Art Basel has appointed Vincenzo de Bellis, a curator at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, to serve in a newly created director position that will involve overseeing fairs and exhibition platforms globally.
Marc Spiegler, the Swiss fair’s director, will remain in his role heading all of the enterprise’s departments, including those that deal with client relations and partnerships. Spiegler said that his role will focus more “strategic development” amid de Bellis’s addition to the fair’s leadership, the Art Newspaper first reported.
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De Bellis will help manage exhibitions and one-off events, and will oversee teams across four shows in Basel, Paris, Hong Kong, and Miami Beach.
The news comes on the heels of other structural changes for the fair. Last July, the fair’s former Americas director, Noah Horowitz, left his post to join Sotheby’s. In January, the Swiss company added a fourth fair, in Paris, to its annual calendar. In March, Clément Delépine, the former co-director of the Paris Internationale fair, was appointed the director of the new event, which is called Paris+, par Art Basel. Its first edition will take place at the Grand Palais this October.
De Bellis, who will start his new role in August, brings to Art Basel previous experience in the art fair circuit. Before joining the Walker Art Center in 2016, de Bellis had been artistic director of the Milan International Fair of Modern and Contemporary Art, or miart.
In his new position, de Bellis will be tasked with organizing physical art exhibitions that relate to the fair’s programming. In a statement, he said the aim is to help the Swiss company’s “exchange between local and global art scenes.”
Source: artnews.com