Please feed the artists

Another dynamic dealing duo who will be at Zoo are writer Niru Ratnam and ex-Tate curator Louise Hayward, who will bring varied specimens such as their Post-it note works by Claire Harvey from their recently opened Hoxton gallery, Store.
Among Hackney's Ibid Projects display will be photographs by Svetlana Heger, whose self-portraits depict the artist as a billboard, advertising the fashion or luxury brands that sponsor her.

"It's a complete cross-section of what's exciting in London now," says Risley. "It's not just galleries but setups like Rockwell, a Dalston space run by nine artists, where they put on amazing shows."

A former artist himself, Risley was given his first big break while working at Zwemmers art bookshop in Charing Cross Road. He persuaded the owners to let him use the firstfloor room as a tiny gallery and built his art-dealing business from there.

After leaving the West End, he set up his eponymous gallery in a former tannery in the East End, where he exhibits artists of all ages and nationalities, not just the next bright young things.

His latest show, Portraits of Non-Humans, includes a painting by the currently unfashionable giant of mid-century British art, Graham Sutherland, as well as three works by photographer John Stezaker, who was so underrated during the 1970s that he is perhaps better known now as a tutor at the Royal College of Art.

Adopting overlooked or starving artists may be a trait that Risley developed since working for the philanthropic Bloomberg Space, set in the company's Norman Fosterdesigned-office tower in the City.

Even though the financial firm puts its name to many art events through exhibition sponsorship, Bloomberg's Space differs from most users of corporate art funds in that it commissions new works for its shows and lets artists keep them afterwards, rather than amassing its own collection.

However, Risley is not a neutral keeper of this Zoo. He, too, will be showing and selling his stable of artists to the big game-hunting collectors that he and his co-director, Soraya Rodriguez, hope will migrate from the Frieze Art Fair - "We don't want people wandering off and looking at apes, we want them to buy art," she says.

Exhibits from Risley's gallery will include colourful bird abstracts by James Aldridge and the quieter oils of Henry Krokatsis.

Zoo's wild concept relies almost entirely on a second lucrative year for Frieze, which squarely beat the ailing annual London Art Fair held at Islington's Business Design Centre to become the capital's first modern art fair to rival the world's best in Basel, Cologne, New York and Miami.

Like its global rivals, Frieze has attracted a lot of cash (one London dealer, Timothy Taylor, sold a Philip Guston painting for around $650,000 last year) and with it come the jealous eyes and scavengers, although Zoo's youthful gaze and a price range of £800-£10,000 should avoid too much direct competition between the two.

Zoo would do well to replicate the surprise hit of NADA, the New Art Dealers' Alliance, from New York, whose satellite fair in an underground car park during Miami Beach's inaugural art fair last year practically sold out, making the names of many off-the-beaten-track galleries from Brooklyn and Williamsburg in the process.

Similarly, Zoo should avoid courting comparison with the American interloper in London this year, the nomadic Scope Fair that is piggybacking Frieze by staging its own art fair in the nearby Meli· Hotel in Regent's Park, with a room rented for each gallery.

Risley prefers to see Zoo's relationship to Frieze as symbiotic, rather than parasitic. While his venture may not be quite as altruistic as it claims, Zoo undoubtedly favours nurture and support over profit and may even help to boost London's lack of collectors of young art.

Whether it will encourage the feeding frenzy that has dealers fighting over ever younger graduates at the annual degree shows also remains to be seen, but Risley's definition of success for Zoo is simple: that it helps to build careers for people in the London art world.

All three fairs, Frieze, Zoo and Scope, will be open from 15 to 18 October and only the art-buying public can decide which species of art fair withers away and which grows stronger.