Swab Barcelona celebrates its 16th edition from October 5 to 8

Swab, the Barcelona International Contemporary Art Fair that will hold its 16th edition from October 5 to 8, 2023 , announces the galleries that will participate in the new edition.

As a novelty, the fair changes location. Swab 2023 will open a new location in the Textile Pavilion at Fira de Barcelona , located at Avinguda Rius i Taulet, 10 (a few meters from the Italian Pavilion, where the fair has been held until this year). Located on the site of the former Palau de l'Art Têxtil of the Barcelona Universal Exhibition of 1929, the pavilion, with an industrial aesthetic, has more than 3,000m2 that will be fully occupied by the fair.

Swab Barcelona, with a careful program that combines established galleries with younger galleries, acts as a platform for experimenting with emerging artistic proposals . The selection committee, the collaborating commissioners and the management of the fair are committed to the freshest and most current proposals from the national and international scene , thus reflecting the trends of the moment and giving visibility to young and innovative projects. The result is a fair on a human scale that brings together the artists who define the present and the future of the art market.

In this edition, the fair, which shows the latest trends in contemporary art, focuses on the city of Barcelona and the Mediterranean , with the aim of projecting local talent to the rest of the world. In the same way that Modernism gave way to Abstraction, which meant the internationalization of Catalan art, Swab 2023 leaves behind recurring figuration to immerse itself in abstract scenarios with surrealistic strokes and colorful poetic landscapes.

The Swab 2023 selection committee is made up of curators and artistic directors Omar López-Chahoud , from the Untitled Miami fair, Jérôme Pantalacci, from the French Art-o-Rama fair, Isa Natalia Castella , from the Materia Fair in Mexico City , Domenico de Chirico , independent curator, and the collectors José Luis Lorenzo , Marie Elena Angulo , Jesper Stieler and Pedro Jaile .

Swab 2023 will have the participation of 70 contemporary art galleries , 27 from the national level and 43 from 21 countries in Europe, Latin America and Asia . In addition, Swab 2023 will have the participation of more than 200 artists .

General Program

The General Program, central pillar of the fair, includes national and international galleries with a consolidated track record in the contemporary art circuit. This year, the program will have 40 galleries, made up of: Anna Nova Gallery (Saint Petersburg), Artnueve (Murcia), ATM Galería (Gijón) + Espacio Valverde (Madrid), Bianca Boeckel (São Paulo), CLUSTER (Rome), Dimensions Variable (Miami), Galería Ángeles Baños (Badajoz), Fran Reus (Palma de Mallorca), Galería Isabel Hurley (Málaga), Galerie chantiersBoîteNoire (Montpellier), Galerie Fleur & Wouter (Amsterdam), Galerie Tanint (Beirut), Herrero de Tejada (Madrid), Jorge López Galería (Valencia), Josilda da Conceição , (Amsterdam), JPS Gallery (Hong Kong / Tokyo / Paris), Kevin Kavanagh (Dublin), OdA (Buenos Aires), Pabellón 4 (Buenos Aires), Portas Vilaseca (Rio de Janeiro) + Reiners Contemporary (Marbella), Quimera Galería (Buenos Aires), Rafael Pérez Hernando (Madrid), Raffaella De Chirico Art Gallery (Turin / Milan), RoFa Art Gallery (Potomac / Gaithersburg), Secret Project Robot (New York), Set Espai d'Art (Valencia), Shazar Gallery (Naples), Smart Gallery (Buenos Aires), TCHIKEBE (Marseille), and VANGAR (Valencia).

Highlight the Barcelona galleries that participate in this program: ADN Galeria , Dilalica , House of Chappaz (also based in Valencia), Pigment Gallery , Victor Lope Art Contemporani , Zielinsky (also based in Porto Alegre). In addition, etHALL , in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat and PALMADOTZE Art Gallery , in Santa Margarida and les Monjos (Barcelona). All these galleries are associated with Art Barcelona.

Emerging

The Emerging program, dedicated to galleries with a history of less than five years, will have the participation of Albert Contemporary (Odense), Bold (Prague), DS Galerie (Paris), LUPO (Milan), Mahara+Co (Miami), I respect Gallery (Santo Domingo) and SISSI club (Marseille).

Emerging LATAM

The Emerging LATAM program, curated by Argentinian curator and gallerist Santiago Gasquet, co-director of the PIEDRAS gallery (Buenos Aires), and which includes emerging galleries and the most promising proposals of the Latin American contemporary art scene, will feature collectio (Chile) , Bloc Art Gallery (Lima), Espacio Enhorabuena (Madrid), Grasa Gallery (Buenos Aires), Now Gallery (San Isidoro, Peru), and Remota Galería (Salta, Argentina).

Swab Seed

The Swab Seed program shows ten independent spaces run, in some cases, by experimental artists whose proposals are shaking up the contemporary scene. In this edition, Swab Seed will have Awol (Los Angeles), CU29 (Plovdiv, Bulgaria), Colette Mariana (Barcelona), HARABEL (Tirana), Kunsthalle.Ost (Leipzig), La Raíz (Granada), Lí Gallery (Shanghai) , Mmundo (New York), Studio-Beta (Barcelona/Berlin) and Yafteh Gallery (Tehran).

SOLO Show by Vila Casas

The program SOLO Show by Vila Casas, curated by the young independent curators Carla Gimeno and Margot Cuevas in collaboration with the Vila Casas Foundation, exhibits four independent projects from the Catalan territory, through a solo show proposal, an exhibition individual with the most avant-garde tendencies of the scene. A program that seeks to promote the new curatorship and generate dialogue between territories of the Mediterranean arc. Swab thus reaffirms its roots in the territory and claims its local essence.

The program, sponsored by the Vila Casas Foundation, will include FOC (Barcelona), Cultural Rizoma (Celrà), Half House (Barcelona), and Magic Pocket (L'Hospitalet de Llobregat).

My First Art Fair

The My First Art Fair program selects three young contemporary art galleries, less than two years old, that have not yet participated in any international fair. In order to help promote new emerging galleries, Swab offers this space for free. The program will feature Ballroom Gallery (Brussels), Galería Fermay (Palma de Mallorca), i Julie Caredda (Paris).

Video Box

The non-profit program Vídeo Box, dedicated to the latest trends in video art and which gives visibility to audiovisual projects created in territories with a developing cultural fabric, focuses on Southeast Asia. Alfonse Chiu, curator of this edition, has selected eight artists who work on the concept of the border, an artistic dialogue through the limits established by colonialism in these territories. Under the title Home/Land, Video Box will feature the following artists: Robert Zhao Renhui and Zarina Muhammad , from Singapore; Shireen Seno , from the Philippines; Prapat Jiwarangsan , from Thailand; Tuân Mami and Lêna Bùi , from Vietnam; Lim Sokchanlina , from Cambodia, and Riar Rizaldi , from Indonesia.