São Paulo’s newest gallery knows you must ‘burn cash to support great artists’ – The Art Newspaper

Most young dealers I interview are eager to discuss the hard work it takes to open a gallery. Far fewer are inclined to speak about the considerable seed capital that is usually required to kickstart the business and keep it afloat—especially in today’s trying economic environment.

São Paulo’s newest gallery, Yehudi Hollander-Pappi, takes a more forthright approach. Co-founded by the former Mendes Wood DM staffers Matheus Yehudi Hollander and Sofia Pappi, it has placed the name of its financial backer, Yehudi’s art collector mother Monica Hollander, above the gallery door. “In our industry there is a culture of keeping things hidden, that is not our ethos” he says. Hollander concurs with her son: “the gallery will be completely transparent in everything it does, which is rare in this market.”

This push for transparency, while a reminder of the privilege so often needed to launch a commercial gallery, also reflects the team’s clear-sighted vision for success. “A good gallery is a money pit,” Yehudi Hollander says. “You have to burn cash to support great artists making new work and spark ideas. Decades ago, Brazil had a fling with Conceptualism, but today the market here leans towards bad painting and doesn’t seem willing to invest in exciting young names. A true gallerist must be brave enough to show artists that might not sell well for many years. You must be as obsessive about art as the artist themselves.”

Yehudi Hollander’s zeal is matched by the gallery’s ambitions, evident in its decision to launch with 20 represented artists, a number that most dealers take several years to reach. As he says: “We are maximalists, and definitely not monogamists.” Among the roster are Adriano Amaral, who creates site-specific installations of sculptural installations, and MEXA, a performance group that emerged from a shelter for homeless transgender women in São Paulo. Both Amaral and MEXA exhibited at the 38th Panorama for Brazilian Art biennial.

Each of these artists is, according to Pappi, “rigorous in their work and deeply committed to experimenting with the materials they have chosen to their ultimate consequences”. The gallery will have a strong focus on performance, installation and video art, as well as painting and sculpture. It is not only interested in work “that can be easily sold or easily displayed”, she says. “We don’t second-guess a great work just because it has a complicated assembly or because it’s too big or too small.”

Yehudi Hollander-Pappi is housed in a newly renovated, two-storey Flávio de Carvalho-designed villa in the affluent Jardins neighbourhood, a short walk away from some of Brazil’s greatest dealerships, such as Luisa Strina. The location is key as the gallery will not be on Instagram, meaning physical visitors will be that much more important. Yehudi Hollander intends for the gallery to evoke something “old school, like 1980s New York” and “take a clear intellectual position”. Moreover he wishes to avoid “mixing great art with the mundane” as is the case on Instagram—a “vulgar platform” where “images compete for attention with Donald Trump, shoes and food”.

Physical promotion is paramount too: in lieu of a digital blast across social media channels, the gallery’s directors have plastered large posters across the city announcing the inaugural show, Supernova, which opens on 22 March and runs until 17 April.

The group exhibition will feature a mix of rising talent and new discoveries such as Luisa Brandelli, Gustavo Silvamaral and Miranda Zhang, along with international stars and 20th-century greats like Anne Imhof, Ross Bleckner and Paul Thek—with works that exemplify the co-existence of beauty and death, the sublime and the grotesque. A “reliquary” sculpture by Thek, comprising a wax knife sculpture in a plexiglass vitrine, will be displayed following a protracted tussle between the gallery and Brazilian customs officials. And an oil on linen painting by Bleckner will be shown publicly for the first time since its debuted in a 1991 solo exhibition at the New York gallery of veteran dealer and former convict Mary Boone, who Yehudi Hollander describes as “a great inspiration”.

While Supernova is filled with secondary market work, as well as loans from collectors and dealers, its line-up belies the primary market focus the gallery will take going forward. Yehudi Hollander confirms that the gallery will not deal in works from his mother’s collection, which Hollander says has particularly deep holdings of Adriano Costa and Solange Pessoa, both of whom are represented by Mendes Wood DM. “I’m always trying to sell works of hers,” he says. “She never allows it.”

Hollander will also provide an artist residency for the gallery in her countryside home in nearby Americana, which has already been trialled by gallery artists like the Brazilian painter Natalia Ivanov, whose works for the inaugural show were produced there. According to Pappi, Ivanov had distanced herself from her artistic practice after becoming a mother. “The outcome of the residency was breathtaking, as if years of suppressed talent, built up through struggle, had been waiting to resurface.”

Such endeavours will also be useful for attracting international artists, which are rarely seen on the rosters of Brazilian galleries due to protectionist art importation policies that levy onerous taxes on non-Brazilian art.

“It’s a romantic decision,” Yehudi Hollander says of pursuing an international programme. “We are fighting against the winds of these crazy 47% taxes that keep things local. But people in Brazil are curious and engaged. They just want to see consistency. It’s really about showing artists obsessively, over and over again, until something clicks.”