MADRID.- The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presents the first individual exhibition in Spain on the work of artist Paul Sietsema (Los Angeles 1968). The exhibition forms part of Fisuras, a program produced by the Museo Reina Sofía that aims to encourage artists to propose alternative viewpoints on the museum.

Sietsema presents his reflections on practices in modern Western art and its discursive, ideological milieu in an exhibition that brings together large-format drawings as well as his film Figure 3. During the five years required to produce Figure 3, the artist documented the reconstruction of various artifacts from ancient cultures, which have been reconstructed from photographed replicas and made with different materials than their originals. Far from desiring to supplant the original pieces with his works, Sietsema is instead interested in illustrating the passing of time and the conversations established between both representations. The artist has chosen a 16 mm format to film these objects, one that bears an inherent distance when representing and translating them, as well as features known to anthropological documentary, scientific photography and experimental film.

On the other hand, the drawings shown in this exhibition provide references to the artist’s work by illustrating objects from his own workshop, and they suggest reflections on the economic and colonial expansion of the West. They are accompanied by a projection of Lecture Film, where the artist reflects on his work and processes of production.

The romantic gesture sags with the weight of convention; it is framed as an exchange of gifts and stock phrases. Social conditions reduce love to a marriage of convenience allowing aging bodies to temporarily forget about the imminence of death. Physical and emotional intimacy are tools for dispelling the loneliness that would otherwise open a space for the contemplation of nonexistence.

But take away the tacky conventions and bland comforts of romance, and love is not a distraction from existential crisis—it is a crisis, a sensation of the present so powerful it brings about a confrontation with the void. Unconditional love suffocates and seizes, subdues and annexes. It has the immediacy of both an orgasm and a pistol to the head.

”Unconditional Love” presents a spectrum of artistic approaches to defining the essence of unbridled love. Curators Alexandrina Markvo, Alinda Sbragia, and Christina Steinbrecher have chosen artists from different countries and generations to trigger a spontaneous and surprising dialogue between artworks. All three are experienced in fostering the exchanges of art and ideas across cultural boundaries. Markvo organized Sir Norman Foster’s retrospective in Moscow and Russian Act, a major festival of Russian art in London. Sbragia has taken part in projects to show Russian art in Italy and Italian art in Russia, while Steinbrecher, born in Germany, has worked at venues from the Palais de Tokyo in Paris to galleries in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

AES+F
(Tatyana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky, Vladimir Fridkes)
(Russian, live in Moscow)
“Unconditional Love” will feature the premiere of The Feast of Trimalchio, a new video project by the Moscow-based collective AES+F. The work updates and abstracts the story of the Roman plutocrat Trimalchio from Petronius’ Satyricon, transposing the orgies of masters and servants to the setting of a modern-day luxury hotel. The Asian maids perform services for their white male clients, and then the clients return them the favours. The loop of reciprocity suggests the frozen temporality of glamour, where only the present moment of youth, beauty, and hedonistic pleasure is valid. The Feast of Trimalchio caresses the contours of ephemeral passion, and in doing so it throws into relief the profundity of unconditional love.

Marina Abramovic
(Serbian, b. 1946, lives in New York)
Serbian artist Marina Abramovic is the grandmother of performance art. Her classic Rest Energy, 1980, documents a performance in which Abramovic’s partner Ulay draws an arrow in a tense bow, aiming directly at her heart. With a single stroke, the scenario merges the ultimate trust of love with the threat of impending death. In a more recent work, the photographic series Virgin Warrior with Hearts, 2006, made in collaboration with Jan Fabre, Abramovic obscures her body in full armour as she bears forth bloody, scarlet hearts as battle trophies, violently reinvigorating the cliché of the organ’s role in the sensation of love.

Sam Adams
(British, b. 1977, lives in London)
Sam Adams is a young British artist whose mixed media abstractions have been noted for their vibrant, irregular geometries, and austere coloration. For “Unconditional Love” Adams has produced three interactive Love Chairs, which make viewers part of the exhibition. When they sit in the chairs, they are not aware that everyone in the gallery can hear what they are saying. While it has the potential to reveal strangers’ intimate thoughts, Adams’ work is not intrusive or a prank played on the viewer. Rather, it is an expression of his belief that the visitor is a natural part of the exhibition environment.

Artists Anonymous
The collective Artists Anonymous works in painting, photography, video, installation, and performance, all while playing with the boundaries between those mediums. They paint the “after image,” meticulously creating pairs of photorealistic paintings that look like a snapshot and its negative print. how to persuade love to stay and the according negatives have personal origins, but viewers can recognize themselves in the image’s common banality.

