The moderate sales seen at this year’s SP-Arte (7-10 April) do not bode well for the country’s art market, as it heads into a deep recession that shows no sign of ending soon. More has been written about the Brazilian political crisis than has been written about its economic situation, but the country’s GDP shrank 3.8% in 2015, its biggest drop in 25 years.
“Brazilians aren’t buying,” said one prominent São Paulo art dealer, during a night of gallery openings tied to the fair’s preview on 5 April. Some local galleries have relied on foreign buying since the crisis began last year.
SP-Arte is aimed at Brazilians, with just 5% of visitors coming from outside the country, according to the fair’s director Fernanda Feitosa. The government also drops its steep value-added tax for the week of the country’s largest fair. Normally, Brazilians pay around 50% VAT on foreign art; during the fair, this was reduced to 15%.
Sales at the fair were mixed, however. Daniel Roesler, the director of Galeria Nara Roesler, said he sold all five editions of a pendulum sculpture by the São Paulo artist Artur Lescher during the fair’s opening night, which, though packed with a Brazilian party vibe, he said seemed thinner than usual. (This year’s edition featured 87 galleries in the general section, down from 112 in 2015.)
“We’re in a recession,” said Ulisses Cohn of Dan Galeria, of the tepid Brazilian interest. “The art market is very sensitive to economic variations—[art is] not a first necessity.”
Feitosa said that the recession had not changed much for the fair. “The whole world is so down,” she said. “If you look at the auctions, the art fairs in the US, they’re all slowing down a little bit.”