Album - Estampa 2004

Big, Brassy and Brilliant
Another edition, the 12th, of ESTAMPA, Madrid's International Print Fair (Feria Internacional de Grabado y Ediciones de Arte Contemporáneo) has come and gone and we're left with the memories and the photographs in the family album.

This year's event was another of the big, brilliant shows to which they have accustomed us: more than 2000 artists in some 100 stands representing art galleries, editors and cultural institutions, along with assorted portfolio presentations, parades of local dignitaries, art colloquiums and stands ceded to innovative young artists.

According to El Punto de las Artes, the Madrid art newspaper, the breakdown looked like this: 53 participants from Madrid, 41 from the rest of Spain and 13 foreign stands from Germany, Argentina, Bolivia, France, Holland, Israel and Portugal.

A Bit of Everything on Display
There was a bit of everything on display at the fair, with a preponderance of prints that people were hoping to sell. This is a commercial fair, after all, despite its undeniable cultural pretensions. So we saw a bit of everything, from the usual suspects--bankable big-name artists presented by brassy Madrid galleries, to collections of work by emerging artists in the stands of various municipal printmaking workshops.

There were smatterings of digital work, some amazing mezzotints (hard to believe that the mezzotint was once the preferred medium for reproducing oil paintings for publication...), as well as the big, flamboyant and highly successful prints of a couple of noteworthy international women printmakers, Cristina Santander from Argentina and Gabriella Locci, the force behind Casa Falconieri in Corsica, whose stand was voted the best of the fair this year.

"Never have I seen a print fair with such a uniformly high level of work..."

The best summing up of this years fair that I heard was expressed by Hugo Bos, the Dutch manufacturer of Polymetaal presses. Bos is a qualified observer, as he has been in the business worldwide for more than 20 years and has experienced print fairs all over the globe.

He said, "I arrived here expecting to find just another fine-art-print fair, but I found something much more remarkable, and I confess I was very moved by it. Never before have I seen a fair with such a uniformly high level of work. I was also struck by the fact that all of it seemed to have its roots firmly planted in the fine-art-printmaking tradition."

Judging by Bos's remarks, ESTAMPA is doing something right, despite the indifferent food in the cafeteria.

Autumn Light, Art Feast
Fair visitors enjoyed Madrid's brilliant autumn weather--warm days and crisp mornings and evenings, with just a hint of rain on one of the five days. Many of them took advantage of their time in Madrid to visit one of the world's most important art museum complexes, made up of the triangle formed by the Prado Museum, the Reina Sofía Contemporary Art Museum and the Thyssen-Bournemisa Collection, all within a one-mile radius of one another in the center of the Spanish capital.

The World Printmakers Stand
The World Printmakers stand was located at the extreme east end of the exhibit hall, a pleasant and spacious location which benefitted from lots of daylight filtering through tall windows, on a little "plaza" with benches where fair visitors could sit, relax, chat and regard the work.

We presented the prints of three women printmakers: Maureen Booth from Spain, who showed her always very personal and poetic hand-pulled etchings; Joan Dubanoski from Hawaii, who hung big, glamorous digital prints based on Hawaiian flora; and Jennifer Waelti-Walters from Victoria, B.C., Canada, who presented a series of very original monoprints portraying the world in motion.

After the third day Jennifer stopped sticking red dots on the wall..."

The work of all three artists attracted a lot of sincere admiration and all of them sold work. But one of them achieved a level of sales which surprised everybody, including Jennifer herself. She sold so many prints that, after the third day she got embarrassed and stopped sticking red dots on the wall.

It was a splendid and well-deserved success for Jennifer, who deserves credit for taking the risk to come with her work all the way from British Columbia. to Spain--with the expense that implies. (For Jennifer's own personal account of ESTAMPA and Madrid, click here.)

More Estampa Album 2004