Angelo Bucarelli
(Italian, b. 1954, lives in Rome)
After studying architecture, Angelo Bucarelli worked in various fields, including photography and film. He was an assistant to Fellini and Claude Lelouch, and also received the Olbia Award in 1974 for best Italian documentary. He is an artist, critic, and curator whose text-based sculptures involve clever, thought-provoking wordplay. “Unconditional Love” features a new iron piece by Bucarelli. Unpolished and dense, its physical presence conveys the weight of unbridled love.

Aristarkh Chernyshev
(Russian, b. 1968, lives in Moscow)
Trained as an engineer, Aristarkh Chernyshev fell into the world of artists’ squats in Moscow during perestroika and continues to make art projects that connect his fluency in technology with conceptual ideas. For “Unconditional Love” Chernyshev plans to construct computerized, mechanical lava lamps, exaggerations of the idea of the decorative object that incorporate pornography in their moving images.

Wim Delvoye
(Belgian, b. 1965, lives in Ghent)
Belgian artist Wim Delvoye has exhibited at prestigious forums around the world. His works toe the border between art and other areas of contemporary visual culture, and always involve sensory pleasures and intricate surfaces. Delvoye’s virally popular X-ray series makes vivid use of contradictory elements, as radiology (a measure of prevention) and the skeleton as memento mori function in tandem. On top of that, the work also celebrates life through a depiction of sexual pleasure, though the excitement of contact is ironically mediated by a medical device.

Dasha Fursey
(Russian, b. 1978, lives in Saint Petersburg)
The young Russian painter Dasha Fursey works with portraiture and its attendant codes of femininity. Her Ave Maria updates the iconography of the Virgin Mary. A pregnant woman looks directly and confidently at the viewer; she is painted with richly textured, thick brushstrokes that emphasize the fleshiness of her skin and the fullness of her belly. The figure is earthy, yet the gold in the background hints at iconographic conventions of depicting the metaphysical and spiritual.

Miltos Manetas
(Greek, b. 1964, lives in London)
Greek artist Miltos Manetas is best known for his conceptual web sites that use clever animations to pay playful homage to great artists. He also paints pieces of computer hardware and peripheral equipment, depicting the cold metal and synthetic materials as soft, nuanced figures, and makes small parts monumental by painting them on large canvases. In Manetas’ execution, an ordinary plug takes on a melancholy loneliness—a male extension pining for the female.

Almagul Menlibayeva
(Kazakh, b. 1969, lives and works in Germany, Kazakhstan)
Like many Central Asian artists of her generation, Almagul Menlibayeva is interested in the efforts to establish a post-Soviet national identity in her homeland, which usually involve a braiding of Islamic and pagan traditions with market-friendly global culture. The imagery of Menlibayeva’s works both echoes dominant culture and critiques it. Her video Exodus transports the viewer to present-day Kazakhstan, where a strange and powerful tale unravels. As men and women pack up their yurts with the clear intent to move on, a young girl watches, captivated and immobile. She seems to be left behind. Her image invokes the experience of geographic uprooting in a global world. In an interlude that offers another take on immobility, two women become birdlike creatures as the hair on their violently thrashing heads begins to look like wings.

Angelo Musco
(Italian, b. Naples, lives in New York)
Angelo Musco’s latest work, Hadal, takes its name from the geological term for the deepest part of the ocean. A mobile nest of hundreds of nude, silvery human bodies swirls in a cloudy darkness evocative of the deep sea. The grouping of lithe male and female figures is erotic, while the dynamism and the lack of individual features makes the scene look like a swarm of sperm cells, suggesting the vulnerability and mystery of life’s beginnings.

Youssef Nabil
(Egyptian, b. 1972, lives in New York)
The ironic self-portraiture of the young photographer Youssef Nabil offers a dry and instructive counterpoint to the more intense expressions of emotion in “Unconditional Love.” The first panel in Youssef Nabil’s two-part self-portrait My time to go¸ 2007, shows the artist alone, asleep in bed beneath a framed poster of two cherubs in reverie. In the next panel, the unmade bed lies empty, creating a contrast between the dynamic body that has left the room and the static language of popular romance embodied by the poster.

