In the wake of a major management change this year, the new fair director and staff showed the quintessential Spanish flair for improvization, salvaging a fairly-well-organized even from utter chaos at the last minute. Visitors who entered La Pipa exhibition hall ("The Pipe" because it's shaped like Sherlock Holmes' pipe) found a big brassy, varied and colorful international-standard, fine-art-print show, enough to make any print lover in the world feel like a kid entering a giant candy store.

In the ensuing decade the Estampa fair grew and diversified and mutated to a large degree. The big-bucks art galleries didn't take long to notice there was gold in them thar hills and proceeded to infiltrate the fair. This year's event housed almost a hundred stands, most of them galleries, half of those from Madrid, as well as a curious section of 24 exhibits of conceptual art, the inclusion of which in a print fair nobody seemed to be able to explain. A lively program of lectures and demonstrations was scheduled all week, and there were stands offering specialist printmaking materials, etching presses and handmade papers from the Basque Country. There was also a smattering of international participation with galleries from the Mediterranean rim, Argentina, Austria and China. The Chinese were new at Estampa this year and took Madrid by storm with their bold and onirical lithographs and amazing woodcuts.

Fresh Work for Next Year
Though the aforementioned big-bucks galleries are very much the protagonists these days with, depending upon one's point of view, their consecrated first-line artists or their safe selection of mortuary art, our favorites were the little stands where three or four live artists banded together to rent space and sell their own work. Others who have a lot of merit are the fine-print workshops and editors who take the risk to present fresh new work at the fair, and there were not a few of them this year. Isabel Pérez Morgade, director of Estampa, wants to encourage even more. She says, "For next year we're making a rule that all participants must bring at least one new artist and fresh work edited especially for Estampa. At the top-or bottom-of the pecking order are the stands of the foundations and official entities who sit Buddha like on cushions of public money, accepting the tacit obeisance of passers by. This year the fair management had the good sense to put them in an adjacent pavillion all to themselves.

Who Goes? Who Buys?
Who attends the Estampa fair, then, and who buys the prints? Actually, since the Spanish sensitivity (nay, passion) for art and poetry is so well distributed, first-time Estampa participants are surprised to find themselves selling as much or more art to just plain folks as to the rich. Also, thanks to the groundwork done by a few Spanish fine-print editors and dealers, a lot of editions are sold to Spanish companies as corporate gifts, an encouraging trend in the market here.

With 91 stands to choose from there was lots of fascinating work at the fair. Among the most interesting, we thought, was that of the Argentine printmaker, Cristina Santander, whose big composite etched figures are elaborate psychological self portraits. Cristina also had the most creative stand, using panels and mirrors to hide and reveal seductively. We also liked the Chinese prints from the Hoke Art collection (Chinese and French, actually, as their star artist, Chu The-Chun, has lived in Paris since 1956…), a stunning mix of tradition and innovation.

Continued...