Welcome to one of the youngest art fairs in the world. It is not that Swab Barcelona is exactly a newcomer -against all odds, there are already 14 editions behind it- but its commitment to emerging artists, those who will define the future of the market, remains unchanged. "It's our DNA," says its artistic director, Carolina Diez-Cascón. "There are galleries with less than five years of existence and others consecrated, but most come with young artists, whose works, fresh and different, are a reflection of what is happening right now." Behold post-pandemic art. That, at least at first glance, has nothing to do with fun, noise or money, but with "the projection of new landscapes of the future and the appearance of a new surrealism. And colour, above all a lot of colour".
Carolina Diez-Cascón makes this reading moments before the opening of the doors of its fifteenth edition, which is being held for the last time in the Montjuïc Italian Pavilion, an area that will house a municipal sports pavilion and will force the fair to move to the Victòria Eugènia pavilion , future headquarters of the MNAC. Until Sunday, Swab hosts the meeting of nearly eighty international galleries from New York, Washington, Paris, London, Tokyo, Istanbul or Beirut...
The pandemic seems to be behind us, but getting here has not been easy either, confesses its founder, the architect and collector Joaquín Díez-Cascón, who after the start of the war in Ukraine saw how many of the galleries that had shown their interest for participating in the fair they were discharged. As the months passed, the inscriptions were reactivated, with the exception of the Nordic galleries
Women artists are once again the majority in Swab (representing 60% of the total), there is not a single NFT and, in terms of prices, gallery owners seem to have adjusted their bets both to the turbulence of the current times and to the idiosyncrasy of Barcelona collecting. "It is a realistic fair", confirms Joaquín Díez-Cascón. In the stands you can find pieces from the 15 euros that a self-published work costs to the 50,000 that the most expensive piece costs in the Madrid gallery Espacio Mínimo. It is The Light by the Argentine artist Liliana Porter (one of the most veteran of the fair), a monochrome canvas that has embedded in one end the figure of a man with a lantern that seems to want to break through the immensity of the canvas. Gray. The average price ranges between 2,000 and 5,000 euros.
"Beyond the business that is generated at the fair, throughout all these years we have seen how foreign gallery owners take advantage of their stay in Barcelona to visit artists' studios that they later end up representing", says Díez-Cascón, who continues to have the support from a large group of Barcelona galleries, some present since the first edition, such as ADN which, among other pieces, presents the series Appearance by Regina José Galindo, a set of fifteen photographs in which she portrays herself in different settings in Germany where there was a sexist crime, at the rate of one per week.
For lovers of Gino Rubert, who is currently the subject of an anthology at Tecla Sala, the Senda gallery has a surprise in store for them. His oil paintings-collage are no longer limited to showing what is on the canvas, but thanks to an electronic device that is activated by the viewer's movement, it is also possible to peek into what is hidden behind the curtains. The price of the works, between 8,000 and 22,000 euros.