Velena Nikova
(Russian, b. 1968, lives in Rome)
The daughter of an orthodox priest, Velena Nikova started her career in 1987, when she received a prize as the best young designer in the Soviet Union. After her first group exhibition in Moscow’s Central Exhibition Hall in 1990, she performed with Valery Cherkashin in Silver. Underground Erotic, a conceptual art exhibition in a metro station in central Moscow. Today her silk-screens are preserved in many museum collections. The new series of prints of canvas show the traces of bodies partially obscured by bursts of light, which makes it impossible to tell whether the arms of her phantom figures are thrown up in self-defence or tangled in an embrace.

Jaume Plensa
(Catalan, b. 1955, lives in Barcelona)
An internationally renowned sculptor, Jaume Plensa has installed public artworks in Chicago, Stockholm, and other major cities. His works exude a contemplative spirit and a sensitivity for their environment. “Unconditional Love” will include his installation Gluck Auf, where diaphanous curtains contain the complete text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, broken down into letters and rearranged in fragments. Plensa’s gibberish remix of the statement communicates the distance between the ideal of human rights and the failure to meet them in many societies. It makes a neat parallel for the gap between the feeling of love—that most basic freedom—and the weakness of our verbal expressions for it.

Olympia Scarry
Olympia Scarry will present a new piece for the show called Polythene.
Scarry’s work is about vulnerability, inner chaos and her attempt to solve her compulsive interpersonal relations. For the show Unconditional Love she presents an installation made out of the material which recalls the title (polythene) that highlights this state of defense towards the exterior world. Because of its outstanding toughness and its cut, wear and excellent chemical resistance, is used in a wide diversity of applications. These include can and bottle handling, moving parts on weaving machines, artificial joints, edge protection on ice rinks and butchers’ chopping boards. It competes with Aramid in bulletproof vests, and is commonly used for the construction of articular portions of implants used for hip and knee replacements. Olympia Scarry chose this material for all these reasons.

Olga Soldatova
(Russian, b. 1965, lives in Moscow)
Olga Soldatova is Moscow-based artist and designer who applies the medieval Russian tradition of embroidery with beads to nostalgic Soviet themes, a technique that, paradoxically, yields works with a contemporary, sensual flair. Inspired by Pop art’s placement of the artist in the role of a machine, and making a self-deprecating joke about her own “commercial” work as a designer. The Art Machine sells precious petit art works oozed with sticky romance. It plays upon the commercialization of take-away, pocket size memories that can be bought at tourist shops.

Vadim Zakharov
(Russian, b. 1959, lives in Moscow and Cologne)
Vadim Zakharov makes wry, cerebral, conceptual works that reflect his coming of age in Moscow’s underground art scene of the early 1980s. His sculpture Execution of Love was inspired by both an antique chair for punishing children he came across in a provincial German museum and the old Chinese practice of torture that seats a criminal over live bamboo shoots so that they will grow into his body. Here the seat perches above a live rose, turning an overused symbol of romance into an instrument of torture.

                                                                                LONDON.- The 20/21 British Art Fair is the only fair specialising exclusively in modern and contemporary British art. It will take place again this year at the Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7, from 16 to 20 September.

The Royal College of Art can justly be called the spiritual home of British art and, as such, provides an ideal setting for the fair which attracts some 60 of our leading dealers showing works by the great names of the 20th century: Bacon, Freud, Frink, Frost, Hepworth, Hockney, Hodgson, Lanyon, Lowry, Moore, Nash, Piper, Riley, Scott, Spencer and Sutherland to name a few. Alongside these will be a large selection of work by emerging and established contemporary artists, some of whom already have achieved international reputations – like Hirst, Emin, Grayson Perry et al – as well as work by emerging artists who may be the stars of tomorrow.

Market Still Strong
The market for good quality, well priced modern British art is holding up well, according to reports from the most recent fairs and exhibitions. The market today is also much deeper than it was at the time of the previous recession of the early 1990s and this will help sustain prices. ‘What’s the point of leaving the money in the bank earning little or no interest when I can buy a work of art which I can enjoy now?’ is often quoted by buyers.

The 20/21 British Art Fair, is now in its 22nd year. More than 90% from 2008 are returning this year, demonstrating the strength of this fair which, not only offers an enormous variety of art under one roof, but also an opportunity to tap into the expertise of the 60 leading dealers. Whether your taste is for the earlier work, Scottish Colourists, Pop Art pop art or the contemporary, the breadth and depth of more than a hundred years of British art may well surprise. With prices from the low hundreds to hundreds of thousands, it is not to be missed!

