MADRID.- The ESTAMPA fair, the largest platform for the dissemination of contemporaneous multiple art held in Spain and in Europe has a meeting point with art collectors and lovers from the 29th of October to the 2nd of November in Madrid, at the new pavilions of the IFEMA Trade Fair facilities.

This year’s edition, number 16 since the fair started in 1992, will mean a leap forwards regarding the concept that up to the date has defined this historical event.

From the knowledge of engraving we have moved on to the more agglutinating contemporaneous multiple art which, in opinion of the organising committee, describes better the evolution of art of the last fifteen years regarding techniques, supports and concepts used in the edition field, and truly and faithfully reflects the role carried out by the fair as a platform for artistic dissemination.

Leading Galleries

ESTAMPA, in order to preserve the quality of the event, will once again limit the participation of national and international galleries to a maximum of 90, which will show the most delicate, wide-ranged and innovating production of multiple art, carried out with the most classical stamping techniques and also those supports that are becoming more and more usual, such as photography, video or the use of computers.

For the first time, ESTAMPA will receive leading galleries in the contemporaneous art panorama in Spain, such as Benveniste Contemporary, Blanca Berlín Galería, Cámara Oscura Galería de Arte, Galería Arnés and Röpke, Galería Carmen de la Calle or May Moré, all of which are located in Madrid, which will add to other renown galleries that usually participate in this event, such as Galería Estampa, La Caja Negra, Galería Múltiple or Multiplicidad.

Other galleries from other Spanish cities will return to the Fair, such as C5 Colección (Santiago de Compostela), and others, such as Galería Vértice (Oviedo) and Marisa Marimón Galería de Arte, will make their debut.


ESTAMPA FRAME

ESTAMPA 08 arrives full of novelties, such as the new exhibition spaces that have been conceived and that highlight the innovating spirit that the Fair wishes to encourage during this new period.

For example, this year the presence of a guest country has been replaced with ESTAMPA FRAME, which will help to encourage alliances with leading centres and institutions in the edition art field in order to strengthen the exchange of ideas, help production and generate a wider view of the participating artists.

The two projects that will provide contents to ESTAMPA FRAME in the upcoming edition are MIDE Lab and ISRAEL Artists Collective.

MIDE Lab is the name of the multimedia laboratory of the Museo Internacional de Electrografía de Cuenca, which depends on the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, where research projects related with artistic creation and new technologies are carried out.

ESTAMPA 08 will present the graphic works of a group of artists of the Universidad de Cuenca, chosen by the person in charge of MIDE, José Ramón Alcalá, and produced by the Taller Digigráfico de Madrid (company certified by EPSON for the development of the highest standards in digital printing).

The title ISRAEL Artists Collective refers to a collective video exhibition of artists from Israel that will show a view of the complex Israeli society and the always difficult social and political context where it is developed, without any sort of prejudices and totally unbiased.

The exhibition will be commissioned by Eyal Danon, and it will be possible to carry it out thanks to the cooperation of the Israeli Centre for Digital Art of Holon, Tel Aviv, and the Israeli Embassy in Spain.

Eight video art, experimental cinema and 3D animation works from eight different upcoming artists whose work is unknown in Spain will be shown.

STAGE and VIDEO.ES

Apart from ESTAMPA FRAME, this year the Fair presents two new platforms for the dissemination of art: STAGE and VIDEO.ES.

The first one is a section that will hold five projects related with any multiple art field and that have been expressly conceived for the Fair. The artists will be chosen by a commission chaired by the curator Javier Duero amongst the candidates presented by the galleries present at ESTAMPA.

To the date, the following galleries have presented their candidature to be present at the STAGE section: Marisa Marimón Galería de Arte, May Moré, Proyecto Arte Galería and Galería Rita Castellote.

Regarding the second space, VIDEO.ES, five video projects will be presented in a special viewing room uninterruptedly during the whole Fair. Once again it will be the galleries who will put forward those artists who they consider more appropriate due to their conditions, techniques or styles, and the final choice will be made by a commission of experts. The authors that finally take part in VIDEO.ES will opt to different grants and will have the possibility to show their works at specialised art fairs.

To the date, the following galleries have already formalised the application to take part in this innovating project at the Fair: Blanca Berlín, C5 Colección and Marisa Marimón Galería de Arte.

With these two initiatives, during this edition ESTAMPA wants to hand over the attention to the galleries and also to its proven capacity to find new assets and trends in the art field.

TENTACIONES [TEMPTATIONS]

The most innovating and transgressing artistic proposals will also have their place at TENTACIONES, which this year will receive unpublished projects, conceived from January 2008 onwards and that deal with sustainability matters.

JAN HENDRIX, OFFICIAL IMAGE AND EXHIBITION

The author of the official image of ESTAMPA 08, the Dutch artist Jan Hendrix (Maasbre, 1949), residing in Mexico since the 70s, and one of the most important worldwide references of the contemporaneous graphic art will take part in one of ESTAMPA’s exhibitions, where he will show his most recent works.

The author assumes as a creative challenge the seizure of fragments of nature which he later submits to a different dimension than the one offered by the human eye, conferring the object a new exposition of the facts. Some people have compared this creative process with a virtual cinematographic zoom, to the extent that the magnifying lens distorts the appearance and the reality of the object under observation. The result is a wonderful discovery of the abstraction of the natural world.

ESTAMPA AT IFEMA
The Fair repeats its location at the facilities of the trade fair park in Madrid, a site that provides the event with even better visibility and a larger projection for artists and visitors.