SPRING1883
With artwork installed in hotel suites, SPRING1883 art fair takes advantage of the timeless, placelessness of the hotel room. Launched in 2014 at Melbourne’s Hotel Windsor, this year’s fair will take place at The Establishment Hotel in Sydney from September 11 to 14, 2019, and features participation by 24 galleries or groups.
The hotel suite carries with it an association of leisure and luxury. It is also an abbreviated stand-in for imagined ideas of ‘home’ or a displaced domesticity, rich with undercurrents of fantasy and folly. In the past, each gallery’s approach to this context has been uniquely innovative and often challenging, providing opportunities for radical new art projects within a non-gallery environment. Notable past examples of this approach include Sarah Scout Presents’ 2014 inclusion of Claire Lambe’s giant vagina-esque sculpture installed in the salubrious bathroom of the Hotel Windsor, Melbourne, or the use of a suite by Gertrude Contemporary to showcase a programme of performance art in 2016.
2019’s edition promises to continue in this vein. Melbourne’s Neon Parc gallery will mine the dark satire of the hotel room through a grouping entitled “Haunted Penthouse”, which features a wild array of artists including Noël Skrzypczak, Paul Yore, Dale Frank and Mike Kelley. SPRING1883 will also be the first outing for Queensland art collector-innovators Danielle and Ryan Renshaw’s new contemporary project and residency space, The Renshaws. The Renshaws’ new space, opening in Brisbane 2020, promises to show bold and experimental contemporary art from Australian and international artists, and will be supported by residency programs for artists and curators. For 2019’s SPRING1883, The Renshaws will premiere a... Subscribe to read this article in full
