Particular: a new sales method to attract collectors
The Austrian capital expands its already packed art market calendar with the selling exhibition of museum works
4' min read
Key points
4' min read
Vienna's autumn art programme has a new appointment with the market. But in today's shrinking sector, is there room for another art fair? The question arises, above all, in the Austrian capital because it is easy to miss the number of appointments. There are currently eight of them within the calendar year, including recently announced novelties such as Paper Positions (21-24 November, Kursalon Hübner), Affordable Art Fair (May 2025, Marx-Halle) and from 11 to 15 September also at the Kursalon Hübner, in the Stadtpark, the first edition of Particular held in conjunction with Vienna Contemporary and the established gallery festival Curated By (until 19 October), which opens on the same weekend.
So whoever decided and contributed to the financial support of this new appointment must have thought there was still room and done the maths right.
The organisers are keen to point out that Particolare is not a fair, or at least not in the way we know it. As the name suggests, it wants to be something different, but only time will confirm or not its success.
"Particolare," explains Marc Brandsma, ceo of CultTech, the main supporting non-profit association, "is a unique and innovative art exhibition that presents a selection of works displayed as in an institutional setting. The first edition of Particolare focuses on the themes of 'time' and 'movement' and includes 40 works, some of them large-scale, by artists such as Wim Delvoye, Lena Jakob Knebl, Marisa Merz and Michelangelo Pistoletto. The works were selected by an artistic committee including Marc Olivier Wahler, director of the MAH in Geneva. The galleries of the selected artists have been invited to participate and currently bear no costs, only transport costs in some cases, and in the case of sales they will have to pay the organisation a commission of around 20 per cent. According to rumours, the budget for this first edition of Particolare is in the region of EUR 1.4 million and the break even, is "reached when we sell most of the works," say the organisers. The works at the Kursalon Hübner are installed as if they were part of a museum exhibition, there are no walls delimiting the space and there is no gallery owner present, but a discreet team of 'art consultants' take care of the sale, accompanying visitors to discover the works on display.
The values of works range from a few tens of thousands, such as Tacita Dea's 'Double Negative II (Antigone)' (30,000 from Marian Goodman Gallery for an edition of 6 + 2) or a Carrara marble sculpture by Kevin Francis Gray, 'Young God Studies', 2019 (50,000 euros from Pace Gallery) to 2 million euros for a 2018 mirror painting by Michelangelo Pistoletto (from Giorgio Persano)
