Village Caballito - Av. Rivadavia y Av. Acoyte
Room: 4
A highly enjoyable look at a career spent duping the art world, Beltracchi introduces an artist who made millions selling fake paintings that allegedly made their way into museums, definitive art books, and collections including that of Steve Martin. The longhaired sexagenarian says he didn’t intend to be a fraudster. Drawn to painting from childhood, he began to “improve” on anonymous works, and segued into more conventional forgery. Soon, he was studying the careers of established (but not super-famous) artists, creating work that was mentioned in biographies but had been lost; in the case of artists like Heinrich Campendonk, some collectors proclaimed his fakes among the finest examples of a painter’s output. (Martin’s painting was a bogus Campendonk landscape.) As in the recent Art and Craft, the forger walks us through the tricks of his trade, buying a genuine but worthless old painting at a flea market and using the signs of authenticity on the canvas to bolster his illusion. This process is fascinating –and one of the final steps, involving vintage dirt, earns a huge laugh. JDF
D, G: Arne Birkenstock
F: Marcus Winterbauer
E: Katja Dringenberg
S: Patrick Veigel, Ludwig Bestehorn
M: Duerbeck & Dohmen
P: Arne Birkenstock, Helmut G. Weber, Thomas Springer
PE: Helmut G. Weber, Arne Birkenstock
CP: Fruitmarket Kultur und Medien
Wolfgang Beltracchi, Helene Beltracchi
Global Screen. Gisela Wiltschek
T +49 89 244 1295 -563 E gisela.wiltschek@globalscreen.de
W globalscreen.de - beltracchi.senator.de
He was born in Siegen, Germany, in 1967. He studied Economics, Political Sciences, Latin American History, and Romance Languages in Germany and Argentina. 12 tangos - Pasaje de regreso a Buenos Aires (2005) and Chandani: The Daughter of the Elephant Whisperer (2010) are some of his documentaries.
