The proposals dialogue with each other from a unique self-supporting structure. / Photo: Camila Godoy
Affair, The unprecedented collaborative contemporary art fair located in the Saldías Cultural Pole, between the Retiro railway tracks and depots and the Mugica neighborhood settlement, offers until Saturday works of art ranging from approximately 180 to four thousand dollars, with the intention of to attract new audiences and collectors, in a climate of enthusiastic expectation.
The fair offers works ranging from 180 to approximately four thousand dollars. / Photo: Camila Godoy
Son 12 gallery owners from Buenos Aires, Rosario and Córdoba -located in Meridiano, that is, the Argentine Chamber of Contemporary Art Galleries-who come together in this “zero edition of Affair”, as they like to say, with the desire to renew the national cultural calendar of contemporary art and to expand.
Luciana Berttoloni: “Expectations are the best”. / Photo: Camila Godoy
It’s about Rosario Contemporary Gabelich; the cordovans Lyv gallery, Sasha D Art Space, Earth and Maria Wonda; and the porteñas Acefala, TokonOMa, Ungallery, Wunsch Gallery, Chimera, OdA art offices, and OTTO; whose premise is to give life to a new type of art fair: “self-managed and accessible” -so be dollars-, with the focus on bringing first buyers closer.
The premise was to give life to a new type of art fair: “self-managed and accessible”. / Photo: Camila Godoy
Galleries whose proposals dialogue with each other from a unique self-supporting structure. That is: wooden modules that support each other without partitions that separate one gallery from the other, a scaffolding designed by the architect Ariel Jacubovich according to the curatorial script of the artist and curator Carlos Gutiérrez, who set out to shape an open tour and winding between galleries, where one work led to another, like a conversation.
“We left the wall and we left the stand, now we hope that the project works and that we can return”says to Telam Barbara Echavarria de Acéfala, who works more than anything with site specifics, whom she has accompanied since they are a hypothesis in the heads of the artists she represents: “we accompany process”synthesize.
This getting out of the wall and the stand promotes the possibility of new routes -there are no partitions that stop the walk of the visitors or hinder the passage between one gallery and another- but tIt also allows other materials and dimensions, the work rests on the floor, it is not mostly the picture that homogenizes the panorama of other fairs.
Affair rises behind the Buenos Aires and exclusive Barrio Parque, between San Pedro de Jujuy and Padre Carlos Mugica streets, a quiet neighborhood where long lines of cargo trucks continue the straight line of the railway line, a couple prepares bread tortillas on a grill and some cartoneros with carts break that silence in front of English buildings from a century ago. It also arrives within the framework of Art Week, geographically very close to ArteBA, one of the most important fairs of its kind in Latin America.
The desire to sell works is irrevocably supported by a different story, a curatorial project that runs through all the works, the dialogue between gallery and gallery is unequivocal. But those modules that support each other, generating a system in which the other is needed yes or yes to make a whole work, support another pragmatic premise, which is the conviction that the market is small, and for this reason this fair that looks towards other sides, different from those indicated by the more traditional or already consolidated fairs.
From the Wunch gallery, a word that means desire in German, ignacio meroni reviews the exhibited works: “low fi photos” (low quality) of matias maroevic, some printed on canvas, where there is a lot of rave and after-party from the south of Buenos Aires; the golden and silver corn that Ezekiel Black he did with the little bowling ball mirrors; and the magical mobile cinema gadgets created by Daniel Roman.
The desire to sell works is irrevocably supported by a different story. / Photo: Camila Godoy
Prices for this part of the journey range from $350 to $1,800.. All amounts less than $600 are part of the program My First Workwhich proposes “learning to live with art” and seeks to promote and accompany the search for a first work of art for the home. Many of these works are in La trastienda, a room “mirrored” with the exhibition room, explains Gutiérrez, where more works by the selected artists are exhibited.
Discounts, payment facilities? “It is the same to talk about discounts than about exchange rates”dice Gabriel Bittermanfrom Chimera. “Payments are accepted in installments as long as they are in dollars and payments in pesos at the blue or cash exchange rate. Everything is negotiable, the idea is to move”summarizes the initiative financed together by the gallery owners themselves, all equally, without other public or private financing.
“That made costs go down a lot, it allowed us to deal with it in another way to recover the investment and then we were able to play more with the artists, we gained freedom, we were able to choose what is not so easy to sell”dice Gabriela Gabelichstanding before the work of Lisandro Arevalo: an iron structure that opens like branches holding, each one, a carving in cellular cement bricks that “goes from pop to the underworld”: UFOs, flying pigs, skulls, pac-man ghosts and brains.
The fair was born from the desire to renew the national cultural calendar of contemporary art and to expand../ Photo: Camila Godoy
“Expectations are the best – says Luciana Berttoloni in front of some hearts that shine, fetishes, with some image of Frida Kalho in the center-; I am happy, the fair is super new and makes history: it is very intimate, unstructured and with a very good level of artists”.
The chosen artists“emerging, not so well known, exquisite, the missionary Rodolfo Zagene one of them, and the themes proposed by his gallery, the search for feminine beauty, the fetish -indica-, accompany the proposed Affair from the very name of the fair”to which it will also arrive through the minibus circuit that will be circulating through the museums and public spaces where there are interventions within the Art Week.
This Friday Affair can be visited from 15 to 21 in San Pedro de Jujuy 4. At 16 and 18 there will be a guided tour organized by Art Week.
2023-09-01 01:09:42
#Affair #began #collaborative #art #fair #seduce #audiences