PROVIDENCE, RI.- The RISD Museum of Art announces its response to the economic crisis and its impact on the institution. Due to a loss of endowment revenue, the Museum will implement several organizational changes including adjusted staff schedules and the elimination of some positions, and closing to the public during the month of August. Attrition due to voluntary retirements and the elimination of vacant positions reduced the number of layoffs. After careful consideration, it was determined that the closing in August will have the least impact on the public, academic, and school programs which are vital to the Museum’s educational mission. These cuts are necessary in order to meet a budget reduction while maintaining an outstanding exhibition schedule and superb educational programs. Administrative staff will be available during the month and risd/works will be open to the public during their regular open hours.

“RISD President John Maeda, the museum’s Board of Governors and the Museum staff have worked diligently to ensure that we preserve the most important aspects of our mission to present thought-provoking exhibitions and educational programs for visitors of all ages,” said Hope Alswang, Director of the Museum.

Alswang pointed to recent successes as an opportunity for momentum in spite of this downturn. “We are so very lucky to have completed the Chace Center and the first phase of the Radeke Restoration project. With these significant accomplishments, we will move forward with positive resolve and passion for this exemplary museum,” she added.

The Museum’s free admission times will remain in effect for 6-9 p.m. on the third Thursday of each month, all day on the last Saturday of the month. Every Sunday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. is Pay-What-You-Wish.

The fall schedule includes a range of exhibitions. In late September the Museum will present an important installation by ceramic artist Arnie Zimmeman and architect Tiago Montepagado called Inner City. Also in the fall, associate curator Emily Peters has organized an exhibition on the history of engraving, Brilliant Line: Following the Early Modern Engraver, 1480-1650. The Museum will focus on the work of RISD faculty member and renowned photographer Joe Deal in a show of his works in the Bill and Nancy Tsiaras Photography Gallery in September.

LONDON. The most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa, narrowly missed a catastrophe in 1963 when it was on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Leonardo da Vinci’s enigmatic portrait of a smiling woman, widely believed to be Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a wealthy Florentine merchant, had left the Louvre in Paris for its first trip to the US.

All possible precautions were taken for the painting’s safekeeping. It was transported across the Atlantic aboard the SS France in a waterproof crate designed to float if the luxury liner sank.

When it arrived in New York, the Mona Lisa was escorted by the police and secret service agents to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where President Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline attended the unveiling of the painting.

On 7 February, the portrait went on show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, flanked by armed US Marines. It would eventually be seen by more than one million visitors in just a few weeks.

It was at the Metropolitan that the painting narrowly escaped severe damage one night when a sprinkler malfunctioned, splashing water on the Mona Lisa for several hours.

The incident is recounted in the memoir of Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum, which is being serialised on the Artnet website (www.artnet.com).

In 1963, Dr Hoving was a curator in the Metropolitan Museum’s medieval department. When he arrived at the museum before it opened one morning, he rushed to the secure storeroom where the painting was locked up at night, in order to check on an English 12th-century ivory cross he had recently purchased for the institution.

“I dashed to the [storeroom] to study my gorgeous acquisition, only to find that Murray Pease, the head of the conservation studio, and his assistant Kate Lefferts, [and] the officials from the Louvre in charge of the Leonardo portrait were rushing around with towels,” writes Dr Hoving.

“No one ever discovered why, but some time during the night one of the fire sprinklers in the ceiling broke its glass ampoule and the masterpiece of painting and the masterwork of ivory carving had both been…rained upon,” he adds.

Guards monitoring the Mona Lisa on a black-and-white monitor outside the storeroom could not see the water on their grainy screen.

“The Mona Lisa, according to the Louvre official, was ok…He told me that the thick glass covering it had acted like an effective…raincoat. The rainstorm was never mentioned to the outside world.” The Metropolitan Museum declined to comment on the incident.

Henry Gentle, a London-based private picture restorer, said damage to the painting could have been serious if it had not been protected by glass. “The paint could have swelled off [the panel] and become unstable. It really would have depended on the painting itself, whether it was protected by a strong varnish or not, and how long the water was dribbling on the surface.”

Dr Hoving is philosophical about the incident. “These things happen in museums,” he says.

The episode is the latest chapter to emerge in the painting’s eventful history. Painted in Florence, the Mona Lisa was taken to France by Leonardo himself in 1516 and sold to King François I. In 1911, the portrait was stolen from the Louvre by a museum employee, Vincenzo Peruggia. It was recovered two years later when Peruggia tried to sell it to an antiques dealer in Florence.

