Eye of the Collector 2024: The Fair Staged Like a Collector’s Own Home

ART & CULTURE · LONDON

Reading time: 9 min

A fair with no booths, no dividers and no separation between an eighteenth-century sculpture, a hand-scorched ceramic amphora and a marquetry cabinet is not a curatorial gimmick. It is an argument about how collectors actually live with the things they buy. In June 2024, that argument moved into the Garrison Chapel at Chelsea Barracks, and the woman making it had spent years running the very kind of fair she was arguing against.

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For four days in June 2024, eighteen galleries hung, stacked and arranged their work inside a Grade II listed chapel in Belgravia as though it were somebody’s exceptionally well-furnished house. There were no aisles. There were no booths. A Lucian Freud sat within view of a marquetry cabinet; a hand-scorched ceramic vessel stood near an African sculpture; a curvaceous upholstered chair by the jewellery designer Lara Bohinc shared a room with a painting from 1936. This was Eye of the Collector, now in its fourth edition, and the arrangement was the point.

The fair ran from Wednesday 26 to Saturday 29 June 2024 at the Garrison Chapel, Chelsea Barracks, with a private preview on the opening day ahead of public access. It was founded and is directed by Nazy Vassegh, an art advisor with close to three decades in the trade, and it has never occupied a conventional stand at a conventional venue. Two Temple Place, the neo-Gothic mansion on the Embankment, hosted the first three editions. In 2024, the fair moved half a mile south to a former military chapel that had reopened to the public only three years earlier.

What follows is not a list of what was on the walls, though there is plenty of that. It is an account of a format built by someone who had already run its opposite, and of the building she chose to run it in.

A fair with no booths, arranged like a house

Eye of the Collector’s defining decision is the one visitors notice first: there are no gallery booths. Works from eighteen exhibitors, ranging from painting and sculpture to jewellery, ceramics and collectible furniture, were arranged together by room rather than by dealer, so that a visitor moved through the Garrison Chapel the way they might move through a friend’s house rather than down a trade-fair aisle.

Vassegh has described the intention in direct terms: she wanted “a grand domestic setting that is sort of like an imaginary collector’s home”, built specifically against “the white boxes and big tents” of the conventional fair circuit. The idea traces to a specific moment, by her own account, watching collectors’ reactions inside a Venice palazzo during the Biennale and wondering why an art fair could not produce the same response.

The 2024 edition carried sixty-one artists from twenty countries and around thirty newly commissioned works, spanning painting, photography, design, film, ceramics and sculpture from 1925 onward. Eighteen galleries took part: seven returning exhibitors, among them Vigo Gallery, Whitford Fine Art, Based Upon, Dellasposa and Zelouf & Bell, alongside nine appearing for the first time, including Offer Waterman, Lalique, Duende Art Projects, Bluerider ART and the Jeddah gallery Hafez Gallery. It marked the fair’s first year exhibiting galleries from the Middle East and Asia alongside its established European base.

The chapel that outlasted the barracks

The Garrison Chapel is the sole structure to survive from the original Chelsea Barracks, the home of the Grenadier, Irish, Welsh and Scots Guards for roughly 130 years before the wider site was redeveloped. Built in the mid-nineteenth century in a Romanesque-Byzantine style with Venetian Gothic detailing, it is one of the few barracks chapels of its kind still standing in London.

Studio PDP restored the building for the King’s Foundation, uncovering and conserving the painted decoration around its arch and the commemorative tablets to the private soldiers who served there, memorials of a kind rarely made for enlisted men before the twentieth century. It reopened as a public exhibition space in 2021 and has since hosted more than forty shows, including work by King Charles III. Eye of the Collector’s four days there in June 2024 sat inside that short but already crowded second life, a chapel built for four regiments now hosting eighteen galleries and their collectors instead.

Placing the fair here rather than in a conventional exhibition hall is consistent with everything else about the format: art and design shown inside a building with its own domestic and devotional history, rather than a neutral shell built for the purpose. The chapel’s arched nave and side aisles gave each gallery’s room-set a distinct architectural frame that a marquee could not have offered.

