Earlier this month, the often quite dry London Art Fair (LAF) was once again held in Islington’s Business Design Centre; a building that in scale and scope is strangely reminiscent of Art Basel Miami Beach’s Convention Centre. Like that other surprisingly lacklustre and somewhat soulless building, the considerable navigational difficulties posed by the labyrinth of pop-up booths proved similarly bewildering, but ultimately a heck of a lot less rewarding.

With talk of the stricken economy experiencing a slight upturn, some guarded optimism hung in the air and major gallerists nervously waited to see how buyers would respond to the selection of international contemporary art. Over the five day event, 23,200 people passed through the centre. For all of this traffic, however, it seemed that the frenzy of past years was evidently over. People might have been interested, but they weren’t buying.

Some moneyed collectors did, however, take advantage of changing market conditions by making considered purchases and asking for discounts and free shipping. Major sales weren’t altogether absent either. An amazing Alan Davie painting from the early-60s sold for £120,000, The Blue Dress (oil on canvas) by Harold Gilman for £95,000 and John Piper’s rare early gouache and collage, Still Life 1933, was sold by Offer Waterman & Co with an asking price of £55,000. Sure, that is way out of reach of many, but some of the works on display were way more affordable. The Bearspace Gallery stand, for example, sold works for as little as £25, and it was pretty much the busiest booth. One area which drew unanimous praise was the fair’s Art Projects, which this year expanded into a new space with 25 projects featuring some groundbreaking emerging artists and new work. One of the most exciting sections of the Fair, the space included solo and group displays and large scale installation from a forum of international galleries including Foley Gallery, New York, Gallery Baer, Dresden and London’s Bearspace, Charlie Smith and the ever-exciting Sumarria Lunn, who we have featured on Dazed Digital before. My personal favourite was the work of rising London star Open Gallery, which created an immersive and interactive video booth. A series of nine haunting videos entitled Portraits from the back by French artist Gabrielle Le Bayon were projected onto the back wall, each presenting different figures in nine vastly differing landscapes. The almost still figures gaze outwards at some part of the vista that lies before them, encouraging the viewer to lose themselves in the image and leaving us looking at, and beyond, the exhibited work. Thankfully, it also took us beyond the dull, stale environment of The Business Design Centre, which proved as ever to be the one of the worst possible places to house an Art Fair in the world.