The Art Newspaper

Low turnout, high praise, mid-priced sales at Pinta

Quality—if not quantity—of visitors pleased at Latin American fair’s first edition in London

By Melanie Gerlis. Web only
Published online: 28 June 2010

Pinta's opening night

LONDON. The signs were, literally, not great. On arrival at Earl’s Court, the west of London venue that Pinta had chosen for its first edition in the city (3-6 June), prominent signage advertised the forthcoming rival fair, Pulse (6-8 June). Meanwhile makeshift boards eventually reassured visitors that the modern and contemporary Latin American fair, whose previous three editions have been in New York, was indeed also taking place in the UK.

Once inside, however, the mood was upbeat (“like a fiesta,” said Riflemaker’s Virginia Damtsa), boosted by a lively mariachi band. Sharing space with regional galleries from cities including Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires and Bogota were international stalwarts such as Sprüth Magers, White Cube and Haunch of Venison, plus dealers from Europe and the US, who had all dug out their Latin American wares in the hope of capitalising on a new breed of well-connected, well-heeled and locally loyal collectors. And with booths costing around £5,000 at a smallish fair (around 60 galleries), Pinta was a much cheaper and more efficient way to access this network than most art fairs.

However, dealers were sceptical of Pinta’s announcement that 4,000 people visited the fair over the three days following its opening night (this was later specified as a “rounding up” from around 3,650). “General visitor numbers were pretty dire,” said Adrian Sutton, a sales director at Haunch of Venison, manfully holding the fort just days after the gallery’s founders—Harry Blain and Graham Southern—announced they were leaving. “But the few people who came were people you recognised,” he added, with praise for the fair’s organisers and the quality of much of the art on display. His gallery swiftly sold Jorge Pardo’s Untitled, 2004, to a private European collector for $25,000.

Visitors to the opening night included Swiss collector Maja Hoffman, Latin American art collector Catherine Petitgas (who is a vice chairman of Pinta); the curator for the Cisneros collection, as well as London stalwarts Alison Myners, outgoing chair of the Contemporary Art Society and David Barrie, previous head of The Art Fund, now believed to be advising some private clients. Tate director Nicholas Serota also visited the fair at the weekend.

“Mauro [Herlitzka, Pinta’s institutional director, who sits on the Tate’s Latin American acquisitions committee] is the most important cultural operator in Latin America. He has a way of making things happen,” said Henrique Faria of the eponymous gallery in New York. He had good reason for his praise: the gallery quickly sold Colchoncito, 1963, a mixed-media work (meaning “small mattress”) by Argentina’s Marta Minujin to the Pompidou, one of the six museums that Pinta had encouraged to buy through a privately-financed matching funds scheme, for around €60,000 (see below for other museum purchases).

Much of the (albeit limited) buying was in the low- to mid-range and by private collectors, many—like the artists—originally from Latin America but now citizens of the world. Sprüth Magers sold a David Lamelas film with 8 stills, To pour milk into a glass, 1967, for €45,000 to an Argentine private collector; Galeria Cayón from Madrid sold works by the octogenarian Venezuelan Carlos Cruz-Diez whose Transerhomie mécanique A, 1965-2009, sold to a private Europe-based collector for €55,000; and at the lower end, artist José Luis Anzizar at the fair with Buenos Aires gallery Elsi del Rio, sold five pieces of his Urban Birdwatching series, 2009, to a French collector for around £3,000 (total).

Museum buying at Pinta

The organisers of Pinta devised a “matching funds” system to encourage museum purchases at the fair. Private donors, together with Pinta itself (a private company) raised over $250,000 to contribute to the scheme, which also saw them donate some works directly from the fair to the participating institutions. Fair director Mauro Herlitzka says that the link-up has encouraged museums to purchase art worth over $1m at its three previous editions in New York. In London this June the bulk of museum buyers avoided the bigger name international galleries in favour of those with a distinctly Latin American programme. These included:

Lygia Pape, Tecelar, 1957, priced around $85,000 at Arévalo Arte gallery (Miami), sold to Tate, London

Tate has been looking for a while to represent the Brazilian neo-concrete artist Lygia Pape, according to curator Tanya Barson. “It’s an incredibly beautiful and sophisticated monoprint,” she says of Tecelar, adding “It’s great to have another Brazilian and another woman in our collection.” The work is still subject to approval by Tate Trustees but could be on display in one of the galleries by Spring 2011.

Paulo Bruscky, Untitled, from the series Poemas Visuais, 1993, priced at $14,000 at Nara Roesler gallery (Sao Paulo), gifted to Tate London by Pinta

One of five works on paper by the Brazilian conceptual artist Paulo Bruscky, “a very welcome gift” says curator Tanya Barson.

Horacio Zabala, Revisar/Censurar, 1974, priced around $21,000 at Henrique Faria (New York), sold to the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MiMA).

MiMA was one of only five UK museums allocated £1m by The Art Fund International in 2007 and at the time stated it was to build a collection of drawings by North and South American artists. To date the collecting has been “predominantly of North American artists,” says MiMA’s director Kate Brindley. She says that the underlying political messages in Zabala’s drawings complement their works by North American artists, particularly Barbara Kruger.

Demián Flores, De la serie Patria II, 2010, priced at £6,000 at Ginocchoi Gallery (Mexico City), sold to the University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art (UECLAA)

Nine representatives from UECLAA were choosing works at Pinta and, according to assistant director Joanne Harwood, they “agreed by committee while there” to acquire this gold-leaf on wood piece by Mexican artist Demián Flores. As well as being an “amazing, striking” work, Harwood says that the work’s contemporary take on Aztec pictograms “encapsulates what we do [at the university], teaching pre-Columbian art to the present day.”