PINTA ~ The Latin American Fair in New York Celebrates Its Fifth Anniversary

Written by Manuel Rodriguez Tuesday, 08 November 2011 22:08

New York City.- PINTA , the Latin American fair of modern and contemporary art, runs from November 10th through November 13th. This year the fair will have a brand new look when it opens its doors in the heart of New York. The new location at 7 West 34th Street in Manhattan will accommodate fifty galleries and projects from the United States, Latin America and Europe that will showcase their best Latin American artists. For the fifth year in a row, New York will see some of the best modern art, including work by masters of painting and sculpture from Latin America such as Fernando Botero , Manuel Mendive , Rufino Tamayo , Wifredo Lam and Roberto Matta ; even as geometric abstraction and concrete art have been our signature since the first edition of the fair in 2007.

The public will also be able to appreciate the rediscovery of conceptual art from the 1970s and 80s: a movement that curators and specialists are revisiting and doing an in-depth rereading of, and that has been the main focus of interest of museums and private collectors in the last few years. Meanwhile, PINTA will offer visitors the best of the most current and contemporary artistic production of the region. The presence of galleries from the United States at the fair has always been the strongest. This year it will again host seventeen galleries from New York, Miami, San Antonio and other cities. The vibrant current state of Brazilian art will also have an important participation with five galleries from Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte, as well as with two individual works that will be presented within the art projects curated by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti.


For the first time, the Brazilian Trade and Investment Promotion Agency (APEX) will support the participation in PINTA of galleries from Brazil. Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Peru and Venezuela will also be significantly represented in this edition of the fair. Spain increasingly welcomes Latin American artists, whose careers unfold mostly in Europe, but who want to gain access to other markets across the Atlantic. Spanish galleries will use PINTA as their port of entry to the cultural capital of America.

According to Diego Costa Peuser, the fair's director, "this year we want to reinforce the concept of a boutique fair with proposals and presentations of the highest quality." Antonio Manuel (1947), one of the most important Brazilian artists of the 1960's and 1970's, will be the guest artist at this edition of the fair. Manuel's work is characterized by innovative artistic resources and a markedly political message. On November 9th, the day before the opening of the fair, there will be a guided tour of the exhibition "Antonio Manuel: I Want to Act, Not Represent!" curated by Claudia Calirman and Gabriela Rangel, at the Americas Society. This is the fifth year of an uninterrupted collaboration between the Americas Society and PINTA. The fair will include a section of artists' projects selected by Italian art critic Jacopo Crivelli Visconti. In his career in the art world, Crivelli has been curator of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo and of the Volta Contemporary Art Fair (Basel, Switzerland), as well as a juror on multiple international prizes. On this occasion he will present works by Claudio Perna (Venezuela), Eder Santos (Brazil), Faivovich & Goldberg (Argentina), Fernanda Gomes (Brazil), Iván Candeo (Venezuela), Jonathan Hernandez (Mexico), Lygia Pape (Brazil), Patricio Larrambebere (Argentina) and Rómulo Aguerre (Uruguay).


PINTA 2011 will continue with what has become its "trademark": the unique and highly prized Museum Acquisitions Program. Thanks to this initiative, those museums interested in Latin American art can acquire works at the fair for their collections. As in previous years, PINTA covers part of the cost of these acquisitions while the museums provide the remaining part of the cost of the works that they wish to acquire. This program, created in 2007, has already invested more than USD $800,000, half of which was provided by PINTA. More than fifty works of art have been purchased with these funds during the two editions of the fair in New York and in London since 2007. Today, they are all part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art - MoMA , New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Museum of Fine Arts Philadelphia ; El Museo del Barrio , New York; Tate Modern , London; Centre Pompidou , Paris; Museo Reina Sofía , Madrid; Museo Rufino Tamayo , Mexico, among others. According to Mauro Herlitzka, Institutional Director of PINTA, "This year we have invited The Bronx Museum of Art , New York; Newark Museum , New Jersey; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and The Museum of Fine Arts Houston to participate in the program." Visit the fair's website at ... www.pintaart.com

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