NEW DELHI.- India Art Summit™ 2009 – India’s modern and contemporary art fair. Following its inaugural success in August 2008, the second edition of, India Art Summit™ 2009 – India’s modern and contemporary art fair, is slated for the 19th – 22nd August 2009 at Pragati Maidan (ITPO), New Delhi, India.

An astounding 10,000 art enthusiasts walked in to witness India’s First International Art Fair; India Art Summit™ 2008, firmly establishing it as a one stop destination for art in India. With an overwhelming mix of art collectors, artists, critics, curators, students and art enthusiasts from across India and overseas, the Summit achieved exactly what it set out to – making art, and the knowledge of art, accessible to a widespread audience.

The second edition of India Art Summit™ aims not only to make the Summit globally known as the single most important destination for Indian & South Asian Art but also create a platform for galleries from across the world to showcase an array of art that finds appeal among the Indian collectors & investors. The fair will represent the best of Indian art as well as provide a first ever opportunity in this region, for international art to be received by a large & discerning art audience. Together these galleries will showcase a diverse range of paintings, sculptures, photography, installation and digital art by established and emerging artists.

There will also be educational and curatorial components to the fair through a series of Art Projects developed specifically for India Art Summit. In due course, we will share with you a detailed programme of these as well as the various satellite events planned in the city for the duration of the fair.

Whether you like art or not, once you visit a gallery of art you get some what absorbed by the surroundings and they really can be quite fascinating. Art does not have to be just about pictures. It can be in any form such as fossils, or monuments. There are some great art galleries around the world, but let’s just take a brief look at five of the best.

Natural History Museum, London
This museum is based in the Kensington part of London and has a huge collection of items. The museum is steeped in historical events and was first opened in 1883. The gallery is currently famous for its dinosaurs section, with fossils from around the world and interactive activities.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Founded in 1870 and officially opened in 1872, this museum is full of great imagery. A very large roman designed museum which consists of ancient, modern, musical and medieval art from around the globe. The museum is world renowned and has been featured in movies and games such as grand theft auto and I am Legend.

Louvre Museum, Paris
This lovely building which is based in Paris is one of the most visited tourist museums in the world; opening its doors in 1793 it had an exhibition of around 537 paintings. But there were a few structural problems which saw the museum close for 5 years.

Museo del Prado, Madrid
This museum has one of the largest collections of 12th to 19th century European art. The museum has now around 1,300 paintings currently on display which make it a world glass exhibition for anyone. The building first opened its doors in 1819, with its first enlargement taking place it 1918.

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Finally we have the art gallery and museum based in Australia, which was founded in 1861 making it the oldest public gallery in the whole of Australia. The museum consists of a fabulous international collection as well as a modern collection which features textiles, fashion, photography, and Australian Aboriginal art.

Visiting anyone or all of these museums will give you a great insight into the historic world, not only that but a lot of these structures now consist of modern and urban art. So you will be able to see a timeline that spreads over thousands of years, right from the dinosaurs up to the current year. Museums store a wealth of information and can be a fun and fascinating time

In the course of researching ART/WORK, we interviewed 100 arts professionals about their experiences in the art world and their expectations of artists. These are some of the most common customs, perspectives and recommendations that we found. The most important piece of advice, of course, was to constantly make your work. Nothing on this list matters more than the quality of your art and your commitment to making it. But if you’re pursuing a career as an artist–or even just considering one–there are quite a few things to keep in mind as you make your work:

1. Every artist has a day job.
Most artists cannot live off their art–even relatively successful artists in New York or L.A. So don’t feel like you’re doing something wrong if you can’t make ends meet without a day job. The key is to define yourself as an artist. What you do for rent is just that. It’s not who you are.

2. Residencies are good for your health.
Applying to residencies is a critical component to a career as a visual artist. Some are hands-on, with career mentoring or technical instruction; some are totally independent without much in the way of communal activities or guidance. They are literally all over the world, and are a fantastic way to connect with other artists, curators and teachers–not to mention save money on rent.

The application process itself is worthwhile. It forces you to think deeply about your work and goals. And it puts your work in front of curators and gallerists who sit on the selection committees, and who may keep you in mind for other projects and shows in the future (regardless of whether you get into that particular residency).

3. NO BLIND SUBMISSIONS!
Every Saturday you can go to Chelsea and see people hauling around their portfolios, cold-calling on galleries. This is a terrible idea. It tells the gallerist that you don’t respect his or her time and that you don’t seem to care where you show. You should be very familiar with a gallery’s program, and be able to explain why you fit into it, before you approach the gallerist about considering your work. And given that galleries don’t decide to bring on new artists lightly, the last thing you want to do is insist on a snap judgment because you happen to be in the neighborhood.

