Bath Art Affair

27th August 2010

12 – 21 November

30 Galleries / 9 Days / 1 City

From 12 to 21 November 2010 the Bath Galleries Group will host the first annual “Bath Art Affair”. The event will include high profile exhibitions, live music, wine tasting, demonstrations and talks. It will be the first time that such a showcase has been held, presenting the best Bath has to offer art enthusiasts and collectors.  Some of the artists showing during the Art Affair include Damien Hirst, Banksy, Peter Blake and Henry Moore, and will be represented in the commercial and public art galleries of this beautiful World Heritage City.

More than 30 galleries from Bath have come together to put the city firmly on the international art map.  Already a destination for art lovers, Bath can boast some of the best galleries outside of London and the newly formed Bath Galleries Group will work together to build on this reputation. 

Positioned between the two important art centres of London and St Ives, Bath has one of the greatest concentrations of galleries outside of the capital.  The city has attracted artists for many years.  Gainsborough set up shop in fashionable Bath and it is here that his paintings will be displayed when the Holburne re-opens with its magnificent, modern extension in May 2011. Today, there is no definitive Bath style, in fact the appeal is in the variety of price, style and medium with fine contemporary work as well as more traditional art.

There can be few cities which present such a visual feast but Bath appeals to all the senses with great food and wine and other treats for the visitor.  Buying art in Bath does not involve steamy trips on the tube, all the galleries can be reached within a short stroll around this walkable and wonderful city.  Just 90 minutes from Paddington, Bath is very accessible.

Patron of the Group, Sir Christopher Frayling, said of the initiative: "The City of Bath has many strong links with the history of visual art. Think Gainsborough and Rowlandson and the eighteenth century. Up to now, it has had rather less strong links with contemporary art. The Bath Galleries Group brings together a wide range of galleries, over thirty of them, to do something about this. The whole is bound to be more than the sum of its parts. This is an important initiative and a timely reminder that there is much, much more to the art world than what goes on in London."

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Notes to Editors:  
For further information or images to illustrate this information, please contact Lucy Weaver at Bath Tourism Plus on 01225 477441 or email: lucy_weaver@bathtourism.co.uk.  

Bath Tourism Plus
Working with the public and private sectors, Bath’s destination marketing organisation, Bath Tourism Plus, takes full responsibility for managing the busiest Tourist Information Centre in the UK, with 535,000 visitors annually, marketing Bath and the surrounding area to leisure and business travellers, PR activity to attract top travel writers - generating £1.7m of coverage a year, development of official tourism website, which receives just under 2 million visits annually: www.visitbath.co.uk, 450 commercial members with an annual retention rate of 98% and development of conference, meeting and incentive travel website: www.bathconference.co.uk.

Bath Galleries Group
The Bath Galleries Group is a collaboration between the city's art galleries and dealers, with the primary objective of celebrating Bath as an art city to an international audience.  The group includes over 30 art galleries, museums, antique dealers and artists studios and represents some of the UK’s leading contemporary artists in disciplines ranging from painting and drawing, to ceramics, sculpture and glass. Each gallery has a unique portfolio of artists representing established, up and coming and graduate artists sourced locally and nationally but many also hand picked from abroad, intensifying the collection of art on offer within the city.