifes, portraits and landscapes painted 400 years apart but resonating in a way that captures the spirit of the fair completely. The pairing of a 16th-century courtier by Corneille de Lyon with a late self-portrait as a courtly musketeer by Picasso, for instance, is inspired. The differential in prices (£950,000 for the de Lyon to £5.6 million for the Picasso) is not so much to do with size but the general disparity in value today between old and modern masters, says Jonathan Green.  One of Frieze Masters’ strengths is its single-artist displays. The Mnuchin Gallery from New York, for instance, is bringing an array of de Kooning paintings and sculptures priced from $1 million (£624,000) to $10 million.  Marlborough Gallery artist Laurence Kavanagh is a fan of the late Victor Pasmore, so he has curated a display of Pasmore’s work (£10,000 to £100,000).  The original Frieze fair for new art, though, remains the big attraction, striving to enhance the visitor experience this year with less galleries, more public space, and smaller crowds through ticket restrictions. A new, child-friendly element seems to have crept in, with paintball machines making splattered paintings, a show curated by children who were given thousands of pounds to spend, and a multimedia playground for children and adults among the sponsored projects.  Bound to attract attention will be a self-portrait sculpture by US artist Jennifer Rubell, who posed naked for a digital scanner when eight months pregnant, reclining like the Velázquez Rockeby Venus. The scans have now been translated into a massive 25ft figure from which the womb has been removed leaving a cavity large enough for an adult to nestle in. The $200,000 interactive fibreglass sculpture, made in an edition of three, will occupy all of the Stephen Friedman gallery stand.  There might be a rush to the Spruth Magers stand for a new striped-wool work by Rosemarie Trockel, priced at €200,000. Trockel’s recent London show, with prices from €80,000 to €180,000, was a sell-out. But then again, with American debt suddenly threatening to destabilise the global economy, there might be no rush at all.
As over £1 billion of art goes on sale at a variety of London art fairs including Frieze, Frieze Masters and PAD, Colin Gleadell picks out the highlights set to make headlines.