What can the visitors expect from the 2019 Paper Positions Berlin? Are there any exhibitor/artwork/artist highlights that you would like to mention?
At paper positions berlin, 48 international exhibitors with around 130 artists will present the broad spectrum of paper as an artistic medium. Our exhibitors come from the USA, China, Poland, South Africa and 7 other countries. This year, the range again extends from modern art (Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, etc.) to post-war (Joseph Beuys, Leo Erb, etc.) and contemporary art. After concentrating in recent years on forgotten positions from the 70s to the 80s and rediscoveries, this year we are focusing on young contemporary art. Above all, the density and quality of outstanding young artists such as Hell Gette, Mafalda Figueiredo, Saba Niknam, Ksenija Jovisevic, Viktoria Strecker and many others is very high this year. We're very happy about that. This year we will also introduce a fair-specific art prize: the paper positions award. Our aim is to promote and highlight contemporary artists in a further way. Our partner .rka Rechtsanwälte enables us to support the winner next year with a solo presentation and a small catalogue. And this year we will surprise our visitors with the FASHION positions in the atrium of our exhibition location. For the first time we support 16 young Berlin based fashion designers and present their current collections in pop-up stores.
When you say that the fair “refrains from classic booths and focuses on a salon-like situation”, what are you referring to exactly?
Paper positions originally developed from a group exhibition shown at Bikini Berlin in 2016. In order to maintain this feeling of an exhibition and to create an exciting curatorial parcour for the visitors, we abstain from classical fair booths. Works of art on and made of paper are more fragile and create a greater intimacy and need proximity to the viewer, we would like to take that into consideration. We don't want to let the fear that a booth at an art fair can sometimes create arise in the first place. Art is communication and needs dialogue, we would like to support this.
What is the state of the drawing and paper-based art market today, in your opinion? Where do you see it going?
Paper works have, not at least because of us, once again become a topic to which the "market" is currently devoting more and more attention. On the one hand, it is the entry drug for young collectors, due to the lower price. If you ask long-term collectors about their first work of art it's usually a drawing. And at some point in the course of a collector's life, interest in paper returns more strongly. Therefore we offer established artists and works of modern art also something for these collectors. Art fairs with a special field or topic will certainly be very interesting in the future, if only because of their better clarity.
