With Miami on its slate of events, Grand Basel proposes to take car shows beyond the concours
Image courtesy MCH Group.
For all their popularity – more spring up every year – concours events run up against a number of logistical challenges: weather, the proliferation of associated auctions, securing a location, and single-day setup and teardown. The organizers of the for-profit Art Basel exhibitions propose to sidestep those concerns with their Grand Basel salon, scheduled to arrive in the United States next year.
Announced late last year, the Grand Basel promises to blend elements of a concours, auction, and museum exhibit with curated and juried exhibits placed indoors in contemporary design spaces and with a portion of the displayed vehicles offered for sale. Its organizers describe it as “the first global salon for the world’s most important and valuable automobiles of the past, present and future.”
In those respects, it sounds similar to a number of already established auto salons, including Retromobile, Techno Classica Essen, Auto e Moto d’Epoca in Padua, Motorclassica in Melbourne, and the recently established Classic Auto Show in Los Angeles.
Grand Basel’s organizers, however, promise “an entirely new perspective on the automobile” by tapping into their nearly 50 years of experience running the Art Basel art fairs. “The distinctly contemporary exhibition concept presents and discusses present and future automobiles within a sophisticated cultural context,” Art Basel’s Rene Kamm said in a press release.
The organizers chose four vehicles to represent Grand Basel’s focus at its introduction last year: Giorgetto Giugiaro’s 1963 Chevrolet Corvair Testudo, Andrea Zagato’s Zagato IsoRivolta Vision Gran Turismo concept, Rem D. Koolhaas’s minimalist Lamborghini Countach design concept, and LeCorbusier’s 1935 Avions Voisin C25 Aérodyne, the latter “a perfect manifestation of the multitude of correlations between architecture, the car and urban development.”
On the Grand Basel’s advisory board are three executive advisors: Sylvie Fleury, Lapo Elkann and Paolo Tumminelli.
The first Grand Basel will take place September 6 to 9 in its namesake city, Basel, Switzerland, followed by the second in February in Miami Beach, Florida. A third will also take place in Hong Kong. For more information, visit GrandBasel.com.
SOURCE: HEMMINGS
AUTHOR: Daniel Strohl