SPECIAL REPORT: a dispatch from a contemporary art fair 🎨🖌️🖼️

A visit to Barcelona's Swab art fair, to share some findings on what's happening in the visual arts.

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Here’s some good news, maybe for the world but mostly for myself: this past weekend Barcelona hosted the seventeenth edition of Swab, a contemporary art fair with a global perspective that sweeps across Europe and Asia with a few entries from the Americas, UK, and Middle East. It was great! I had no expectations as I had attended last year and was a bit underwhelmed. This year I’m happy to share it was very enjoyable and that we are so back, meaning I am back on my art writing shit, reinvigorated and hopefully kicking off a series of posts about the visual arts (from my little corner of the world, which can be a lil limiting) (but I am hoping to be the change I need in my life, repeating a bit of history, a la Los Angeles, I’m Yours).

It was a cute lil gathering that brought together works by predominantly younger artists and playful (furniture) designs from galleries that are relatively new, all situated in a dog ear of the Fira Barcelona convention center. A surprising amount of people talked to me, telling me about artists and their galleries, completely unprompted, which was both welcome and warm considering that has maybe happened once or twice at the countless art fairs I’ve attended over the past decade. The vibe was more akin to ALAC than Felix, more like Matter and Shape than Frieze: it feels like a young fair, simultaneously unestablished but esteemed in its own way. Attendees swept demographics as there were many a children running around, darting in between younger couples and groups of elderly visitors. To my surprise, I even ran into someone I knew: Nicolas of

Creative Destruction

, which had us digesting the fair (and the larger scene in the city) in real time for about thirty minutes. Let me tell you: all this put juice in the tank, enough to turn down the volume on last week’s subject, reminding again that I need to make my own local event and stop waiting for things to happen. Play an active role in your life’s change! (I just…need like seven hours more in my week and I’d be set.)

There were seventy exhibitors that included general gallery exhibitors, a dedicated wing for galleries from Tokyo and Seoul along with Taipei, there were a handful of design studios, and dedicated areas for very new, very young, and very non-traditional galleries. If you’ve been to an art fair before, Swab is no different. A key difference to me is that they had a sizable thumbprint for kids to make art, which they also had last year and is something I don’t remember seeing at any other fair before. Does that make it any better? Not really. Just a surprising something that jumped out.

For the sake of ease, we’ll explore thoughts on the show via the trends that I noticed, all that represent ongoing or potentially emerging trends in contemporary art. Note that this reflects the diverse galleries represented, which ideally has some microcosmic properties that go beyond the local to capture specific gestures and approaches that artists from Spain to Korea to the UK to Taiwan are considering. Let’s get into it!

First, the main themes and trends.

Memes are the new pop art.

This has been brewing for years and years and years and finally seems to have turned direct, years after artists like Eric Yahnker and Christine Tien Wang elevated the subject as pop culture skewer to stab through the world’s problems. This was most apparent in Elena Garrigolas’ showing at Ola, which saw children with adult male faces, mothers turning into furniture, and old people doing acrobatics, all of which seemed to pick up where Joan Cornellá left off but done in oil pastels. Raffaella De Chirico’s showing of Jacopo Mandich’s bound and concretized stuffed animals, offering a similar effect while evoking that of Highland Park icon Clare Graham and his bound and gagged stuffies. Nicolás Romero Escalada brought savage pop culture takes at Tramo, Daichi Sato had meme commentary at MJK, and Jinum Nam’s large scale anime inspired monsters at Space Willing N Dealing helped carry the same energy, proving that memes and the visual language of the internet has jumped from the screen to gallery walls — and that this is what pop art is in the 2020s. This isn’t new, as Instagram and Etsy has long been platforms for this style of art: the difference is that the traditional art world spaces are incorporating these gestures into the mix. This means memes are officially a language, a way of communicating, something that goes beyond in-joke instead invoking cultures and communities. That’s major! Stay tuned for Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami’s Talk Tuah statues. (By the way: speaking of Christine Tien Wang, she is still repped by Night Gallery but her latest show is with The Hole, which is a major sign of the times. Her new solo show is up through October 20!)

Welcome to the dawn of tiny art.