For its 16th edition during this year’s Basel Art Fair Week, Volta Basel is set to occur from September 20 – 26, 2021 in the newly renovated venue of Elsässerstrasse 215, with high standards of research, novelty, surveys and curated proposals, refining the experience to its essential elements: the artists and their work.
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“Welcome you back to an in real life fair experience”, says Kamiar Maleki, the new Director of VOLTA art fair, collector, curator and patron, previously at Contemporary Istanbul.
After a period of re-branding, strategizing, and developing new actions, VOLTA Basel is ready to showcase some amazing art - in compliance with all safety and health guidelines for the staff, exhibitors, and visitors. 69 galleries from across five continents, 50 cities and artists of over 40 nations. From established galleries to younger ones, there will be some thrilling attractions: three first-time exhibitors from Iran and the first galleries to show NFTs at a European fair. From Mohsen Gallery in Teheran - at its inaugural participation in VOLTA Fair - to AEDAEN Gallery, Strasbourg which presents a solo by German artist Theresa Moeller, and TUASHO Gallery, Kyiv presenting four emerging Ukranian artists, VOLTA keeps focusing on booth curation, staging ambitious solo and group presentations.
VOLTA Basel, which is about discovering, connecting and ultimately about collecting, is accompanied by a dense group of other online experiences: VOLTA Visits, VOLTA Voices - an interview series with vanguards of the contemporary art world - and VOLTA activations in situ. VOLTA Visits is a recurring series where you are able to spend studio time with VOLTA exhibiting artists. Among the latest sponsored: Artjom Chepovetskyy, the abstract painter on chiffon presented by Galerie Heike Strelow, Frankfurt, Rafel Bestard (presented by Galeria Contrast in Barcelona) and Yongchul Kim (presented by Galerie Thomas Fuchs), who was discovered before he graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart and immediately accepted to the gallery’s artist roster. Those three artists will create for VOLTA’s September Edition a new set of figurative paintings, of recent works in various formats.
Connecting to its Swiss roots and encouraging collaborations between galleries, VOLTA fair will present three Swiss galleries and shared presentation of different galleries respective programs, as well as live experiences. Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury (b. 1961, Geneva) will produce an on-site activation at VOLTA Basel featuring the Porsche Taycan Turbo S. and inspired by the iconic movie “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, while Calligraphy artist Souun Takeda (presented by Selene Art Media Inc.) will draw in-situ at VOLTA Basel.
“VOLTA traditionally for the last 15 years has been a fair about discovery. What we love to do in the art world is to discover talent, to discover artists - whether young old old - that have the potential to be great artists but don’t have the opportunity to show in the main fairs yet. This is the role of VOLTA, to be the showcase for these artists and these galleries” (Kamiar Maleki).
Stay Tuned!
