Art Basel in Basel: offline to online
Art Basel in Basel: offline to online
Following the decision taken by the organizers of Art Basel to cancel the Basel-based edition postponed from June to September but later cancelled, the highlight of the annual calendar also shifts to digital. First tested in March at the Hong Kong edition, the Basel edition will also debut online with over 4,000 works on display. With a global participation that already has more than 280 galleries from 35 different countries, Art Basel in Basel will debut online with the VIP preview starting tomorrow 17th June, and then open the virtual doors of the Viewing Rooms from Friday 19 until 26 June.
As it would have been for the royal fair, the digital one will also be structured in sectors, each of which will have a specific focus: Galleries will offer works of painting, sculpture, drawings, installations, photographs, videos and unpublished works of the highest quality; Edition will be dedicated to prints and multiples; Feature will feature works by artists of the 20th and 21st centuries and Statements will focus on emerging voices.
To further increase the calibre of the fair will be the video-guided tour of the David Hockney Exhibition underway at the Annely Juda Fine Art in London, an unprecedented digital experience.
Some participating galleries will also use their own exhibition spaces to physically install some of the works on display in online viewing rooms. An interesting approach to this is the Basel by Berlin project: more than thirty galleries in Berlin will physically install the works in the online booths in their galleries, in order to recreate a more realistic view possible of the exhibition.
What will surely be missed, in this multifaceted online universe, will be the main attraction of Art Basel: Unlimited, which with its giant installations of some of the best international artists over the years had established itself as one of the most attractive exhibitions on the world scene, to be overcome with many biennials.
