Art Reviews

Art Fair East

St Andrews Hall

30/11/19

In Norwich’s St Andrew’s Hall, Art Fair East is hosting a collection of national and international artists. With pieces ranging from large oil paintings, prints, and glass sculptures, there is a lot to be found beneath St Andrew’s high ceilings, and many of them are on sale (for a rather high range of prices). But are they worth the selling price - and worth checking out for the fun of it?

To preface: a lot of the pieces were incredible, and I’ll list some of my favourites later. But it also must be said that some of the art on sale looked more like an 8 quid framable print from Ikea, despite the price tags ranging anywhere from 60 to 800 to 2000 pounds. You can buy prints of zebras and Amy Winehouse in Home Bargains: why would you want to for an extortionate price at an art fair? But that being said, amongst a few canvases that raised my eyebrows there were some real gems to be found. Here are some of the artists that particularly caught my eye, and that I think are worth visiting.

Will Teather:Teather’s oil canvases depict melting and deconstructed classical paintings: muted cherubs dripping with paint, expressive portraits of marquises, a fractured Virgin Mary. His style and vision is intense, striking, and original. A particularly fun one is his ‘British Bird Gallery’: a sphere hanging by a string, with a painting of a room from Norwich Castle full of taxidermy.

Shelly Nott:Nott’s photography, she told me, is completely unedited - she relies on natural light when she takes her strange photographs. It’s hard to believe they’re not paintings: the light and shadow, the colour, and the detail are all so rich that they simply don’t look real. The photos - of food, vases of flowers, egg shells - are based off the style of the Dutch Masters, and contain the complex symbolism found in classical still lives. Fun to read about, and fascinating to look at. Particularly lovely is searching for a little bee in one of her flower photos.

Brad Gray:Gray’s surrealist paintings grabbed me immediately. ‘In The Field Behind Us’, for instance, depicts a sinewy figure, dressed in a long dress and wearing what looks like rubber bunny ears, playing a grand piano in a field as two giant spirits dance above the trees. It’s strange and incredible, and if you got to see Dorothea Tanning in the Tate Modern this year you’ll see a resemblance in style immediately.

Clarissa Porter:another surrealist and abstract painter. Porter’s strange figures and abstraction of colour, combined with collages of book pages and classical portraiture, make for dense and fascinating canvases.

Brian Korteling:night time paintings with an incredible use of light. Small studies of power lines with cracks running through the canvas, filled in with gold. It’s really transfixing stuff.

Kero Beattie:Beattie has transformed old metal toy soldiers with delicate glasswork. The glass turns the figurines alien: one soldier is given a dark spherical head, others hold strange blue glass shells and wield them like weapons. These are tiny sculptures, and worth bending down to get a closer look at.

Ophelia Redpath:delightfully strange magical realism. Redpath paints beautiful and dreamlike scenes, my favourite being a man on a boat at dawn, playing a trombone as his dog howls in harmony. Out of everything at Art Fair East, Redpath’s paintings are what I’d like best hanging on my wall.

Art Fair East is open to the public on Friday the 29th of November from 10.30am to 5.30pm, Saturday the 30thof November from 10.30am to 6.00pm, and Sunday the 1st of December from 10.30am to 5pm.