5,000 years of art at BRAFA Brussels
Pieter Brueghel the Younger - Wedding Dance - 1612Dogon Figure Maternite - Dalton Somare
After Art Basel and one week before TEFAF Maastricht, the 2022 edition of BRAFA in Brussels (from 19 to 26 June) fatures artworks from 115 galleries from all over the world, exhibiting art from antiquity to the present day.
Source: BRAFA Brussels - Images: Pieter Brueghel the Younger, "Wedding Dance" (1612). Courtesy De Jonckheere ·· Maternity, Dogon, Mali, N'duleri style, 17th-18th century. Courtesy Dalton Somaré.
As with Art Basel (which closes today in Basel), BRAFA art fair returns to its usual dates after two years of changes due to the pandemic. For its 2022 edition, BRAFA has selected 115 art galleries from all over the world which, as will be the case with the giant TEFAF art fair opening next week, include works from different periods and cultures, and in different artistic media, both fine and decorative arts.
In the field of Ancient Art, Galerie Eberwein is showing a small but interesting -both in terms of quality and dating- figure of a vulture, created in Mesopotamia between 3200 and 2900 BC, and therefore contemporary to the famous Guennol Lioness, which still holds the record for being the most expensive ancient sculpture ever sold. Axel Vervoordt exhibits a fragment of a head representing the Egyptian Pharaoh Senusret I.
With regard to Old Masters, Giammarco Cappuzzo Fine Art exhibits "David with the head of Goliath" (c.1655-60) by the Baroque painter Elisabetta Sirani, a prolific painter despite her death at the age of just 27. De Jonckheere offers "Wedding Dance" (1612) painted in the typical style of Pieter Brueghel the Younger. Dei Bardi Art exhibits a "Saint Bartholomew" attributed to the circle of Pietro Cavallini, one of the most important painters of the transitional period between the Byzantine style and the proto-Renaissance of Giotto and Duccio.
One of the works that has aroused most expectation is Salvador Dalí's "Dream of Venus" (1939), created for a pavilion at the New York World's Fair, which is on display at Alexis Pentceff. A good companion for that work would be "The Storm" (1962) by the Belgian painter Paul Delvaux, shown in the aforementioned De Jonckheere Gallery.
As usual, BRAFA includes a good selection of African art. Didier Claes, one of the most important dealers in the field, exhibits several sculptures from the present-day Congo, while Galerie Schifferli is offering a stylised Dan mask that belonged to Paul Guillaume. A spectacular sculpture of Maternity by a Dogon artist from Mali, N'duleri style, 17th-18th century, is on display at the stand of Dalton Somaré.
“We have always tried to evolve”, explained Beatrix Bourdon, Managing Director of BRAFA. “Twenty years ago, there was no contemporary art at the fair, no tribal art or comics. We have always been attentive to market developments, whilst keeping our feet on the ground. By being too fashionable or too focused on trends, there is a risk of becoming old-fashioned very quickly too.”

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