LONDON—An edgy satellite featuring only 20 galleries, SUNDAY is the place to go to keep abreast of the emerging — and curators know it. White Columns director Matthew Higgs was spotted during the opening breakfast, and so were the Institute of Contemporary Arts's Gregor Muir, and one of London's most devoted young artist supporters, Anita Zabludowicz. The overall experience is more akin to visiting a large group show than traipsing the aisles of yet another art fair. The space is modestly sized, there are no booths to speak of — exhibitors are only separated by white marks on the floor — and all of them showcase one or two artists, no more.

Limoncello, co-founder of SUNDAY, is the star here. It features a gigantic chicken mural by Cornelia Baltes, as well as her “Headless Chicken” stilt painting, which sold for £2,500 in the fair's first couple of hours. Their cluster of sculptures by Jack Strange is also a high point. Some are composed of objects softly glowing with the light of a computer screen underneath, others combine various bits of materiel — such as plastic and twigs — in an alluring contemporary take on the Japanese Ikebana. Strange's wall-mounted series of rune-like stones, “Like Spirit, Like Ghost, Like Human, Like Alien” (2012), sold for £6,000.

At SUNDAY, most of the works on display are under the £10,000 price mark. Unlike their senior counterparts in the big tent, dealers at SUNDAY are generally unwilling to discuss prices and sales, as if pretending it was not really the point. Yet for many, particularly the UK- and Europe-based galleries, being at SUNDAY is a canny move: a cost-effective way to present their artists to collectors a stone's throw from the main Frieze action. For those further afield, like New York's Lisa Cooley — participating for the first time after two years at Frieze Frame — SUNDAY offers a solid foothold in the British capital.

In the first hour, Seventeen placed two pieces by David Raymond Conroy, including “Devotion” (2012), a work on paper combining posters depicting Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct and Joy Division's Ian Curtis for £3,000, and a pair of collages, “He Always Loved Larking” (2012), for the same price. The Swiss gallery BolteLang, loyal to SUNDAY since its first edition in 2010, also had a good start, selling two works by the British painter Benjamin Senior (priced at between £2,500 and £3,500).

This year's discoveries include Niall Macdonald at Glasgow's Kendall Koppe, which is showing an extraordinary set of plaster cast sculptures: tables supporting such items as a digital camera and a chicken bone, the artist's studio key and an animal horn, a large sea urchin shell, and an ecstasy pill (£4,600 each). Over at Milan's Fluxia, Timur Si-Qin's pair of Axe shower gel bottles skewered on an Excalibur replica sword powerfully evokes (or skewers?) a cliché young male's psyche (9,500 euros). And it's fun too. In double-channel video "Legend" (2011), also shown on the booth (and priced at 2,500 for an edition of give), the artist asked the two Fluxia gallerists to shoot copies of medieval armours with guns, later to be sold as sculptures.

Just three years old, SUNDAY has become, in this short time span — and despite the competition of the main fair's young galleries section Frame — a not-to-be-missed rendezvous for the connoisseur. “Onwards and upwards,” said Zabludowicz, giving her nod of approval.