LONDON — Gérard Faggionato, a prominent Mayfair dealer who for 22 years has run his own gallery specializing in postwar and contemporary art, is joining the sales team of the New York mega-gallerist David Zwirner.
Beginning in April, Mr. Faggionato, 54, will work with Angela Choon, the director at the gallery’s London branch, which is based in a Georgian townhouse on Grafton Street in Mayfair. He will concentrate on sales of new works and on the re-sale market for older material. A former head of both the Impressionist and Modern and the contemporary art departments at Christie’s, Mr. Faggionato has been the British and European representative of the Estate of Francis Bacon since 1998. That relationship is expected to continue, the New York gallery said in an e-mail.
“London has a particularity,” Mr. Faggionato said. “It’s extremely international. There are more collectors here than we’ve ever had, but it’s not as straightforward as it is in New York. It’s great to have a new challenge.”
The closure of Mr. Faggionato’s gallery on Albemarle Street and the bolstering of the Zwirner sales team will come as a shock to market insiders, given the status of both as immovable fixtures in the art world. But combined with the patchy sales this month at a typically impressive array of dealer exhibitions, the news is symptomatic of how little of the enormous wealth aggregated in London in recent years is being spent in commercial galleries.
More ultra-wealthy people own properties in London than in any other city in the world. Recent surveys have estimated that 4,000 to 6,000 ultra high-net-worth individuals (those with at least $30 million of spendable cash) have some kind of presence in the city. As a result, international galleries have felt compelled to establish branches in London.
Mr. Zwirner is one of the prominent New York dealers — Pace, Michael Werner, Skarstedt, Marian Goodman and Dominique Lévy are others — who have opened branches in London since 2011. Opening is one thing; making meaningful contact with the elusive 0.1 percent that owns second or third homes in “ultra-prime” residential districts like Kensington, Notting Hill, Knightsbridge and Mayfair is another.
“There isn’t the same density of collectors,” Mr. Zwirner, who represents Jeff Koons, Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans and Oscar Murillo, among others, said of London compared with New York. “There’s a competitive spirit among New York collectors, and they show up. In New York, you have four major museums with important groups of trustees, who are all quite active as collectors. There’s a group dynamic.”
Still, Mr. Zwirner doesn’t seem to have trouble selling fresh work by a big name in his London gallery. He is currently showing 10 new canvases by Mr. Tuymans, a highly regarded Belgian painter, some of which were inspired by a visit by the artist to Scotland during the2014 independence campaign. Eight of these, including three close-up portraits of 18th-century Scottish thinkers, have sold for $850,000 to $2.5 million to collections in Britain, China, France, Italy, the Middle East and the United States — a typical London mix.
But Mr. Zwirner also wants to increase his behind-the-scenes “secondary” market sales in London. “That’s what we’re hoping Gérard will expand,” he said. “He knows the Impressionist and Modern market well and we’re also moving in that direction. Our clients are looking at all areas of the 20th century. It’s logical to grow the gallery in a way that gives more options for both buying and selling.”
Business was certainly booming this month at auctions of 20th-century art in London. Sotheby’s 186.4-million pound, or $285 million, evening Impressionist and Modern sale on Feb. 3 ranked as the biggest-grossing auction ever held in the British capital. The following evening, Christie’s held the first-ever $100-million auction of Surrealist works. At the Sotheby’s contemporary auction a week later, a 1986 Gerhard Richter abstract sold for £30.4 million, having been bought for $607,500 at auction in 1999.
Without the sense of competition they experience at auctions — or even art fairs — wealthy individuals have been slower to spend their millions in London’s commercial galleries.
Dominique Lévy’s branch in Old Bond Street did, however, find a buyer for a 1965 five-cut Lucio Fontana “Concetto Spaziale, Attese” painting included in a show of 26 loaned and for-sale works exploring the theme of the white relief. Helped by the £8.4 million paid at Sotheby’s on Feb. 10 for a white “Concetto Spaziale” from the same date with no fewer than 23 cuts, the Fontana has found a buyer for more than $5 million. A 1960s Fontana slash painting has become as bankable as a Knightsbridge apartment.
“For us, it’s less about constant traffic and more about bespoke one-to-one transactions,” said Lock Kresler, director of Ms. Lévy’s London operation, which specializes in secondary-market sales. “It’s about picking up a phone and getting on a plane.”
At the time of writing, the London dealership Dickinson had confirmed just two sales among the eight Joan Miró bronze sculptures generously offered by the artist’s family to benefit Yorkshire Sculpture Park in northern England. Sculptures made in the artist’s lifetime have fetched almost $10 million at auction, but these more recent posthumous casts are priced at 140,000 euros to 800,000 euros, or $159,000 to $911,000.
The October Gallery’s exhibition of six new bottle-top hangings by the Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui, meanwhile, has for now resulted in only one confirmed sale, and price might be more of a factor. Dozens of these sumptuous postmodern tapestries have been acquired by public and private museums around the world. These works are now priced in the gallery at more than $950,000, which is not far off what they are fetching at auction.
For Pilar Ordovas, a London dealer who specializes in highly selective exhibitions of masterworks by 20th-century artists, it’s the sheer volume of stuff happening in the art world that makes life difficult for gallerists, even in a wealthy destination city like London.
“The market becoming so international has changed the dynamic, particularly in London,” said Ms. Ordovas, who, like Mr. Faggionato, is a former head of Christie’s postwar and contemporary art department. “Collectors have so much choice and are so time-deprived. Getting their attention is challenging.”
At the moment, Ms. Ordovas is trying to get their attention with an exhibition of three unique David Smith metal sculptures from the 1950s, offered direct from the estate of the American artist, priced from $1.5 million to $7 million. These are shown standing in “conversation” with two loaned Alberto Giacometti bronzes from a similar period. Smith’s 1955 varnished steel “Forging VI” is marked at about $2.5 million, the price at which the Mnuchin Gallery of New York sold another Smith “Forging” at the Frieze Masters fair in London in October. As of last week, none of Ms. Ordovas’s sculptures were confirmed sales.
“The problem is we don’t have ‘collectors’ in the old sense of the word; we have buyers,” said Ms. Ordovas, who, like many of today’s gallerists, finds herself tailoring gallery hours to the schedules of individual clients. “In the old days, you couldn’t imagine Castelli or Marlborough having to stay open for all hours just for a Hong Kong collector to say hello.”
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