A new fair in Cologne is betting that less is more. Prospect, an alternative art fair that opens on November 5 and runs to November 7, brings together 19 galleries under a deliberately level playing field: every participant gets an identical aluminium table, two metres by one metre, and a single light source. There are no bigger booths, no better positions and no hierarchy of display.

The fair is the work of a founding team made up of Antonia Nolte, Lilli von Bodman, Carola Seher, Manoucher Khoshbakht and Max Mayer, with Khoshbakht among its co-founders. Its roster mixes emerging spaces such as a. Squire, King's Leap and Portas Vilaseca with established names including Galerie Nagel Draxler, Drei, Galerie Khoshbakht, Gisela Capitain and Buchholz, giving younger galleries the same physical footing as their older counterparts.

Prospect opens alongside the 59th edition of Art Cologne, which hosts 164 galleries, and its stripped-back format is a deliberate counterpoint to the scale and expense of the conventional fair model. It follows a lineage of small, dealer-led alternatives that have appeared in recent years, including Post-Fair, organised by Christ Sharp in 2025, as well as the London Invitational and Tokyo Jazz Club, all of which have tried to rethink how galleries present work to collectors without the machinery of the big fair.

The idea is that equal conditions change what visitors notice. With nothing to distinguish one table from another except the art on it, the fair asks collectors to judge the work rather than the presentation, and asks galleries to compete on the strength of their programmes. Whether the experiment can hold its own beside one of Germany's largest fairs will be tested over its three days.