Conversations | The Art Market in 2023: Collecting in Brazil

Conversations | The Art Market in 2023: Collecting in Brazil

Art Basel Miami Beach 2023, December 7

The Brazilian art market is the largest by size in Latin America. With president Lula’s government reinstating the ministry of culture and increasing funding to the arts, how is the market developing? This panel examines shifts in the Brazilian art scene since the beginning of 2023 through the voices of gallerists, collectors, and experts. Has a renewed prioritization of the arts already had a measurable impact?

Pedro Barbosa, collector, São Paulo 
Márcio Botner, co-founder, partner and director, A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro
Thiago de Paula Souza, curator and educator, São Paulo and Berlin
Moderator: Oliver Basciano, writer, São Paulo and London

Pedro Barbosa, a former bond trader, launched the Coleção Moraes-Barbosa (CMB) in 1999. The collection includes both global and local artists, and is focused on conceptual art and video. The 20,000 items of printed matter that form part of the collection are used as research material by artists, curators, and researchers. CMB also has a project space in São Paulo that showcases artists and projects from the collection. Pedro Barbosa is a board member of EAI (Electronic Arts Intermix), KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and the Media and Performing Art Committee at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Márcio Botner was born in 1970 in Rio de Janeiro, where he lives and works. Artist, director, and founding partner of the gallery A Gentil Carioca, he has been a member of the Art Basel Miami Beach Selection Committee since 2010. He graduated in Cultural Marketing from the Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing in Rio de Janeiro in 2000. He studied at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage between 1991 and 1995, where he also taught from 2005 to 2013. He served as CEO of OCA Lage, running not only EAV Parque Lage but also Casa França Brasil from 2014 to 2017. He is a founding partner of the Alalaô project, an artistic-political-affective mobilization to carry out a series of actions on Arpoador beach, held since 2010.

Thiago de Paula Souza is a curator and educator. He is interested in the ability of art and education to rethink the past and produce new ethical codes. De Paula Souza was a member of the curatorial team of the 10th Berlin Biennale, ‘We don't need another hero’ (2018), and was a curatorial advisor for the 58th Carnegie International (2021-2022). He is a PhD researcher at HDK-Valand at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Coinciding with Art Basel Miami Beach, he has curated a solo show by Sallisa Rosa, commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary. In the coming year, de Paula Souza will co-curate a group show at Raven Row in London, focusing on re-situating a canon of Brazilian artistic production from the 1940s to the 1970s. He is the co-curator of the 38th Panorama da Arte Brasileira, a survey of the contemporary art scene in Brazil, at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art.

The Art Basel Miami Beach 2023 Conversations program was curated by Emily Butler.