“There’s a before and after Este Arte,” Uruguay’s first and only art fair, according to its founder, Laura Bardier.
The professionalization of Uruguay’s art market could read as Bardier’s biography—the curator who, through sheer insistence, converted a quixotic dream into a promising market machine—but that would misinterpret the ambition of Este Arte.
The fair has a handful of exhibitors, few of whom are well-known in the United States or Europe, and its setting can’t yet rival its continental peers. Still, the fair has reshaped expectations, positioning a country long defined by the ebb and flow of seasonal capital as a rising stage for international galleries, collectors, and cultural leaders.
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Uruguay is a teardrop of land, no larger than England and Wales combined, pressed by the continental powers of Argentina and Brazil. A ribbon of beach towns along its nearly 400-mile coastline supplies its persistent cliché—the Latin American Côte d’Azur. The country boasts some 3.4 million residents, many of whom descend from European émigrés drawn by the country’s lenient banking laws, which have earned Uruguay another moniker: “The Switzerland of South America.”
Montevideo, the capital, sits at the coastal hinge. Two hours east, Punta del Este offers its vibrational inverse: glass towers, haute cuisine, and nocturnal excess. The metro area of Montevideo accounts for nearly half the nation’s population. The near-universal urbanization of Uruguay has concentrated audiences and institutions in an easy-to-traverse corridor. Together with its growing GDP, this could offer Este Arte, and Uruguay as a whole, a reliable collector base—if the people can be convinced to spend locally.
Este Arte’s 12th edition will run from January 4-7, roughly 25 miles east of Punta del Este, at the Vik Pavilion in José Ignacio—a fishing village–turned affluent enclave of dunes, pine woods, and boutique villas. For the past three editions of the fair, it has functioned as headquarters to what is effectively a live experiment in market construction.
“No one thought an art fair in Uruguay was possible when we started,” Bardier said. “Most people I spoke to would say that Uruguay is not Brazil or Argentina”—larger countries with established art markets. The quiet consensus back home was that she was “crazy” to think she could rally enough galleries to participate, let alone find collectors to follow.
That skepticism wasn’t totally unwarranted. Only 40 years ago, Uruguay emerged from a civic–military dictatorship that turned cultural life into a fraught battleground between state-imposed censorship and covert creative resistance. Between 1973 and 1985, the state imprisoned a staggering 2 percent of the population, while scores of intellectuals, artists, and civilians fled abroad, representing part of the global collector and curator diaspora Este Arte aims to reconnect. Democracy was consolidated during the 1990s, though the trauma of dictatorship persisted, leaving artistic networks and infrastructure weakened. At the same time, this recovery coincided with an economic and social urbanization push at a scale comparable to the metamorphosis of the Arabian Gulf. In what feels like a blink, shifting fortunes transformed this flat stretch of sand and farmland.
Este Arte can’t compete with the scale of Frieze or Basel—or even regional peers like São Paulo’s SP–Arte—so it doesn’t try. For its upcoming 12th edition, just 14 galleries will participate, including returnees Galería del Paseo (Manantiales), Xippas Galleries (Paris, Geneva, Punta del Este), and Aninat Galería (Santiago), as well as newcomers Almeida & Dale (São Paulo), Valerie’s Factory (Buenos Aires), and Galerie Jocelyn Wolff (Paris). In fact, it may be the only fair that has intentionally reduced its exhibitor list since its inaugural edition. The works on offer range from about $500 to $400,00, though most cap out around $20,000. For booths showing living artists, 99 percent of the work must be new. This structure gives first-time collectors a way to enter the market. It offers local artists a moment in the spotlight, aiming to feed the broader ecosystem of galleries, institutions, and collectors that supports an independent art infrastructure.
More than a decade in, Bardier and her all-women team—another rarity in the fair circuit—have embraced the advantages of Uruguay’s small scale, where most issues can be resolved with one or two phone calls and exhibitors’ planning is unusually hands-on. The fair’s curatorial expectations are notably pluralistic: some years have prioritized solo presentations; others have required that every booth include at least one female artist.
Laura Bardier and Cecilia Alemani at Este Arte.
Courtesy Este Arte
Bardier wants Este Arte to feel like a showroom rather than a “supermarket” of art, with just enough of a classroom woven in. To that end, the fair runs a talks program geared toward a population still acclimating to contemporary art as a part of everyday life. Previous programming has included “Everything You Wanted to Know About Indigenous Art But Were Afraid to Ask,” presented by Candice Hopkins, director of Forge Project (Taghkanic) and moderated by the Uruguayan anthropologist José López Mazz. As the fair has grown—the event drew 2,500 visitors in its first year, compared to more than 5,000 in its last edition, per prior reporting—so has its ability to attract prominent figures in the field, like Hopkins. Prior edition featured talks by curators Cecilia Alemani, Hoor Al Qasimi, Barbara London, and Joanna Warsza, some of whom, in addition to speaking, conducted studio visits with Uruguayan artists.
Some critics say that global fairs tend to parachute in, arrive with fanfare, spend big on the fairgrounds, and depart just as quickly. This dynamic, they argue, can deliver little lasting benefit to local infrastructures or ecologies. Carbon emissions aside, Este Arte has yielded concrete gains for Uruguay’s art ecosystem. Several Uruguayan galleries that didn’t exist when it began—La Pecera, Black Gallery, and Diana Saravia—now participate in international fairs.
Galería del Paseo in Manantiales, a veritable stone’s throw from the fair, opened a second space in Lima and exhibits Uruguayan artists in Peru and Peruvian artists in Punta del Este. A new class of authorities at the Ministry of Culture has stepped up efforts in promoting exchanges with the region, too: This fall, Buenos Aires’s MALBA museum showed the work of Uruguayan artist Ulises Beisso, curated by Montevideo’s Martín Craciun, the new coordinator of the National Institute of Visual Arts in Uruguay.
