Mattia Pozzoni on Building MEGA and Challenging Traditional Art Fairs

Mattia Pozzoni is the Founder and Director of MEGA Art Fair in Milan, launched in 2023 as an alternative to more rigid and transactional art fair models. With over fifteen years of experience advising collectors and institutions across Europe, he works across curation, advisory, and cultural strategy.

In this interview, he explains how MEGA prioritises relationships over transactions, why social and informal settings can lead to more meaningful engagement with art, how new audiences are entering the market, and what challenges arise when trying to scale a more flexible and human art fair model. 

MEGA describes itself as a "social space for art" - how has this shifted the way galleries and collectors actually interact at the fair compared to more traditional formats?

At MEGA, the transaction isn’t the starting point — the relationship is. By designing the fair as a social space, we slow things down: collectors spend more time with works, galleries engage in longer, more informal conversations, and encounters happen across contexts — a dinner, a talk, a drink. It creates a different kind of attention. Less transactional, more porous. And often, more effective.

You're both a co-founder of MEGA and an independent art advisor - how do these two roles inform each other, and does your advisory background shape how you curate the participating galleries?

My advisory practice keeps me very close to how collectors actually think — and that inevitably shapes MEGA. But the fair pushes me further: it’s not just about placing works, it’s about building an ecosystem where those decisions can happen in a more meaningful way.

The extended evening hours and programming feel like a deliberate choice to reach a different kind of audience. Are you seeing a shift in who's actually buying, not just attending?

The art world can be quite self-referential — we wanted to open that up. The evening format brings in a broader, younger demographic, but they’re not just there for the atmosphere. They’re informed, curious, and increasingly buying. The idea is simple: expand the audience, and the market evolves with it

MEGA moves to a new reclaimed space in Milan every year - how do you choose the location, and how deeply does the fair engage with the neighbourhood and its community?

Partly necessity — we’ve grown and outgrown our spaces each year. But more importantly, it’s intentional. We want to ‘give back’ a new space to the city every time, and to work with places that carry a narrative. This year, Spazio Profumo — a former perfume factory — wasn’t just a backdrop, it shaped the entire experience, as for instance it informed our experiential dinners based around an olfactory parcourse. 

What's the one problem in the existing art fair ecosystem that MEGA was specifically built to solve - and what still remains unsolved?

Access. Fairs can be expensive, rigid, and transactional — we wanted to make them more flexible, more human.
What remains unsolved is scale: how do you grow without becoming exactly what you were trying to challenge?