There is something slightly ironic that today’s biggest and boldest art fairs are usually held in unsightly venues like sterile convention center complexes or warehouses packed with white-tented booths. But for Giorgio Pace and Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte, the founders of the roaming international art fair NOMAD, art is just as much about the destination as it is the installation.
Since its launch in 2017, the fair has invited galleries, exhibitions, art-fashion pop-ups and thousands of art-world who's-who's to some of the world’s most rarefied architectural locations, such as a garden-laden villa restored by Karl Lagerfeld in Monaco and a gothic palace built in 1473 on the southernmost tip of Venice’s Cannaregio quarter. For this year’s fair, which runs through July 10, NOMAD has set up shop in the Charterhouse of St. Giacomo, a 14th-century Carthusian monastery in the heart of Capri. Part of the thrill is navigating how contemporary wonders from Angela Weber Möbel gallery in Zurich and Objective Gallery in New York co-exist alongside crumbling buildings that once housed Italian monks and gardens overlooking the Faraglioni.
A labyrinth of cloisters and ancient chapels are now backdrops for an exhibition by Julian Schnabel curated by Fernando Francés and Cy Schnabel, a handwritten series by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Patricia Urquiola, and an outdoor installation by the textile artist Rachel Hayes. “I really believe that beautiful art is heightened by a beautiful location,” says Pace, NOMAD’s co-founder. But in true Italian style, la dolce vita comes before all else — even art. “In Capri, we decided to open in the afternoon because in the morning we thought people would swim and go to the beach clubs in the mornings — how art should be experienced, really.”