That contemporary Uruguayan art is finding a market footing matters especially because, as Bardier pointed out, regional collectors and foreign institutions have historically favored deceased, primarily male artists at auction. One of the most expensive Uruguayan artists at auction is Joaquín Torres García, whose record stands at $3.38 million. Living sculptor Pablo Atchugarry commanded auction attention as well, with a 2021 Sotheby’s New York sale of approximately $649,000 setting his auction record. Meanwhile, Gonzalo Fonseca, the great painter-turned-stone sculptor, was given a retrospective at the Noguchi Museum in New York in 2018, and his legacy is palpable in Manantiales.
Uruguay’s cultural landscape has been steadily expanding over the past decade. The arrival of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Atchugarry in 2022 filled a long-missing venue for global contemporary art. Meanwhile, Casa Neptuna’s FAARA residency program, run by Fundación Ama Amoedo, draws artists and curators from across Latin America and beyond into dialogue with local peers, fostering the cross-pollination that ultimately helps place Uruguayan artists in overseas collections, galleries, and biennials.
“It is important to show young artists in Uruguay that you can make a living from art,” Bardier said. “That you don’t have to go abroad to have a career.”
Collector and patron Ama Amoedo, who built the foundation on three decades of collecting, described Uruguay’s collectors as “a growing network.” Since the pandemic, she said, “the country is becoming increasingly connected to the Latin American art ecosystem through the visibility of its artists and the dedicated work of institutions, foundations, and galleries that build regional bridges.” Amoedo added that the sort of socially engaged artistic practices standard in Uruguay “exist outside the commercial art market and need support to thrive.”
James Turrell’s ‘Ta Khut’ illuminates Posada Ayana in José Ignacio.
. (Photo by Santiago MAZZAROVICH / AFP)
Este Arte wants to create the network defined by Amoedo, in the process, bringing the Uruguayan cultural diaspora home. One sign that Uruguay’s market is stabilizing, and that the country is recovering from the institutional desert deepened by the dictatorship, is that artists and cultural workers are, in fact, returning. Bardier, who also serves as the executive director of the James Howell Foundation in New York, said she founded the fair partly to give herself a purposeful way back to her homeland.
Renos Xippas came to Uruguay from Greece in 1957, following the Greek Civil War, and fled once more in 1973 at the onset of the dictatorship, only returning after its end in 1985. He now spends most of the year in Uruguay, after once dividing his time more evenly with Paris—a city that, to him, is emblematic of a continental culture dominated by transactional reflexes and steered by a profound misreading of Europe’s global relevance.
“I have 30 acres of land here: residences for artists, showrooms, restaurants. We even have donkeys, cats, chickens. Can you imagine?” He recalled recently receiving a busload of collectors from Brazil, who were invited to view the ground, dine, and generally get to know his artists and one another. “This was Paris when I opened my gallery in 1990,” he said, nostalgic for a milieu that, in his view, has since ceded to Instagram browsing and blockbuster fairs.
He was careful to frame the moment as encouraging, rather than triumphant. “Let’s not exaggerate: There are not many galleries in Uruguay, though I’m not talking about quality. Let’s say there are 10, five of which are very small but run by very informed people.” The collectors who buy from them, he added, are roughly 50 percent Brazilians, 25–50 percent Argentinians, 25 percent Brazilians, and 25 percent from the rest of the world.
Acuarela de los canteros (2025), by the Argentine artist Vicente Grondona. Xippas Galleries will present a solo exhibition of work by Grondona at the 2026 Este Arte titled “Acuarela de los canteros (Watercolor of the Stonemasons)”, and curated by Manuel Neves.
Courtesy Xippas and the artist’s studio. Photo: Paz Elduayen
Marco Maggi—one of Uruguay’s foremost contemporary artists—resettled there after building his career with New York’s Josée Bienvenu Gallery and Nara Roesler in São Paulo. He had his first exhibition in Buenos Aires in 1973, when he was 15. The opening was on the same day as the coup d’état in Uruguay, he told ARTnews. He’s spent the last 30 years in New Paltz, New York. His work sits in the collections of MoMA and the Whitney, and he represented Uruguay at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Now, he says, the languid pace and high quality of life back home suit him best.
“We, Uruguayans, are discreet and moderate, not prone to fads and enthusiasm,” he said; however, since Este Arte launched, the country’s appetite for contemporary art has “made important strides in an auspicious direction.”
“Its commercial impact is difficult for me to quantify, but the persistence of convening international and regional collectors every year is the only way to foster a collecting community in Uruguay,” Maggi said. “This is what happened in processes I witnessed firsthand, such as ARTBO in Colombia, Zona Maco in Mexico, and Arco in Madrid.”
Este Arte is surely looking ahead: In 2025, the fair introduced the Theodora Award, developed in partnership with the Chilean company Theodora AI, a specialist in bias detection. The prize is billed as the world’s first devoted to the ethical integration of artificial intelligence in the visual arts.
Xippas, for one, recommended that Este Arte evolve accordingly. “The fair can improve in quantity. The pavilion [in José Ignacio] is beautiful. Still, to host more than 20 galleries, it needs a second space, or a bigger one, perhaps for galleries both traditional and avant-garde,” he said, adding that after 11 years, collectors are now comfortable attending. “It’s no longer: ‘Who’s there? Who cares?”
“But,” he added, “to attract more galleries from Europe and the United States, you have to grow.”
