SWAB: A Burst of Brush Strokes and Colors

By Art Signal Media

The spring of 2007 has given us the pleasure of a new international venue for young up and coming art. The SWAB International Art Fair, held in the city of Barcelona, was received with enthusiasm in a city where, until now, no similar initiative has been organized, despite the fact that many local sectors agreed that such an event was necessary. SWAB took place from the 10th to the 13th of May, at the historic site of the Reales Atarazanas in Barcelona, where gallery owners, collectors and visitors attracted by the new project could be found. As the Director, architect and collector Joaquín Díaz-Tascón commented to ArtFacts, “We thought that Barcelona needed an art fair equivalent to Volta, Pulse or Frieze, and we have tried to bring contemporary art to the fair through 42 galleries from 13 countries, which basically work with young artists”. SWAB (the name refers to the idea of exchange present in the word ‘swap’, but transforming the letter ‘p’ to a ‘b’ to represent Barcelona), was held three weeks before the fifth edition of the specialist video art fair LOOP, and thus the organizers considered it more appropriate to focus on painting and drawing rather than to select works from this genre. In addition to this evident orientation towards art produced by artists who in their majority were born after 1970, other characteristics differentiating this event from others at Spanish and international level can be highlighted: firstly, its manageable size from the point of view of the spectator and visitor, which made it possible to visit all of the exhibition calmly, giving sufficient time for the contemplation of each exhibit; next, the clear international bias, with only 7 of the 42 contributing galleries coming from Spain; and lastly, the unique disciplinary coherence with respect to the drawing and painting in the works of the artists represented by the 42 galleries. This latter aspect should be especially highlighted, constituting one of the most interesting aspects of the SWAB project, which permitted us to see the marked interest young artists have for neo-figurative forms, clearly influenced by illustration and graphic design, and even comic strips, and far removed from informalist tendencies.

The choice of participating galleries was the responsibility of a committee comprising three gallery owners: Fred Mann and Leo King from London and New York respectively, and Marta Moriarty, from the Vacio 9 Gallery in Madrid. The resulting selection included a significant number of galleries from The United States and Gemany, with a total of 9 and 12 respectively, coming from New York (5), Boston (2), Los Angeles (1) and Durham (1) on the one hand, and on the other, Berlin (8), Düsseldorf (2), Leizpig (1) and Cologne (1). Other significant sources were Paris (3) and London (3) on the Euro-American side, and Oriental galleries were represented by Shanghai and Tokio.

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In the limited space available to us, it is not posible to undertake an exhaustive review of the works by all the artists represented at SWAB. But that does not prevent us from mentioning those artists who most aroused our interest, given that we believe that in an art journal, artists and their works should form the principal center of attention, over and above other contextual commentaries habitual when dealing with these themes.

These, then, are some of our choices, although we regret having to exclude many other projects. We shall start by mentioning the paintings of female faces exhibited by the Brasilian, Harding Meyer (1964). Also the metallic portraits painted on aluminium by the Norwegian artist, Berit Myrebøe (1968), both from the Jarmuscheck und Partner Gallery in Berlin; Denise Grünstein’s (1950) enigmatic photographs from Stockholm’s Charlotte Lund Gallery; the dark drawings by the Greek Alkis Boutlis (1978) from the Susanne Tarasieve Gallery in Paris; Ruprecht Von Kaufmann’s paintings from the Ehrentraut Gallery in Berlin; or the ecstatic works of the photographer and digital video-artist from New York, Tim White-Sobieski, from the Pilar Parra Gallery in Madrid. Lastly, going back again to a figurativism which, in the medium of painting calls to mind what we have seen in the medium of cinematography (for example, in the films ‘Kids’ or ‘Ken Park’ by the photographer and film-maker, Larry Clark), we find the paintings of Juan Tessi, from the Alexander Pollazon Gallery in London.