With FOCUS ACADEMY, PREVIEW BERLIN turns toward art academies and their students in a new format. Developed from the enhancement of PREVIEW BERLIN’s art fair concept, FOCUS ACADEMY concentrates on students at the moment of their transition from training to artistic independence. This has led to a platform for a new generation of young and promising artists, presenting their work for the first time to a broader public.

FOCUS ACADEMY’s pilot projects included the participation of the 2009 and 2010 graduates of Burg Giebichenstein presented by the Saxony-Anhalt Arts Foundation, as well as the participation of marke.6, the exhibition space of the Bauhaus University in Weimar, which allowed 2010 Grafe-Kreativ-Preis award winners to show at the art fair.

In 2011, this concept, which pushes the new artistic generation to the next level – in line with PREVIEW BERLIN’s profile as an interface between artists and art markets – will be expanded for the first time and enlarged to include several universities. In its next editions, PREVIEW BERLIN would like to develop a platform in which the art university students and exhibition spaces will be on a comparable level to the state of production, education and mediation of other academies of art. This platform will also enable them to make new contacts or refresh existing cooperations.

PREVIEW BERLIN 2011 includes work by students of the Bauhaus University in Weimar, the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg presented at the stands of marke.6, Umtrieb – Galerie für aktuelle Kunst and MyVisit.to.