For 164 days last year, Mario García Torres' workshop in Mexico City had to suspend its activity.
The artist decided to hang a notice on the door: "Temporarily closed."
The next day, he photocopied that poster and replaced the original with the copy.
And so on, until the inscription became unreadable and began to look like an abstract and somewhat gloomy drawing.
The experiment became the perfect visual metaphor for the dark routine that would eventually lead to the collective confinement.
And spawned an installation,
It Must Have Been a Tuesday
(2020), now unveiled at Art Basel, the world's most important art fair, which will be held again this week in Basel after the two-and-a-half-year break imposed by the pandemic.
In the corridors of the great fairgrounds located to the north of the Swiss city, the works produced in recent months were abundant, all pulling gloomy, but also an unprecedented euphoria among the attendees, who exchanged clumsy hugs and prophylactic kisses, after having passed various controls of security. This new edition of the fair aims to mark a definitive return to normality in the art market. “We have gathered 272 galleries from 33 countries. There are
performances
in the public space, a varied program of activities and the corridors are full again.
Saving the masks, it looks a lot like the 2019 fair, ”argued Art Basel's global director, Marc Spiegler, at the pre-session for professionals and VIP collectors held this Tuesday, before the fair opens its doors to the public on Friday. to Sunday.
David Zwirner: "This year has been very solid, we are advancing at the same pace as in 2019. It is a surprise"
Last year, sales fell 22%, according to the annual report on the state of the market published by this fair. A very considerable fall, but not catastrophic, if the pandemic context is taken into account, which many hope to overcome this year. The German David Zwirner, in charge of one of the most powerful galleries in the world, analyzed the situation: “The market sank until June 2020 but recovered quickly from September. This year is being very solid; We are advancing at the same pace as in 2019. It is a surprise for everyone ”. In May of last year, he himself predicted that prices would fall until there was a vaccine. To his surprise, they were relatively stable. In this edition of the fair, the New York gallery Van de Weghe puts on sale an oil painting by Basquiat estimated at 40 million dollars (34 million euros),an unexpected turn for those who promised greater sobriety and price containment in the aftermath of the pandemic cataclysm.
'Bread House', by the Swiss artist Urs Fischer, a bread and wood house turned into a great sensation at Unlimited, the curated section of the fair. It is sold for 3 million dollars (2.56 million euros). Behind, a new mural by David Hockney.GEORGIOS KEFALAS / EFE
Nobody is clear that this work, the most expensive of the fair, will find a buyer, although the dealers assure that this return to a physical format will benefit astronomical sales, as the first figures communicated by the galleries seem to confirm. For example, the Hauser & Wirth gallery, the star of the summer season with its new art center in Menorca, sold an oil painting by Philip Guston for 6.5 million dollars (5.5 million euros). Gladstone, based in New York and Brussels, sold a Keith Haring painting for five million dollars (4.2 million euros) and Pace found a buyer for 20 works in just three hours, including a new piece by Jeff Koons, his This year's star signing, for two million dollars (1.7 million euros). “The experience of art is, above all, emotional.It is easier to conclude a sale in person than in front of a screen ”, stated Stefan Ratibor, director of the almighty Gagosian, along with two Picasso charcoals from 1909, valued at around two million euros each.
“When they go to a fair, collectors buy things they hadn't anticipated. If they fall in love with a work, they can close the deal immediately ”, Kamel Mennour supported him, with theaters in Paris and London, who had just sold a work by Martial Raysse in record time and aspired to reproduce the feat with a brass mobile and ocarina by Petrit Halilaj, the author of the giant flowers of the Madrid Retreat. For the Austrian Thaddaeus Ropac, a prominent gallery owner with offices in Salzburg, Paris and London - and about to open another one in Seoul - the digital format is useful, but it will never replace the real experience. “We are reaching a large audience that we never thought we would have access to, made up of hundreds of thousands of people who follow us on social media. But a work will always be different by Zoom and in reality ”, ditch.On the opening day of Art Basel, Ropac sold a work by Rauschenberg for 4.5 million dollars (3.8 million euros) to a European museum.
Spanish representation is scarce: only six galleries in Madrid and Barcelona are in Basel, compared to nine in 2019
Even so, almost all the galleries experiment in this edition with a new hybridity.
They have rented spacious exhibitors at the fair (and expensive, despite the 10% discount with which they have been given in this edition) but they also have new tools that allow them to continue operating remotely.
Almost all have
viewing rooms
, those virtual rooms where works are exhibited for sale, improvised during the confinement of 2020. In its space in Basel, Gagosian forces to scan a QR code to access the data that traditional cartouches used to collect, while Hauser & Wirth has launched a live chat where its sellers can chat with collectors who have not been able to travel to Switzerland.
In particular, Asians and Americans, two strategic groups for the good health of the sector who are trying to take care of more than ever.
The portrait 'Vivien' (2019), by American artist Alex Katz, exhibited in the Thaddaeus Ropac space at Art Basel.GEORGIOS KEFALAS / EFE
Art Basel has become more intimate, more digital and also more European, although the Spanish representation is particularly scarce: only six galleries from Madrid and Barcelona have moved to Basel, compared to the nine that did so in 2019. Among them, Elvira González, the only Spaniard on the ground floor, who occupies the very first division of contemporary art. “We never considered not coming. This fair has always been good for us and it is the last one I would give up, "said Isabel Mignoni, gallery director, although this year it shares space, for the first time, with another room in San Francisco" to create synergies and reduce costs ”.
On the first floor, Travesía Cuatro repeats, which returns to Art Basel after its debut in 2019 with a selection of women artists led by Asunción Molinos, Elena del Rivero and Teresa Solar, and which closed half a dozen sales yesterday.
“This is the most important fair in the world.
Spanish art has to be there.
The presence of this year is not representative of the vitality of our market ”, indicated Silvia Ortiz, from the Madrid gallery.
Two absences were notable: those of veterans Helga de Alvear and Juana de Aizpuru.
The second, which was announced in the initial list of this edition released in July, ended up suspending the trip.
"We will be back next year," they promised yesterday from their headquarters in Madrid.
The Guggenheim to open its museum in Abu Dhabi in 2026
The new Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi, designed by the architect Frank Gehry, will finally open its doors in 2026. The director of the institution, Richard Armstrong, confirmed this on Tuesday in a meeting with the media in Basel, at the start of the Art Basel fair. This new 30,000 square meter center has been the victim of various delays. The project was first announced in 2006, with an opening date scheduled for 2012, which would then be postponed until 2017. "It is a challenge, it will be Gehry's last great masterpiece," Armstrong said to explain the "long gestation." of the new museum.
The Guggenheim has been building the art collection that will be exhibited in this new venue for more than a decade, which already has some 600 modern and contemporary works, with a special focus on Asian and African art. The museum will open on the island of Saadiyat, a new district for leisure and culture where other Western institutions have already settled, such as the Louvre, which opened its Emirati headquarters in 2017, or the New York University, which opened a campus in 2014.