Barcelona International Contemporary Art Fair

The Barcelona International Contemporary Art Fair will take place from Thursday, October 5 to Sunday, October 8 with the participation of more than 200 artists from 27 national and 43 international galleries

he International Contemporary Art Fair of Barcelona, named Swab, celebrates its 16th edition on October 6, 7 and 8. This year Swab will have the participation of 70 contemporary art galleries, 27 national – from Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Marbella, L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, Murcia, Palma de Mallorca, Gijón, Granada and Celrà (Girona) –, and 43 coming from 21 countries in Europe, Latin America and Asia. In addition, Swab 2023 will feature the participation of more than 200 artists.
Swab Barcelona, which acts as a platform for experimentation of emerging artistic proposals, has seven programs: General Program, dedicated to consolidated galleries; Emerging, galleries with less than five years of experience; Emerging LATAM, the most promising proposals of contemporary Latin American art; Swab Seed, independent spaces and new platforms; SOLO Show by Vila Casas, Catalan interdisciplinary projects, My First Art Fair, young galleries less than two years old and who have not participated in any international fair, and Video Box, dedicated to the latest trends in video art.

As a novelty this year, Swab changes location and will open a new location in the Fira de Barcelona Textile Pavilion, located at Avenida Rius i Taulet, 10 (a few meters from the Italian Pavilion, where the fair has been held to date) . Located on the site of the former Palace of Textile Art of the 1929 Barcelona Universal Exhibition, the pavilion, with an industrial aesthetic, has more than 3,000m2 that will be entirely occupied by the fair.

Swab Barcelona, with a program that combines established galleries with younger galleries, acts as a platform for experimentation of emerging artistic proposals. The selection committee, the collaborating curators and the fair's management are committed to the freshest and most current proposals from the national and international scene, thus reflecting the trends of the moment and giving visibility to young and innovative projects. The result is a human-scale fair that brings together the artists who define the present and future of the art market.
In this edition, the fair, which shows the latest trends in contemporary art, focuses on local talent with the aim of projecting it to the rest of the world. In the same way that Modernism gave way to Abstraction, which meant the internationalization of Catalan art, Swab 2023 leaves behind the recurring figuration to immerse itself in more abstract scenarios with surrealist strokes and colorful poetic landscapes.
The Swab 2023 selection committee is made up of curators and artistic directors Omar López-Chahoud, from the Untitled Miami fair, Jérôme Pantalacci, from the French Art-o-Rama fair, Isa Natalia Castilla, from the Material Fair in Ciudad de Mexico, Domenico de Chirico, independent curator, and the collectors José Luis Lorenzo, Marie Elena Angulo, Jesper Stieler and Pedro Jaile.