Major international exhibitions tend to be a hit with the public, given the unique opportunity they offer to encounter the work of artists who do not always have a significant presence of works in the country where the show will be displayed. Some of these exhibitions can reach hundreds of thousands of visitors in just a few months, as was the case with O Triunfo da Cor, which welcomed 922,000 people in 2016 at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, with 74 post-Impressionist works from the Musée d'Orsay. But have you ever stopped to think about how an art exhibition of this magnitude travels?
Shipping an art exhibition is an extremely complex logistics project, one that demands experience, technical knowledge, agility in decision-making and the ability to establish an international network of partners ready to act along the entire route.
Planning the route and splitting the cargo
Planning begins with defining the route, including stopovers and any necessary connections. Another key factor is dividing the cargo to balance the weight inside the aircraft, and here another important specialty comes into play: building made-to-measure crates to house the works of art so that handling does not harm them.
When the cargo is small and low in volume, commercial passenger flights can be used, but it is often necessary to charter cargo aircraft. For security reasons, works by the same artist or from the same museum never travel on a single flight; they are split across at least two aircraft.
The courier: artworks never travel alone
Another curiosity is that the works never travel alone. On each flight there is a specialised professional supervising the entire transport process, from the place of origin to the departure airport, and then from the arrival airport to the venue where the exhibition will take place. This is the courier, who accompanies the whole logistics operation from start to finish and is also responsible for dealing with the customs authorities in the countries involved in the journey and for checking the condition reports of the works.
Where an exhibition waits between venues
Sometimes an exhibition spends several years travelling and may need to be housed in a specialised art storage facility between one museum run and the next. That was the case, for example, with the OSGEMEOS exhibition, which opened at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo and then moved on to the Museu Oscar Niemeyer in Curitiba. Before heading to its run in Rio de Janeiro, the entire collection was brought back to São Paulo and stored at Clé Chenue do Brasil for a few weeks.
Clé Chenue is the only private art storage facility in Brazil with international standards of security, climate control and fire prevention, counting some of Brazil's most important museums among its clients. All this technology is also available to private collectors, through tailor-made services for the safekeeping of a single object or an entire collection. Discover our services.
