Actress Rachel Griffith and her artist husband on the importance of art fairs
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- 04 Oct 2020
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The art-loving couple discusses the relevance of the fair in the lead up to this year’s Sydney Contemporary.
As well as a successful acting career, Rachel Griffiths sits on the advisory board of the Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, opening this week. In addition to being an enthusiastic consumer of art, her husband is painter Andrew Taylor. Here, the husband and wife team talk art with Vogue.
Rachel, you are on the advisory board of Sydney Contemporary, how and why did this come about?
“I’m not really sure actually but my love of art fairs is widely known. It's my Glastonbury. It was an exciting proposition and I had a feeling that Sydney would have a very different flavour to Melbourne...a little more Miami perhaps. I truly believe art fairs are a great non threatening way to introduce more people to contemporary art in a non high brow and egalitarian (non curated) way.”
Andrew, how important is it to show at a fair such as Sydney Contemporary?
“It's exciting to be amongst it. To have work exposed in this caldron-like environment can be scary but healthy. It's interesting what works and doesn't and who responds and who doesn't!”
How important is it for art fairs to enable the public access to both established and emerging artists?
Rachel: Of course art fairs represent all aspects of the market high to low. I really love the affordable art fairs and the offshoots of established art fairs like Pulse and Nada and Art HK, that allow younger artists to find a platform. I like the effort of art fair Managment to ensure the younger, hipper galleries are represented and their artists given that kind of national and international exposure. As an actor I have always felt lucky that my work can be seen by international audiences so easily through festivals and foreign markets and have always been aware of the challenges to our local artists accessing international careers.
Andrew: As a trading nation I think it's fabulous we get to celebrate the maverick, the daring and the sophisticated in our culture. We have a dynamic scene happening here and events like this help to celebrate what going on.
You both visited Venice for the Biennale, where do you think Australia fits into the international contemporary art landscape, both with regard to art fairs, and Australian artists?
Rachel: “Obviously our challenge is very physical. It is a very expensive exercise to ship valuable and fragile artworks around the world and a huge leap of faith for overseas galleries to come here. There is no doubt however that as the world becomes more global and individual collectors have more connections through the movement of people across generations to more cultures there is an ever-expanding interest in non-indigenous perspectives. While each market will have its own darlings that ring true to a particularly generation from a particular locale (and are not widely collected or valued beyond borders or even state lines). We are all getting more excited about the hunt for the exotic. I think this will benefit our local artists. I do believe we could up our government level funding targeting bringing international curators to Australia. Curators do seem to be the new gatekeeper, and as image making and reproduction proliferates the curators role appears to be only growing. It was absolutely fantastic to have so many Australian artists in Venice.”
