Art Dubai is cementing its position as the region’s key art market

There are 30 new exhibitors at Art Dubai this year but the framework remains the same. The VIP crowds will sit in the lounge by the lapping waters of the Madinat Jumeirah’s lagoon; the Lebanese lunch options will be served up in large portions; and gallerists will listen out for what new accents and languages are coming en masse this year.

But if Art Dubai opens in a familiar landscape, the context of art fairs has changed dramatically. The US talent agency Endeavor has put Frieze up for sale, while Art Basel is frequently named (though never confirmed) in rumours around multiple potential collaborations in the Gulf. Art Dubai’s own hints of unspecified “international projects” have brought it under scrutiny as well. So far, this year’s event has the feeling of the calm before the storm.

Maturing internally

“It helps to be operating in a city—and country and region—that is doing very well, in which cultural infrastructure is being invested in, and in which there’s an obvious maturing of the scene that, in turn, attracts international attention and creates new opportunities,” says Benedetta Ghione, the executive director of Art Dubai. “But our maturation is also an internal process… It feels like this is the right time to be putting in place an expanded team to meet our growing ambitions.”

In January, Art Dubai announced that it had taken on board Alexie Glass-Kantor, from Sydney’s exhibition site Artspace, as the executive director of Art Dubai Group, and Dunja Gottweis, the former global head of gallery relations at Art Basel, as the director of the Art Dubai fair. It also launched a new Editions fair, devoted to editioned art, which had mixed success during Dubai Design Week last November. And next month, Art Dubai will expand its design week to Riyadh, with the debut of Downtown Design Riyadh, a four-day event in JAX, the warehouse district in Diriyah on the outskirts of Riyadh. It is currently pitched as a trade fair, serving the always churning real-estate industry in the Gulf, but many are viewing it as a trial run for a more art-focused event.

However, it remains to be seen how much of Art Dubai’s growing ambitions will focus on the fair itself—or on the extensive programming its parent company has also developed.

Though it is principally known for its five-day flagship event, the Art Dubai Group operates programmes year-round in Dubai. Since 2013 Art Dubai has owned and managed Downtown Design, the region’s main design fair, which takes place during November’s Dubai Design Week—a varied programme of talks, commissions and activities that it also oversees. It runs a number of educational ventures, such as Prototypes for Humanity, which began in 2015 as a yearly exhibition showcasing university projects and is now a year-round initiative that cultivates design and innovation solutions to global challenges, in collaboration with the Dubai government.

More civic initiatives

Over the past few years, Art Dubai’s initiatives have grown more civic in nature, even infrastructural in scope. In 2020 it launched the Dubai Collection, which brings private collections into the public realm—essentially making up for the fact that Dubai, despite being a key centre for art in the UAE, has no permanent contemporary art museum. And the Dubai Public Art strategy, which began last year again in collaboration with the Dubai government, commissions works of art to be embedded across the city.

Ghione characterises Art Dubai’s strategy as organic and responsive to the city itself—and a deliberate distinction from other franchise fair models.

“Our independent model really helps us, because we have a lab-thinking, iteration-led way of going about our programming,” she says. “Over time, our programmes have grown to be year-round programmes. The Dubai Collection, for example, is now a multi-year programme with a long-term strategy and very big and important ambitions of wanting to contribute to the cultural infrastructure of the city.”

The lifting tide of interest in Arab art has also benefited the fair, as well as the gallery and auction sector across the UAE more broadly. Alserkal Avenue has grown by three galleries over the past 12 months, with Aisha Alabbar Gallery and Efie Gallery moving in from other Dubai spaces, and Taymour Grahne Projects from London opening a Dubai outpost.

Meagan Kelly Horsman, the managing director of Christie’s Middle East, sees a swathe of new collectors in Dubai—both in terms of a Gen Z/millennial demographic who are beginning to acquire works, and people new to collecting art from the Arab region.

“Younger collectors are buying more contemporary works as well as Modernist works on paper, and prints, and internationally based clientele are looking to acquire Modernist works, primarily painting,” she says, adding that institutional interest abroad, such as the exhibition on the Lebanese artist Huguette Caland at Reina Sofia in Madrid and Adriano Pedrosa’s Venice Biennale in 2024, is also fuelling demand.

But as Art Dubai moves forward, Saudi Arabia is the elephant in the room. The country is developing its art scene at a rapid pace, and though the commercial sector has lagged behind other projects, the Sotheby’s sale and internal discussions around an art fair are starting to change what is still a small market relative to its wealth. Earlier this month the Ministry of Culture launched Riyadh Art Week (6-13 April), which brought together local and international galleries, cultural institutions, and artists and patrons in a series of exhibitions and events in JAX—much like a fair week, without a fair. But very little in the region, at this point, can rival Art Dubai.

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