For the first time, four fairs dedicated to prints and multiples will take place across three countries later this month. On view 20-23 March, the London Original Print Fair (LOPF) will celebrate its 40th anniversary only days before the Brooklyn Fine Art Print Fair (27-30 March) holds its inaugural edition in the borough’s Powerhouse Arts complex. Unfolding concurrent with the Brooklyn fair will be the tried and tested Paris Print Fair (27-30 March) and New York’s IFPDA Print Fair (27-30 March).
Amid this bustling calendar, the fairs’ directors remain optimistic about the future of the print trade, signalling that print publishers, collectors and dealers have embraced the unique commercial advantages of editioned works.
Gen Z fave
Prints have demonstrated resilience amid a two-year slowdown in the art market. ArtTactic reported sales in the medium grew 18.3% in 2023. Young collectors have been instrumental in this rise. Art Basel and UBS’s 2023 survey of global collecting found that Gen Z buyers spend more on prints than any other generation.
Jenny Gibbs, the director of the IFPDA Print Fair, says: “Starting in the fall of 2024 we began seeing new faces entering the market, and this does appear to be driven in part by the generational transfer of wealth we’ve all been reading about.” She adds that Josh Baer, the adviser and Baer Faxt founder, “called it correctly when he forecast a bull market in terms of volume—not price—and we have been seeing that in the market for prints and editions”.
Bolstering the phenomenon have been key changes in collecting strategies. Sharon Coplan, the independent curator, publisher and adviser, says: “If I strike up a conversation at a dinner party with a collector, invariably they speak about their collection by artist or theme—rarely by medium.” She cites Jordan Schnitzer and his august print collection as an exception to this rule.
The institutional sector has undergone a parallel swing, with museums increasingly incorporating editions into their larger exhibition programmes. This year, for instance, LOPF is relaunching the Hallett Independent Acquisitions Award, which grants £8,000 to one UK institution to purchase works from the fair. “It has been striking how many of the applicants have highlighted that they see prints as a way of adding important artists to their collections,” Gordon Cooke and Helen Rosslyn, respectively the fair’s founder and director, tell The Art Newspaper, adding: “Museums and collectors seem to take prints more seriously nowadays, and prints are given greater prominence and are incorporated into exhibitions with paintings.”
Contemporaries outmuscle Old Masters
The Paris Print Fair, by virtue of its symbiotic relationship with the classical drawing fair Salon du Dessin (26-31 March), maintains its focus on the Old Masters. Yet March’s other three print expos are tacking firmly toward the contemporary. For instance, Cooke and Rosslyn say that while two-thirds of the exhibitors at LOPF’s first edition in 1985 (when admission cost only £1) showed Old Master prints, 40 years later the ratio has shifted in favour of dealers and publishers focusing on 21st-century works. Those works include the UK publisher and gallery Tin Man Art’s new series of prints by Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, who contributed much of the album art for Radiohead, The Smile and Yorke’s solo releases.
The 40th edition of the London Original Print Fair runs from 20 to 23 March
© Tom Hammick, courtesy London Original Print Fair
Accompanying this trend is a surge in non-profit institutions and other atypical entities taking expo stands. The Brooklyn Fine Art Print Fair, for one, has offered free participation to academic print departments and will include a subsidised section featuring Crow’s Shadow Institute for the Arts. “So many of our great talents don’t fall within the traditional definitions of ‘exhibitor’,” says David Luther, the event’s co-founder. Ann Shafer, its other co-founder and the fair’s vice president, adds that the Brooklyn expo will “push the needle for the print ecosystem by striving to get smaller, younger, emerging printmakers more firmly into the pipeline”.
While emphasising the foundational role of publishers such as Universal Limited Art Editions and Gemini G.E.L., Coplan points out that the growing demand for editions is also leading to innovative publishing models. In 2024, she partnered with Jeffrey Gibson and Sotheby’s New York to produce editioned cashmere blankets sold to support Gibson’s participation in the 60th Venice Biennale. “I wanted to honour the fact that Jeffrey already had an active practice of working with dedicated print publishers,” Coplan says of her role in the project. “It made sense to make something that resonated in a different space.”
Gibson’s blankets, which featured hand-painted editioned labels, broadened not only the classical conception of prints but also who can create and offer them. “Principally, auction houses are in the secondary-market business,” Coplan says. “The blanket edition was a rare opportunity for Sotheby’s to be a stakeholder from the inception to the distribution of the project.”
Ultimately, the expansion of both demand and supply in the print trade has fostered an optimistic and collaborative outlook among the directors of March’s quartet of print expos. Underscoring that the four fairs all “have their own character”, Cooke and Rosslyn say that “there is room in the market for all of us”.
