Boutique Art Fairs Are Following Collectors to Mallorca, St. Moritz, and Saint-Tropez
The art fair calendar is quietly expanding into a different kind of geography: the places where collectors already spend their leisure time. Mallorca and Ibiza in Spain, St. Moritz and Gstaad in Switzerland, Capri, the Berkshires, Punta del Este, and Joshua Tree have all become hosts to small-scale fairs that align with the rhythms of seasonal life — summering, après-ski, and long weekends in second homes.
Soon, Saint-Tropez will join the roster. In early July, the design fair PAD will stage a new edition there with 20 exhibitors, positioning itself squarely inside the summer flow of the Riviera. “There is a clear advantage in having a fair in Saint-Tropez,” said Flore de Ségogne, PAD’s executive director. “Everyone travels here between June 1 and July 20!”
For galleries, these destination events offer an alternative to the familiar, high-pressure circuit dominated by major “anchor” fairs. Nathalie Kates, founder of the four-year-old Lower East Side gallery Kates-Ferri Projects, says the appeal is as much about pacing as it is about sales. “I hear it all the time — that there is art fair fatigue because we all participate in so many fairs,” she said. “At the anchor art fairs, you see the usual suspects because the fairs are so expensive.”
Kates is among the exhibitors in the debut edition of Art Cologne Mallorca, a new outpost of the long-running German fair. The event will run April 9–12 in Palma’s neo-brutalist Palau de Congressos, bringing together 88 galleries. Most participants are based in Europe, with 15 galleries from Palma itself; Kates-Ferri is one of five U.S. exhibitors.
Organizers of these smaller fairs argue that the audience is no longer arriving only for sun or snow. Baptiste Janin, cofounder of MAZE Art Gstaad — which concluded its third edition in February and has also staged editions in the Alps and on the Côte d’Azur — says many of these destinations have shifted away from being purely seasonal resorts.
“Each salon is conceived in relation to a specific place and to the rhythm of that destination,” Janin said, adding that MAZE tends to select locations where “collectors and experienced art audiences are already present.” In that model, the act of looking — and buying — becomes part of the destination’s cultural calendar rather than an imported spectacle.
Scale is central to the proposition. Many of these fairs host fewer than 50 galleries and lean into their surroundings, operating less like convention-center marketplaces and more like temporary ecosystems. The directors of VIMA — Edgar Gadzhiev, Lara Kotreleva, and Nadezhda Zinovskaya — say that local anticipation is part of what sustains the format. Ahead of the fair’s second edition in Limassol, Cyprus, in May, they described residents asking what the fair will bring this year and signaling they are “ready and waiting.” After VIMA’s inaugural edition in 2025, they said, the event became a draw for international visitors alongside its local audience.
Dealers also point to a different social texture. Anne-Claudie Coris, executive director of Paris gallery Templon, recently participated in MAZE Gstaad and described an atmosphere that encouraged longer conversations. The pace, she said, was “relaxed and convivial,” a contrast to the intensity of the largest fairs — and, she added, “Sales were good.”
The concept can be mistaken for a luxury detour, another amenity for the ultra-wealthy. Yet the fairs’ staying power appears to depend on something less easily engineered than glamour: community. By embedding themselves in places where collectors already return year after year, these events are testing a recalibrated art market logic — one in which the fair meets its audience on familiar ground, and art becomes part of the destination’s seasonal life.
One early template has been NOMAD St. Moritz, founded nearly a decade ago as an alternative to the standard white-cube fair model. Its founder, Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte, has described the project as a deliberate departure from exhibition halls in major cities — a signal of how far the destination-fair idea has moved from novelty toward a parallel circuit of its own.
