Discover 8 Highlights from BRAFA Art Fair in Brussels
The 71st edition opened with “major sales”—and a long-lost Rubens
“We really didn’t know how the fair was going to work out this year,” says Beatrix Bourdon, managing director of the BRAFA art fair. “The world is not turning as it should at the moment, but in here, it is like another world. There is really a good atmosphere—very positive, very enthusiastic.” The result has been “red dots” and “major sales” since the 71st edition of the Brussels event opened last week with a record 147 exhibitions—up from 128 last year. “Now, the art market is more contemporary, but we have managed to remain eclectic,” says Bourdon. “Everything is mixed; we have Old Masters but also Brazilian design.”
Not to mention a Siberian woolly rhinoceros skull, sold on the first day by Stone Gallery for an undisclosed sum. Other early notable sales included one of Italian artist Enrico Castellani’s all-white “Superficie Bianca” from 2002, which sold for nearly $600,000 by Brussels-based Galerie Greta Meert, a first-time BRAFA participant; a pair of 1909 chairs by Belgian Art Nouveau architect Victor Horta showcased by specialist Thomas Deprez Fine Arts and priced at just under $24,000; and a group of late-19th-century papier mâché botanical models by Robert Brendel, which fetched between $71,000 and $96,000 at the booth of Paris gallery Maison Rapin.
Discover eight highlights from the fair below:
1. Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of an Old Man, circa 1609
Long considered lost, this sketch by the famed Flemish painter is being shown for the first time on the booth of Klaas Muller. The Belgian Old Masters dealer discovered the energetic oil-paint study whose attribution was confirmed by Ben van Beneden, former director of the Rubenshuis.
2. Laure Prouvost, We Will Keep Cool (Theatre Cornwall), 2025
The French artist, who landed the MaxMara Art Prize for Women and the Turner Prize, is today based in Brussels. This piece, exhibited by Galerie Nathalie Obadia, leans into a Belgian tradition: tapestry. Created with Flanders Tapestries BVBA, part of an ongoing collaboration, it inhabits the same whimsical world of Prouvost’s immersive mixed-media installations, complete with a tree laden with her signature pendulous breasts.
3. Léon Wuidar, 03 novembre 09, 2009
A fierce loyalty to Belgian artists is one of BRAFA’s defining features. At Brussels gallery Rodolphe Janssen, one highlight is a vibrantly geometric painting by Liege-born Léon Wuidar, who, at age 87, is finally getting his due. In 2023, the Centre Pompidou acquired three of Wuidar’s paintings and a solo exhibition of his work from the 1960s and ‘70s recently opened at White Cube’s Paris gallery.
4. Ettore Sottsass, 18K gold ring, 1984-1986
All things related to the Memphis Milano maestro are hot property. His avant-garde design pieces regularly fetch five figures. This sculptural ring, offered by Brussels’s Collectors Gallery and featuring black onyx and diamonds, was designed by Ettore Sottsass for Milan’s Cleto Munari Company, a pioneering producer of both jewelery and design objects by the likes of Gio Ponti and Carlo Scarpa.
5. Pieter Boel, The Creation of the World, 1600s
At Gallery de Potter d’Indoye, alongside Louis XVI-period carved and gilded chairs and a pair of circa-1800 ormolu and bronze oil lamps, is another new-to-the-market Flemish masterpiece. Born in Antwerp, Pieter Boel became a painter to France’s King Louis XIV; he created still-lifes and floral scenes, but is best known for his naturalistic animal paintings. This example, one of his largest, has been privately owned by the same aristocratic family for 250 years.
6. Pablo Picasso, Testa di Centauro, 1962
Participating in BRAFA for the first time, gallery PRON opened in Paris just last year. Its playful, multidisciplinary approach is exemplified in a booth that includes a graphically patterned, earthenware-fronted cabinet by contemporary French ceramicist Alice Gavalet; one of modernist Italian artist Fausto Melotti’s poetic brass sculptures (from 1979); and this glass sculpture created after a Picasso drawing by glass artist Egidio Costantini.
7. Canaletto, Capriccio of Piazza San Marco from the Basin of San Marco with the Church of the Redeemer
Third-generation art dealer Cesare Lampronti, director of Hartford Fine Art Lampronti Gallery, specializes in Italian Old Master Paintings of the 17th and 18th centuries, from Caravaggio to Canaletto. This example from the latter will be a fair-wide focus––especially in light of the record-breaking sale of Canaletto’s Venice, Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day (c. 1732), which fetched $43.9 million at Christie’s London this past July.
8. Nagai Ikka, Pair of six-panel folding screens, 1930s
The late Japanese artist Nagai Ikka is particularly well-known for his paintings of crows. So much so that his classical ink depictions of the birds—richly symbolic in Japanese culture—earned him the nickname “Doctor of Crows” from statesman Ōkuma Shigenobu. Examples are sought after, and these screens on the booth of Van Pruissen Asian Art, based in Arnhem, The Netherlands, sold unsurprisingly swiftly.
BRAFA art fair is open through February 1.