SWAB Art Fair

Tube Gallery has been selected as one of the three galleries to participate in the prestigious SWAB Art Fair in Barcelona, showcasing emerging talent and contemporary art.

This year, a committee of international art professionals chose only three galleries for this honor. The selection criteria focused on galleries that have been open for less than two years and have not yet participated in any international art fair, highlighting new and innovative spaces in the art world. Presenting works by emerging and contemporary artist, Jack Burton.

The idea for the booth came from a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz of a photography exhibition in 1906. Stieglitz was a visionary of early photography, ran his own gallery, and argued hard for photography to be considered an artistic medium in its own right, rather than something purely mimetic.

I clearly have a relationship with photography, and true to photography’s salad days, my work explores the potential a photographic image has, rather than using it as something purely mimetic. And so, I wanted to pay tribute to those early salons by creating our own, and in doing so, create something that feels out of context with today, where we could argue photography, in all its ubiquitous cameraphone success, has become in its broad use a tool of representation rather than of creative exploration.

We use photographs not to show, but to think, to propose, to discuss, to do what contemporary art does best, which is to put disparate things together, and make them talk.

–Jack Burton