This year, the fair focused on the medium of paper was postponed from April to September 2020. It will now take place during Berlin Gallery Weekend. The extra time has allowed for further research and organization, ensuring more precise choices and higher quality.
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One of the extraordinary peculiarities of contemporary art is the fact that you never know where you will find it. To be “contemporary” means in fact to be always up-to-date, and to make the public discover new things, such as new places.
This year paper position berlin 2020 has a new, special and unconventional venue: an airport. Tempelhof Airport Hangar 3-4 will become an incubator for some new creativity and energy thanks to the fair. An unconventional location, for an unconventional fair that, since an idea born during Bikini Berlin in 2016, is showing art made on paper – with a focus on drawing, the most immediate and sincere medium for an artist – and has become a fundamental meeting point.
The fair was postponed to September, and will be showed together with POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair, parallel to the Berlin Gallery Weekend. paper position berlin keeps on developing its main focus on a special genre, a specific medium. To chose “paper” as a display means to reveal the importance of this material and the approach that artists have towards it. An approach that is more direct, and seemingly simple. But it is not, because, most of the time, it is even a highly intimate process taking place on the paper.
It’s for these reasons that directors Heinrich Carstens and Kristian Jarmuschek chose a “salon-like situation”, as they called it, because they “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”. paper position berlin’s itinerary indicates an intimate approach to discover and absorb a selection of International galleries that goes from Serbia to Poland, from Spain to South Africa, from Israel to Austria. These galleries chose to pick work on paper of artists of different generations – from emergent to historical ones – to show drawings, collages, world writing, as action practice “to directly approach individual artistic works and to perceive them in a mutual dialogue”. As happened last year, the fair will assign the paper position award, that in 2019 went to Hell Gette. A new adventure in Berlin, therefore, that will display a new reality based on last year’s experience.
Cover image: paper position berlin 2019, © Clara Wenzel-Theiler
Writte by Rossella Farinotti