High Quality and Very Solid Sales at Art Basel Miami Beach 2009 |
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| Written by Paul Kenyon |
| Thursday, 10 December 2009 05:00 |
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Art Basel Miami Beach proved again that high-quality works remain in strong demand, as collectors rewarded excellent material and booth presentations with steady sales throughout the week. The new layout of Art Basel Miami Beach included larger spaces for many galleries. Many exhibitors also reported excellent sales and valuable new contacts, especially in Latin America. Gallerists offered positive reports, including: Roger Tatley, Senior Director, Alison Jacques Gallery, London “We’ve had a great Art Basel Miami Beach. The response from museums has been fantastic and sales strong. The decision to exhibit a large group of Hannah Wilke works from the 1970s, along with iconic vintage self portraits by Robert Mapplethorpe, together with other gallery artists, has been extremely rewarding.” Andrew da Conceicao, Director, Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town “It has been a long while since we have met this many new and serious collectors and curators in such a short time span. We have always felt that Americans connect particularly strongly to our program, and Art Basel Miami Beach more than confirmed this for us. Conversations we’ve had in the past few days will continue well beyond the fair, and we hope that Miami will become a new point of reference for our gallery. We are leaving with a big smile on our face.” This year’s Art Kabinett was of high quality and showed an interesting mix of carefully curated exhibitions in the booths of the galleries. Twenty-eight galleries – more than ever before – presented an Art Kabinett. The projects in this sector of the show featured a wide array of artists, ranging from emerging artists such as Jakub Julian Ziotkowski, Haegue Yang and Latifa Echakhch to historical figures like Marcel Duchamp, George Grosz and Jack Tworkov. Further highlights included projects by Olafur Eliasson, Anish Kapoor, Richard Prince and Wim Delvoye. Group shows included exhibitions titled “Fluxus”, “Ninety Years of Bauhaus” and “Aspects of Pop Art”.
Many leading art-world figures appeared in the Art Basel Conversations. Located this year for the first time at the Oceanfront, the Art Basel Conversations were especially wellattended by the artworld and the broader public in their new location by the beach. The premiere presented an artist talk with Ai Weiwei, followed by “Museum Directors: Change in Generation”, “Collector Focus: Latin America” and “The Future of the Museum: The Portable Museum”. Art Salon, located this year for the first time in the central area of the Miami Beach Convention Center, evolved well in its new location. Participants included artworld figures such as Pae White, Jens Hoffmann, Fred Tomaselli, Mark Rosenthal, James Rosenquist, Klaus Biesenbach and Josh Baer. Museum Groups More than a hundred international museum and collectors groups came from all over the world to attend Art Basel Miami Beach. The delegations included boards of trustees from Museo de Arte de Lima; Brooklyn Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; MOCA Los Angeles; Guggenheim Museum New York; Museu de Arte Moderna Sao Paulo; Dallas Museum of Art; MCA Denver; Birmingham Museum of Art; Detroit Institute of Arts; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington; Art Institute of Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; New Museum, New York; and many more. Museum exhibitions and collections Following long tradition, the Miami museums organized significant exhibitions. A particular highlight was the opening of the newly built De La Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space in Miami’s Design District, which attracted a large number of visitors every day during Art Basel Miami Beach. Other shows included exhibitions presenting Guillermo Kuitca at the Miami Art Museum, “Art from the Jumex Collection” at the Bass Museum, William Kentridge at the Norton Museum, George Segal at the Margulies Collection, “The Realms of Reality” at MOCA Miami, and Raymond Pettibon and Sylvie Fleury at World Class Boxing. Once again, Miami’s leading private collections – among them the Margulies Collection, the Rubell Family Collection, CIFO, the De La Cruz Collection, the Mora Collection, the Scholl Collection, and the Dacra Collection – opened their homes and warehouses to guests of the international art show. The daily visits to artist studios in the Greater Miami area were also very popular with visitors. Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~ |
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