Pentagram has designed the new brand for Art Basel Cities, an exciting new initiative from Art Basel aiming to reach wider audiences across the world. Art Basel Cities links local and international communities through a vibrant and intellectually rigorous multi-year programme.
For their first partnership, Art Basel Cities is working with the Argentinian capital - Buenos Aires, to create an extraordinary project that will celebrate the city’s thriving cultural ecosystem.
Involving over 20 local cultural partners, the initiative aims to forge new bridges between the Argentine and international art worlds; promoting Argentina’s remarkable art scene to a worldwide audience via Art Basel’s extensive network.
As part of the initiative, Pentagram was asked to deliver a marketing campaign and brand identity for this new initiative, which presented Marina Willer and her team with an exciting challenge. The goal was to design a campaign that reached a broad, global audience balanced yet presented an identity that meshed with existing hierarchies, partners and the city of Buenos Aires itself.
Any solution also had to be relevant to the various cultural connections that would result from these communications, as well as work both for above-the-line media and overall digitally-led promotions.
Pentagram’s approach takes an integral part of the Art Basel logo and brand, its glyph, and turns it into a link into the city in which the program will take place. By literally re-shaping this glyph and extending it, Willer and her team symbolised the brand reaching out to new audiences.
Building on Art Basel Cities’ core mission, the campaign imagery has been based on the idea of finding unnoticed beauty in the ordinary making unusual connections and promoting dialogue. Abstract urban images have been applied in pairs to encourage audiences to find beauty in the unexpected angles of Buenos Aires’ urban landscape. Indeed, the visual language itself mirrors the changing nature of the city.
The result is a campaign and visual identity that reinforces Buenos Aires’ reputation as a cultural destination of choice; promoting new and exciting conversations between the art world at large and this very special place in the world.
