Art Basel opens its doors to the public in Miami

The contemporary art fair Art Basel on Thursday opened its doors to the general public at the renovated Miami Beach, Florida, Convention Center, where some 80,000 visitors are expected during the next four days.

A total of 268 galleries representing over 4,000 artists from 35 different countries will meet at the seventeenth edition of this fair.

At the nexus of North and Latin America, Latin American and Spanish artists have a special space.

A delegation of Chilean galleries arrived at the Miami Art Week with the goal of positioning the contemporary art of their country and, at the same time, expose their young artists to one of the main international fairs.

“Our participation is measured by the penetration and added value that it can give to Chile’s image,” Carlos Willson, director of SISMICA, a network for the visual arts of the Latin American country created a year ago, said Thursday, during their first participation in Art Week. The network has nine galleries.

The Chilean delegation highlighted the sale of the work “Modos de Calzar”, by the young artist Fernanda Lopez (1991), to Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), one of the platforms for the promotion of contemporary art in Latin America and which since 2002 has awarded grants of more than $1.5 million to 135 artists in the region.

Visitors to Art Basel can expect to see artworks including sculptures, photography, paintings, film- video and digital art from young and coming artists as well as masterpieces destined for museums.