The fair she built after running the one she left

Here is the connection that the fair’s own material does not draw, and it is worth drawing, because it answers the format question more precisely than any mission statement. Before founding Eye of the Collector in 2020, Vassegh spent nineteen years at Sotheby’s, rising to Managing Director of the house’s Impressionist and Modern Art division for Europe and building Sotheby’s Preferred, a collector loyalty programme designed around exactly the kind of personal attention a boutique fair now trades on. From there she became chief executive of Masterpiece London, the King’s Road fair that is, structurally, everything Eye of the Collector is not: a large tented event, organised in conventional booths, spanning antiquities to contemporary art under one big top on the Royal Hospital Chelsea grounds. She stepped down from that post in 2016.

Four years later she founded a fair with no tent and no booths at all. That sequence, Sotheby’s client-relations architect turned tented-fair chief executive turned the person who dismantled the tented-fair format entirely, is the clearest evidence available for what Eye of the Collector’s format is actually solving. It is not a reaction to fairs in the abstract. It is a specific, first-hand answer, arrived at after years spent running the model at scale, to what a collector-focused fair does not need: a marquee, a grid of identical stands, a floor plan organised by gallery rather than by object. Her own description of conventional fairs, that they “all feel the same experientially from the visitors’ and the collectors’ points of view”, reads differently once you know she spent a decade producing that experience herself.

Eighteen rooms, one continuous argument

The room-set format only works if the individual presentations hold up on their own, and the 2024 edition’s standout pieces did. Zelouf & Bell, the London furniture makers Susan Zelouf and Michael Bell, showed a marquetry piece titled Kimono with Peonies Jewellery Cabinet, which sold for £128,000, the highest recorded sale of the fair. Ash & Plumb, the ceramics studio run by Barnaby Ash and Dru Plumb from a workshop near Lewes, showed seven pit-fired vessels from their Amphorae series, which found buyers between £1,500 and £6,800.

Duende Art Projects, exhibiting for the first time, brought a selection of classical African sculpture into the same domestic arrangement as the fair’s paintings and design objects, extending the room-set logic to a category rarely shown alongside twentieth-century European art in this way. Lara Bohinc, better known for jewellery, presented her Peaches furniture collection, upholstered curved seating built on a wood and steel frame and finished by hand in a north London workshop, including the Big Girl Chair and the Derrière Armchair. Among the paintings, Alice Frey’s My Palette (1936) sold for £12,000, and works by Henrik Godsk and Thomas Cameron each found buyers in the low five figures.

The range, a Guards’ chapel holding a six-figure marquetry cabinet, a scorched ceramic vessel under £2,000, and a chair named after its own curves, is the format working as designed. Nothing here was segregated by medium or by price. It was segregated, if at all, by room.

What four days at Chelsea Barracks proved

Over 4,000 people visited across the four days, with organisers reporting record numbers of international visitors on the opening preview. Sales were recorded across every price band the fair covers, from Ash & Plumb’s sub-£2,000 amphorae to Zelouf & Bell’s six-figure cabinet, which Vassegh pointed to directly when she said visitors valued “the wide range of price points, galleries, and artworks” on show.

That range is the practical case for the format, alongside the emotional one. A fair organised by booth tends to sort visitors by gallery relationship: you go to the stands you already know. A fair organised by room does the opposite. It puts a Frank Auerbach within eyeshot of a ceramic amphora priced at a fraction of the cost, and lets the visitor’s own eye, rather than a floor plan, decide what gets a second look.

Final thoughts

It would be easy to describe Eye of the Collector as an art fair with a nicer venue than most. That undersells what the room-set format is actually doing. Every decision, the chapel over the tent, the room over the booth, the mixed category over the segregated one, traces back to someone who had already built and run the conventional version at scale and chose, deliberately, not to repeat it.

The Garrison Chapel’s own history makes the point without needing to state it. A building that outlasted the barracks around it, restored for a public second life it was never designed for, hosted a fair built on the same idea: that the most convincing way to show someone a collection is to let them imagine living with it. Four thousand visitors and a six-figure sale for a marquetry cabinet suggest the argument landed.

Eye of the Collector is currently paused rather than closed. Whichever building it returns to next, the format it has spent four editions refining, no booths, no dividers, one continuous room of things worth living with, is now the fair’s real signature, more than any single venue has been.