Now celebrating its 67th edition, BRAFA is the world's longest running and one of Europe's leading art and antiques fairs. The first major art event of the calendar year, it is considered a reliable barometer of the art market.
BRAFA, short for Brussels Antiques & Fine Arts Fair is organized every year by the Belgian Antiques Fair not-for-profit association. The first ever fair in 1955 was held in the Arlequin Hall of the Galerij Louiza. This first Belgian Antiques Fair, or Foire des Antiquaires de Belgique, copied the example of Grosvenor House in London and the Prinsenhof in Delft, but preceded similar fairs set up in Paris, Florence and Munich.
As the fair became increasingly successful and more and more antiques dealers wanted to take part, the need arose for a hall on a scale that could meet this growing demand. The range of art objects on display also continued to expand. Between 1967 and 2003, the fair was held in the "Palais des Beaux-Arts" in Brussels. In 2004 the Belgium Antiques Fair moved to the Tour & Taxis industrial site in the Noordwijk district of Brussels alongside the Willebroek canal: a true gem of Belgian industrial architectural heritage. Now that an ample exhibition space with a huge capacity was guaranteed, the Antiques Fair purposely sought to significantly increase the number of participants. Having grown from twenty Belgian antique dealers at the outset to around one hundred and twenty participants from both Belgium and abroad, the last few years have seen the Antiques Fair become an international fair on a European scale.
In 2022, following the development of new projects on the Tour & Taxis site, which no longer allowed the 67th edition to be held there, BRAFA switched venues. Brafa is now located in Brussels Expo, a grand site on the Heysel plateau that is a prestigious legacy of the Brussels Universal Exhibitions of 1935 and 1958. This is a new chapter in the history of the fair, which, over the course of almost two decades on the Tour & Taxis site, had become increasingly internationalised and open to new specialities: contemporary art, design, comic strips, twenty-first-century-style curiosity cabinets including dinosaurs and astronaut costumes… Embracing all market trends and a pioneer in certain fields, BRAFA is now truly distinguished by its diversity and its “cross collecting” particularity, thanks to a perfect blend of styles and eras.
