Preview Plates are open-access museum images, each credited and licence-checked. Availability is demonstration state. Every market figure is mined, never typed.

Vitrine Zurich · Brussels · Luxembourg

Objects with a past.
And one with
no past at all.

Twenty-five years of trade between Zurich, Brussels and the Luxembourg circuit. Art deco ceramics and glass, twentieth-century design, and — new this year — contemporary work and interactive installation, commissioned rather than sold off a shelf.

Muse with Violin Screen, Paul Fehér
I

Objects

Glass, ceramics, seat furniture and lighting — things with enough of a public record that a figure means something. A price is shown up to € 2,500; above that it is a conversation, which is how the trade has always worked. Where the public record cannot value a name at all, this says so rather than guessing.

II

Works

Unique painting, drawing, sculpture and one-off metalwork. None of these carries a figure, and the reason is not discretion: an auction band is built from every lot a name ever carried, mostly prints. Mondrian's band on the public record runs € 43–€ 650. Printing that beside a 1935 canvas would be a mined number answering a question nobody asked.

III

The commission

The new half of the business. Contemporary work and interactive installation are not stock — there is no vitrine to put them in and no comparable to price them against. They are scoped: a site, a duration, a budget and a maker. What follows is a working study, running live in this page rather than photographed.

Study 01 · Light curtain · move a pointer across it

FormSensor-driven light and sound, projection, kinetic assemblies. Sited work, not editions.
ScopeA brief, a site survey, a maquette, then a build. Six to twenty weeks.
PriceQuoted against the brief. There is no comparable and we will not pretend there is one.
WhoThe gallery commissions and produces. The artist is named on every piece and retains the moral right.
AfterInstallation, a maintenance window, and a documented de-install. An installation nobody can service is a liability dressed as an artwork.

A 1928 vase and a light curtain are not the same kind of object and this catalogue does not present them as one. The vase has a maker, a date, a condition and a market. The curtain has a brief, a site and a power budget. Pretending otherwise is how galleries new to contemporary work get found out.