For Europeans looking for one final gasp of summer, the Art-O-Rama art fair was a great excuse to head to Marseille for the last weekend of August. Many Parisians had already returned to the capital, having taken their month-long summer holiday a week or two earlier to avoid the Olympics, so the fair’s timing was ideal for what Marie Madec, founder of Parisian gallery Sans Titre, called an “easy extra holiday” for those who didn’t quite want to return to full working life just yet.
“It’s a nice way to go back to work,” said Sophie Tappeiner, founder of her eponymous Viennese gallery, while collectors milled around with glasses of wine and perused the buffet tables during the VIP brunch.
Marseille’s vibe in the international creative community has been getting a lot of attention recently as a place where young people and artists can afford to live. This was mirrored in the fair’s approach to emerging artists and galleries. Half of the 42 exhibitors were presenting for the first time, and much of the emphasis was placed on younger galleries, some of which had just opened this year.
A constant topic brought up among the journalists (who’d come from all over Europe) was whether it was the same as the Berlin of the early 2010s. Before Art-O-Rama launched in 2007, Marseille was last seen as a significant art city more than two decades ago, when the Art Dealers fair was running (which ended with the passing of its founder, gallerist Roger Pailhas, in 2005).
While Art-O-Rama’s location, Friche la Belle de Mai—a multi-use cultural complex that has exhibition spaces, concert venues, artist studios, and residences—is evidence of the city’s growing art scene, it is also a clear signal of the city’s gentrification as it is housed in a former cigarette factory in a still working-class neighborhood.
Tappeiner initially participated in Art-O-Rama because she was interested in doing a Paris fair and thought it’d be a good way to build French connections. But she’s liked it so much that she’s kept coming back for years, and is part of the artistic committee, along with Madec.
This year, Tappeiner shared her booth with fellow Viennese gallerist Antonia Lia Orsi, whose gallery, City Galerie Wien, is the youngest in the Austrian capital. Orsi called the fair “pirate-y” in that it’s “rough around the edges, but committed,” and this was clear in what she and Tappeiner showed in their booths: floral embroidered drawings by Anna Zemánková and sculptures by Xenia Wood—one, Pigs’ Blowholes (2024), was a painted wooden chest with sculptures on top that replicated the pigs’ bladders children used to blow up as primitive balloons.
“It’s very different from the others we’ve done,” said Public Gallery director Harry Dougall. Art-O-Rama was the gallery’s first fair three years ago and it has since also exhibited at Frieze London. “We had good recommendations,” he said. “We learned first-hand what it could offer.” Dougall estimated that the gallery usually has an 80% sell-through rate at the fair. This year, it showcased three meter-high paintings—all depicting two figures by Stefania Batoeva, who’d made them while living in Marseille over the summer.
As the only Marseille gallery showing at Art-O-Rama, sissi club was proud to be representing the city that has changed so much in the last few years; it opened its new space the night before the fair’s vernissage. sissi club director Elise Poitevin has seen the impact on Marseille from the increase in tourism and also how the city council that was voted in four years ago put more money into the arts. “Obviously, it isn’t the highest priority,” Poitevin said, referencing the large amounts of poverty in France’s second-largest city, “but it has become something really important in galvanizing the city and its economy.” The regained international visibility was “why we wanted to open a gallery here,” Poitevein said. “We were born here and we don’t have any wish to leave.”
According to Pantalacci, most of those who moved to Marseille after COVID lockdowns have stayed—and not just Parisians; Pantalacci noted the high number of Londoners. “They can have bigger apartments,” he said. “There is a more agreeable quality of life. You have the sea; and in winter, you can go skiing a two-hour drive away.” As a result of its geographical proximity, collectors from Italy and Spain were there for the weekend, as well as the expected French.
But what the galleries really like is how the intimacy of the fair allows them to talk to curators from the French institutions at length; some galleries have sold works months after the fair’s end because of these conversations. At sissi club’s first time at the fair, in 2022, it sold a work by Ines di Folco to FRAC Sud, an important French institution for contemporary art.
The strongest point about Art-O-Rama is that the gallerists feel less pressure to make back their costs: Its fee is around €3,000 ($3,313) per booth, so they can easily bring along early-career artists. “I do think this fair does lend itself to taking risks,” Tappeiner said.
“We’re able to not have to put all the fair’s economic weight on the exhibitors,” the fair’s director Jérôme Pantalacci said about the fair’s public funding and commercial sponsorships. “We know we’re not a major art market—we’re not Paris, we’re not New York, we’re not London,” he said. “As we’re in a different market segment, we can do something a little more free, maybe, finally, working more on artists’ projects, and maybe seeing a trend of being less commercial, more radical.”
