Best Stands at Affordable Art Fair Milan 2019

The Affordable Art Fair at Superstudio Più in Milan, running until January 27, 2019, features a vibrant and chaotic array of works including landscapes, portraits, photographs, sculptures, and pop culture references. Among the vast selection, three stands stand out for quality, research, or audacity. Bleach Box Photography Gallery wins top honors with Richard Heeps' vintage-style photographs from series like Forward To The Past – Stockton-On-Tees (2009), This is not America, Wildwood Days, and Dream in colour, capturing Route 66 imagery and domestic scenes such as Ave Maria, Ho Chi Minh City (2016). Heeps, who owns the Cambridge gallery and develops his own photos in its darkroom, created a special reportage of Milan during the fair, drawn to the city's brutalist, Gothic, and modernist architecture. Second place goes to Mercedes Roldán Art Gallery from Madrid, featuring anonymous Milanese street artist Beast's irreverent collages and photomontages that transform iconic figures: Trump as a clown, Salvini in Hitler's uniform, Saviano with a noose, Pope Francis and Benedict XVI on a Vespa, and Obama and Putin on a sofa. Third is Galleria Carte Scoperte of Milan, presenting a collective of three Japanese artists working on paper: Tomimori Hitoshi, who creates inkblot animal forms; Nishimura Daiki, who oxidizes photographs with chemicals for a metallic atmosphere; and the anonymous Thirty Four, who uses puddle-readymades by pressing paper onto urban standing water.