4. Write stuff down.
Paperwork sucks. But staying on top of it will make your life easier and save you time in the long run, which means more time to make art.

There are some basic items to track just for yourself. Make a detailed inventory list for every work, a list of contacts, and a chart of art-related expenses and any income from art sales.
There are also arrangements between you and other people that you should write down: When you sell work, make an invoice and keep a copy for yourself; when you consign work to a gallery, use a consignment form; when you do a commission, use a commission agreement.

5. The Internet is all the rage.
You need a website. (Or a blog, or some sort of online space.) Everyone expects you to have one: gallerists, curators, critics, art bloggers, other artists. It doesn’t need to be fancy or expensive, but it should have images of your work, a copy of your cv and your contact information. Ideally, the design of the site should reflect the kind of art you make or the kind of artist you are.

Also, think of it as a retrospective you’re curating, rather than an exhaustive encyclopedia entry. Present your work in a coherent order (or total disorder, if that’s what your art is about), separate different bodies of work and don’t feel compelled to upload everything you’ve ever made.

6. Rejection: It’s not you, it’s them.
The odds of landing a residency, getting a grant or finding gallery representation are daunting. Popular programs may accept as little as 1.5% of their applicants each year. And even before the economic crisis, commercial galleries couldn’t possibly absorb all the artists who came out of school.

Which is all to say that you shouldn’t take it personally if you don’t get into your dream residency or favorite gallery. With those kinds of numbers, you can be sure that the decision doesn’t turn solely on the quality of your work. There are many other factors that go into committee selections, such as how many other applicants do work similar to yours, or come from the same city. Likewise, a gallerist may love your work but not have the collector base to support it.

7. There’s more to life than commercial galleries.
Commercial galleries are a prominent part of the art world, but there are many other ways to show your work: non-profits, collaboratives, artist-run spaces, online galleries, artist-run fairs, cafes, restaurants, retail spaces, books, zines, podcasts, project-specific websites, libraries, botanical gardens, hospitals, science centers–really, anywhere you can think of.
Only you can know where your work fits best, which depends of course on its content, the context you want it to be shown in, and the kind of audience you seek. Let your art dictate where it should be shown, rather than conforming it to a preconceived venue.

LONDON.- Leading art business Christie’s International announced that Christie’s Fine Art Storage Services (CFASS), provider of customized storage solutions for fine art, antiques and collectibles, will open a new ultra-high security facility at The Singapore FreePort in January 2010. This long-term offering with The Singapore FreePort Pte. Ltd. underscores Christie’s commitment to Singapore and marks the firm’s continued investment in Asia.

The Singapore FreePort, supported by the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), is the largest freeport dedicated to the storage of fine art and high value collectibles in the world, and the first in Asia. Its shareholders include the Singapore National Arts Council and the National Heritage Board of Singapore. Through the long-term contract between CFASS and the Singapore FreePort Pte Ltd., the CFASS Singapore facility will comprise roughly 40% of the FreePort’s Phase 1 floor area available for lease, out of approximately 22,500 square meters gross floor area, with an option to add capacity in Phase 2 when it is completed in early 2014.

Located at Changi Airport, CFASS Singapore at The Singapore FreePort allows for the rapid and safe transfer of fine art, collectibles, and other valuables. Offering cutting-edge security technology, strong rooms and storage solutions ranging from single item storage for individual items and small collections to fully-managed exclusive units ranging from 10 square meters to very large spaces, the world-class facility of CFASS Singapore at the Singapore FreePort offers services and infrastructure that are unmatched anywhere in the world. In addition to fully customized storage solutions, CFASS Singapore will offer enhanced services designed to accommodate the growing needs of a diverse clientele, whether they need to store a single object or an entire storage room to hold a substantial collection.

Mr Andy Foster, Chief Operating Officer of Christie’ s International and President of Asia, said, “The opening of CFASS Singapore and our agreement with The Singapore FreePort Pte Ltd underscore Christie’s long-term commitment not only to Singapore, but to our business in Asia. This facility stands as the most advanced of its type in the world, and the services that it provides clients not only in Asia but around world make it the perfect partner for international fine art collectors, dealers, institutions and others looking for a safe, stable and secure location to store and trade valuable collections. And by providing for additional sophisticated services in the future, CFASS Singapore will meet the complex needs of its global clientele. ”