ABOUT BRIDGE ART FAIR:

Bridge Art Fair, the Independent International Exhibition of Art and Visual Culture, is a transnational art fair organization, currently staging events in Berlin, Miami, New York and London.

BRIDGE was founded in 2000 by Chicago artists, and the majority of its staff remain artists today. In its earliest incarnation, BRIDGE was a Pushcart Prize–winning publishing group, producing journals of artists' monograms, fiction, art criticism and theory, role-playing games, special projects, poetry, DVD collections of video art and cinema and CDs of original experimental music.

Bridge editors soon began organizing exhibitions of the artists who appeared in the pages of the magazine, and these shows became the seeds for the eventual transition of the company into the art-fair business.

Bridge began producing art fairs at its current scale in 2006, when it premiered in Miami concurrent with Art Basel Miami Beach, and its identity has been evolving ever since. Acclaimed for its use of non-traditional spaces, Bridge has held expositions in abandoned office buildings, a converted railway tunnel, elevated train cars, parking garages and aboard a private yacht.

GALLERIES

Bridge Art Fair currently presents a combined total of nearly 300 galleries and over 2,000 artists at four expositions throughout the year. Visitors will discover a truly global selection of contemporary work from every imaginable medium, including but not limited to painting, prints, photography, sculpture, installation, drawing, film, video, new media, and conceptual art.

Bridge: Definition

As a concept, Bridge Art Fair is, by preference, irreducible in its terms. Bridge views art as a shared cultural good. In recent decades, some art fairs have come to exist merely as vehicles for galleries to bring their work to market. Historically, art fairs have been defined, in large measure, as serving a specific regional or even national interest, promoting the art and culture of that interest by means of the global market.

We believe this root focus on regional and national interests can create art-cultural 'bubbles' that restrict the traffic of new ideas and practices. Bridge Art Fair seeks to counteract this effect. We also strive to support new, emerging artists and help them become more established. To do so, we promote international cooperative efforts between art and cultural communities, and we extol innovation in partnerships between for-profit and nonprofit initiatives. We move artistic projects from idea to execution, and we seek to provide a platform for the cross-pollination of ideas between media and aesthetic modes.

The art fair itself—as well as the Focus, Visual Culture and Effect components of the exposition (explained in depth in their respective sections) remains our primary vehicle for accomplishing our goals. It is a testament to the Bridge concept that its adaptability has allowed it to respond to diverse needs in the various cultures which it has served.

Cities on the Verge. Artists on the Verge.

Bridge: Verge

Verge editions of the Bridge Art Fair offer a cutting-edge approach to the ever-changing market and cultures of the global art world. Today's artworld is no longer defined by a single city universally recognized as the center of it, but by numerous cities and multiple centers. Verge editions of the Bridge Art Fair are more experimental, often taking place in unconventional locations. They are also smaller-scale productions, including a lesser total number of exhibitors and programmatic elements. By definition a younger, more intimate fair, we have chosen Berlin as the launching pad for the first verge edition of the Bridge Art Fair, in recognition of its status as a city on the verge.

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