Eyes have been cast on South America over the last year, and really over the last decade, led by curators and collectors like Eugenio Lopez, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, and Mari Carmen Ramírez, among others. Case in point, in the last year alone the Museum of Modern Art opened the joint show of León Ferrari and the Brazilian modernist Mira Schendel last month, and a mid-career retrospective of the Mexican Conceptualist Gabriel Orozco; and Tate Modern’s mid-career retrospective of contemporary Latin American Conceptualist, Cildo Meireles of Brazil (and before that, the jagged floor crack by the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo in the Turbine Hall), which is en route to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts where it will open next month. Zona Maco had a fabulous international turnout and the MoMA store just launched their exclusive Destination: Brazil product collection, highlighting more than 75 items by an eclectic group of Brazilian designers.
And it continues into May. Last week, the 18th annual ArteBA took place, the longest running Latin American fair, including the work of approximately 800 Latin American artists from 90 galleries primarily from South America. Over the five-day span, more than 120,000 visitors poured into La Rural Stadium and Exhibition Hall in uptown Buenos Aires. Existing as a non-profit organization, Fundacion ArteBA boardmember Marga Munez-Vargas de Macaya says, “Because of [this] we have assumed this objective of bringing contemporary art to people; so we really look forward to many people visiting the fair. It’s not only for collectors. This is a very open fair.” And open it was, in a refreshing way. Because a significant percentage of those visitors were non-buying, the fair feel more like an eclectic (and well-curated) Latin American exhibition than a fair.
As far as sales go, red dots were few and far between at the fair this year (no doubt a result of the economic climate), however overall gallerists were upbeat, perhaps because in attendance were some major curators and collectors—including including Ella Fontanals-Cisneros; Anibal Jozami; Eduardo F. Costantini; Julieta Gonzalez, curator of Latin American art at Tate Modern; Carmen Ramírez; Patricia Phelps de Cisneros; and Alberto de la Cruz, son of Rosa de la Cruz, among others—who were no doubt eyeing a few bold face artists—including Antonio Berni, Luis Felipe Noé, Joaquín Torres García, Luis Fernando Benedit (who simultaneously has a show at MALBA), Xul Solar, Emilio Pettorutti, Eduardo Stupía, Julio Le Parc, Jorge Macchi, Leandro Erlich, and Flavia da Rin to name a few—as well as emerging talent chosen for the Barrio Joven (translated as “young neighborhood”) section of the fair, where 20 galleries were chosen by a selection committee to display work ranging from advertising graphics to illustration, street art, installation and multimedia art. Overall the fair was as refreshing as it was eclectic with a laid back quality that only Latin Americans can execute so perfectly.
[caption id="attachment_2704" align="alignnone" width="560" caption="Barrio Joven at ArteBA."][/caption]
(Special thanks to LAN airlines, www.lan.com.)
