Discover the Highlights from BRAFA Art Fair in Brussels

“This is a fair where you can see beautiful things from all different periods and I think that’s very enriching,” says Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos, this year’s guest of honor. “I’ve been to art fairs all over the world but I have to say that this one is really special; it’s really chic.”

Of the 130 exhibitors, many are long-standing participants, while just 16 galleries are new to BRAFA. The vision for this year’s edition, adds Desmet, was to “keep the great things we’ve got already and then try and make the fair even more vibrant”.

Vasconcelos is central to this aim. Two of her “Valkyries”—monumental and colorful ceiling-hung textile sculptures inspired by Nordic mythology and developed in collaboration with Dior—enliven the event’s main thoroughfare. Her work is also on show with Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach, an art space housed in a historic 19th-century building in the Brussels district of Saint-Gilles.

“BRAFA is always a good way to start the year,” says founder Valérie Bach. Her booth includes an augmented 18th-century Aubusson tapestry by Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil and photographs of one Gordon Matta-Clark’s architectural interventions in Antwerp. Meanwhile, Vasconcelos’s textural and twinkling Drop #1 (2024) is a precursor to “The Enchanted Forest”—a solo show “of new work opening at La Patinoire Royale Bach on February 1.

The stand of Francis Maere Fine Arts Gallery also felt lively on the opening day; among the 19th- and 20th-century European paintings, Conrad Willems was building one of his large-scale architectural sculptures from hundreds of sandstone blocks. “Everyone is serious and I’m just having fun,” laughed the Belgian artist. “I wasn’t sure about BRAFA people being my type of collectors but I’ve already had wonderful conversations”—and one of his smaller, wall-mounted pieces sold just a few hours into the collector’s preview.

A new initiative this year is “Selected by BRAFA”, a group booth of five young dealers. A standout was the selection of elegant vintage jewelry put together by Sophie Derom. “I really pick the pieces according to my taste,” she says. “It’s a mix of signed and one-of-a-kind designs by artists.” First to sell was a brooch with a “constellation of gemstones—amethyst, moonstone, tourmaline, ruby. It’s signed ED, but I don’t know who that is.”

Derom recently opened a Brussels showroom in Sablon—the same neighborhood that Objects With Narratives is based in. The cutting-edge design gallery was founded three years ago by Nik and Robbe Vandewyngaerde and Oskar Eryatmuz, and is located in a landmark Beaux-Arts building: Grand Salon 40, commissioned in 1920 by furrier Raymond Malien and later commandeered as the sales rooms of Pierre Bergé auction house.

“Brussels is one the world’s best cities for design,” says Nik Vandewyngaerde. Their inaugural booth at BRAFA is titled “L’Élan Belge” (“Belgian Momentum”) and features a roster of exciting local creatives. A low and curvy cream sofa, one of their in-house designs (OWN editions), is surrounded by a pair of interlocking and organic patinated steel side tables by Jumandie Seys (€3,000 and €3,500 each), part of his Fragment furniture collection; and artwork-like coffee tables cast in crushed glass (€120,000) or crafted in onyx (€65,000) by Ben Storms, a stonemason and sculptor based in Antwerp. Maverick multidisciplinary designer Lionel Jadot is represented by his Automatic Writing Chairs (€7,500 each), roughly hewn in MDF and resin with childlike markings, while Tanguy Tourrain’s enchanting, nearly two-meter-high Tondel 03 lamp (€41,500) combines a burnt Poplar tree trunk with giant cast brass mushrooms.

At Maison Rapin, contemporary and vintage design sit side by side. “We love extravagant pieces,” says the Paris gallery’s associate director, Alice Aïda Kargar, pointing to the modular, leopard-print “Safari” Sofa created by Florence-based design studio Archizoom in the 1960s. Meanwhile, the show-stopping bronze chandeliers and mirrors—one encircled in a swathe of wheat stems; another edged in waterlily leaves—are by Robert Goossens, most famous for designing costume jewelry for Chanel.

BRAFA newcomer Galerie Capazza, based in France’s Loire Valley, offers one of the fair’s most striking solo booths, dedicated to 83-year-old Georgia-born silversmith and sculptor Goudji. His idiosyncratic silver and stone objects often take the form of birds and animals, nodding to ancient artefacts with skill and humor. “My parents started showing his work nearly 50 years ago,” says Laura Capazza-Durand, who today runs the business with her brother Denis.

Intergenerational dealerships abound at BRAFA—from Axel Vervoordt and his son Boris to Dina Vierny Galerie, opened in Paris in 1947 and now headed up by the eponymous founder’s grandsons, Pierre and Alexandre Lorquin. The brothers continue to show the artists championed by their grandmother—such as Henri Matisse, Aristide Maillol, and Serge Poliakoff—while their stand references the gallery’s original woven wooden walls by 20th-century French architect Auguste Perret in a scenography by up-and-coming designer Edgar Jayet. It pays homage to the past with a dash of contemporary verve—much like the fair itself.

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