ARTEBA'10 CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR

Since reaching the age of majority last year, and achieving both healthy sales and record attendance, the arteBA Foundation has been busy working to ensure that the 19th Contemporary Art Fair will be a historic one.

In 2010, Argentina will be sharing the Bicentenary of its first national government together with Colombia, Chile, Mexico and Venezuela. For this reason alone arteBA ‘10 promises to be a memorable fair for the special presence of contemporary art of our region, with a greater number of galleries coming from these Latin American countries and from Spain.

And as it did 18 years ago, arteBA Feria, for seven intense days will again become a meeting-place for gallery owners and directors, collectors, artists and cultural institutions, and a focal point for transactions between those offering and those looking for high-quality art. Year after year, more than 120,000 visitors to the Fair have the opportunity to view an impeccable selection of contemporary art.

arteBA ’10 will feature the seventh presentation of the arteBA-Petrobras Prize in the Visual Arts, by now one of the most awaited art awards in the region’s art scene. Its director this year will be Rafael Cippolini.

The Fair’s sustained growth and the stimulus it brings to the art market are commitments of arteBA. The arteBA Foundation pursues the aim of strategically associating over time with leading companies so that they will join in the mission to heighten the Fair’s impact as the largest-scale and longest-established event for Latin American art. To this end, arteBA Feria works to cultivate an essential triad of touristic, economic, and cultural attraction in the region.

The acquisition programs, both of work for Argentine museums and from abroad, and for corporate collections, have been expanding and gaining continuity over successive years of the arteBA Fair. For the Fair’s coming year, the arteBA Foundation is working together with the sponsors and participating businesses to be able to offer the press and the visiting public attractive events and sites for closer access to contemporary art –and in order to offer art galleries an extensive works-acquisitions program.

Now entering its sixth year, the arteBA-Zurich Matching Funds Program will continue to allow the country’s major museums to expand their collections with works acquired at the Fair, through joint contributions from Zurich and the museums themselves.

For a second consecutive year, Mercedes Benz also is giving its support to Latin American art by acquiring artworks from the Fair for the company’s own collection, one of the most important corporate collections in the world, including artists such as Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, Max Bill, Walter de Maria and Nam June Paik. The exhibition center La Rural will also continue last year’s initiative of acquiring work through Impulsarte, the company’s Visual Arts Stimulus Program.

The arteBA Contemporary Art Fair is the moment in which galleries exhibit their best works of Latin American art. With the aim of maintaining high quality in the artistic material the arteBA Fair provides, the selection of the participating galleries will be in the hands of a selection committee led by Fernando Farina. Its members are Eva Grinstein, Sonia Becce, Jaime Cerón Silva (Colombia), Adriano Pedrosa (Brazil), and Orly Benzacar.

The Barrio Joven–Chandon (Chandon Young Quarter) will again be the area in the Fair dedicated to presenting emerging artists, artists “new,” as the name suggests, “to the neighborhood.” The Barrio Joven–Chandon selection committee will be made up of Ana María Battistozzi, Ana Martínez Quijano and Oscar Cruz (Brazil). We look forward to discovering new works that reflect the latest trends in the region’s various art scenes.

The Auditorium Program, which over the last years has developed as a platform for debate and for fresh perspectives on the contemporary cultural scene, will again be one of the focal points of the Fair. This year, the Prime Time programming will be coordinated by Gabriela Rangel. The prime time program of arteBA´10 will feature presentations by prominent figures in the artistic, institutional, and critical scene, both in Latin America and internationally. In previous years the auditorium space, packed every day, has had wide repercussions throughout the press, both for the quality of presentations and the level of its participants and audience. Next year’s arteBA ’10 will be no exception.