LONDON.- Grid Art Fair announced its exciting new partnership with Verisart, in which Grid will be the very first art fair to offer their artists the unique opportunity to certify, using the Bitcoin blockchain, all their works to be displayed at the event.
Verisart is the world's leading platform to certify and verify artworks and collectibles using the Bitcoin blockchain. Since its launch in 2015, Verisart has provided contemporary artists including Shepard Fairey with a free and easy way to generate permanent certificates of authenticity and reduce the scope for fraudulent activity. Verisart combines museum certification standards, distributed ledger technology and image recognition to its provenance and registry services.
For Grid Art Fair, independently of work being sold, certificates of authenticity will be generated on behalf of the artist, each carrying their own signature and an image of the work. The certificate will be attached to the Bitcoin blockchain and will not be dependent on or linked to any third party. Once generated, this cannot be tampered with or deleted; it will always be there and can be transferred by the artist or each new owner of the artwork, in order to validate the authenticity of the artwork certificate in perpetuity.
Grid’s inaugural fair marks an exciting new series of events taking place at 1 Paris Garden, a short hop from London’s South Bank. Happening on a regular basis throughout the year, Grid Art Fair presents a fresh perspective and a new carefully selected roster of 50 artists per edition. Alongside the artist-led booths of the main fair, Grid will be announcing several commissions – including large-scale sculpture, installation, film, new media and performance.
Fair highlights include a strand of video and digital art, spread out throughout the venue, featuring work by Chris O’Donovan, Gabriella Parisi, Duncan Paterson, Holly Birtles, Vasilisa Forbes and Greg Lee, whose work encompasses a lyric-visual collaboration with the poet Kate Tempest and will be presented as part of the fair’s Events Programme.
Andrew Hancock – whose paintings, works on paper and video work has been exhibited in galleries, fairs and film festivals around the world, from London to Europe, Moscow and China – has been commissioned to present a multimedia installation during the fair, centring upon his video work “The Oracle of our Species (Temple to the Unseen Artist)”. “Oracle” has been widely praised and is currently on a NASA spacecraft, enroute to the asteroid Bennu as part of the OSIRIS-REx mission. It has already travelled nearly 1.5 billion kilometres since its launch and is not due to return until 2023 – but Grid Art Fair will be showing the work for the very first time in the UK.
Near to the main entrance of the fair, Gianluca Pisano will recreate a corner of his own studio, presenting a work-live installation at the fair. Visitors will be privileged to observe as he paints and enjoy his completed works as part of his fair booth. Anastasia Belous will also invite visitors to engage with her working practice, offering the opportunity to sit for a large-scale painting, created live during the fair. With each sitter posing for 20 minutes, the resulting work will appear as a mural of faces and will be auctioned at a Mayfair venue, with some of the proceeds being donated to Grid Art Fair’s charity partners, Operation Smile and YOLO Youth. Anastasia will also be holding several themed painting workshops as part of Grid’s Events Programme.
Robert Norton, Founder and CEO at Verisart, said: “We’re delighted to welcome Grid Art Fair to our partner certification program and extend the benefits of blockchain certification standards to their participating artists”.
EXHIBITING ARTISTS: Shelley Anderson, Siméon Artamonov, Anastasia Belous, Marina Borozna, Bo Cosfranz, Stuart Dalzell, Thomas W. Dowdeswell, Alistair Cartland Glover, Roxana Cristescu, Eliska Dordova, Alejandra Estrada, Diego Farneti, Giuliano Fazzari, Patrick Feure, Gregory Ford, Emily Alice Garnham, Giuseppina Irene Groccia, Roberto Grosso, Andrew Hancock, Jo Holland, Beth Holmes, Naoki Kawano, Imran Ali Kazmi, Simon Kirk, Sara Le Roy, Linda Lipinski, Sylvia Lockhart, Sandra Menant, Tatyana Murray, Alia Peoples, Gabriella Parisi, Richard Parsons, Duncan Paterson, Gianluca Pisano, Jozef Popjak, Martin Rakovsky, Awa SAR, Iris Sun Art, Carlo Suraci, Astra Taylor-Todd, Amanda Thompson, Georgica Vasii, Shikha Vijai, Simona Visan, Andy Walker, Alize Wilkinson, Tina de Windt, Eugene Wood, Scarlett Woodman.
