Fairs and Markets

Contemporary Decorative Arts, Sotheby’s annual showcase for new craft and design, gets underway for its seventh successive showing next month. For a week from February 13-21, the Bond Street rooms will be given over to the latest in furniture, lighting, ceramics, jewellery, glass, silver and textiles by over 50 designers from round the world, all for sale.

There will be three newcomers among the 100 or so exhibitors at this year’s BADA Antiques and Fine Art Fair, which will be held at The Duke of York’s Headquarters in Chelsea’s King’s Road, London SW3 from March 19 to 25.

CURRENTLY decorators’ darlings, the distinctive and different antique dealers David Grocott and Ian Lemon, who work out of Chelsea’s Core One under the name Plinth, are taking a stand at the Spring Fine Art and Antiques Fair at London’s Olympia from February 25 to March 2.

LAUNCHED 18 years ago with the interior decorator in mind, a reminder that the thrice-yearly Decorative Antiques and Textiles Fair is still going strong and will be held this week in its trademark marquee in Battersea Park, London SW11 from January 14 to 19.

LAUNCHED next September, a new biennial fair organised by France’s national dealers’ association, the Syndicat National des Antiquaires, will be called Le Salon du Collectionneur – Paris.

THREE new dealers have moved into Alfie’s Antique Market in London’s Marylebone, bringing the total number of shops in one of London’s most popular and innovative centres up to 80.

WELSH organisers Robert and Carol Pugh, who operate as Towy Antiques Fairs, finished last year with a flourish when their pre-Christmas Carmarthen Fair at the local showground proved surprisingly successful.

FOUNDED in 1976, Caroline Penman’s West London Antiques and Fine Art Fair, which will be held from January 16 to 19 at Kensington Town Hall, W8, is now a new year institution and its famously friendly atmosphere has for some time been a gentle way of getting some good dealers back on to the year’s fairs circuit.

FOR a decade LAPADA, our largest antiques association, has held its winter showcase event at the National Exhibition Centre, Birmingham and indeed the Birmingham LAPADA Antiques and Fine Art Fair has become the favourite out-of-London fair for a good many exhibitors.

JOSTLING for space on the January fairs calendar, Cooper Antiques Fairs get their year under way with The North Cotswolds Antiques Fair at Stanway House on January 11 and 12.

AFTER 18 years of setting rather than following trends with their Decorative Antiques and Textiles Fairs, organisers Patricia and Ralph Harvey know their field well, and no doubt the 100 or so exhibitors at the first of the thrice-yearly decorative fairs, to be held in Battersea Park from January 14 to 19, hope the formula proves successful yet again.

THE future of Stonegate Antiques Centre in York has been thrown into confusion amid a legal row and a police investigation into whether owner Anthony Gilberthorpe should face criminal charges.

THE first quality fair of 2003 is one of Robert Bailey’s strongest events, the 11th Cheshire New Year Antiques and Fine Art Fair at Tatton Park, Knutsford, Cheshire. It runs from January 3 to 5.

LONDON-based Brian and Anna Haughton are moving their International Ceramics Fair & Seminar from the West End to the Commonwealth Centre in Kensington where it will be staged in conjunction with a new event, The London Asian Art Fair.

CENTRE Exhibitions, the organising arm of Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre, are launching a new Antiques For Everyone fair at the Earls Court Exhibition Centre in West London next August.

New look Olympia fair puts a spring in its step: CLARION Events, the in-house team who organise the Fine Art and Antiques Fairs at Olympia, are adopting a radical new approach to bring in customers for their Spring Olympia fair next February.

FLORIDA hosts a new design fair next year when ARTform, the International Fair for Dimensional Fine Art, debuts at the International Pavilion of the Palm Beaches in downtown West Palm Beach from March 6 to 11.

BIRMINGHAM-based ex-dealer and now fairs organiser Jean May holds nine Deco fairs at various locations in the Greater London area and launches a new one in North London this Sunday, November 10.

UK: A man calling himself Terence Lucas has disappeared without paying for antiques hired in antique centres to use as props in a film. Mr Lucas, who is described as white, around 40-45, 6ft tall, slim and with very short grey hair, visited three dealers in Antiquarius on the Kings Road, London on October 2, claiming to work for a company called Fine Art Research.

MUCH to the relief of the international trade, international buyers and discerning New Yorkers, the International Fine Art and Antique Dealers’ Show returns to The Seventh Regiment Armory, Park Avenue at 67th Street, New York from October 18 to 24.