How to Craft the Perfect Home Gallery Wall https://ift.tt/9Ju7ipQ

Gallery Wall #4-Drawing, 2018
Ji Eun Kim
Gallery SoSo

Few tasks are as simultaneously exciting and daunting for a collector as hanging a home gallery wall, especially for the first time.

Gallery walls, also known as salon walls, are a popular way of hanging groups of artworks. Rather than centering a single painting on a wall, gallery walls hang several works in a clustered arrangement ranging from a handful of works to well over a dozen. But where to start?

You’ve done the fun part and found and purchased a few artworks you love. You may have even had them framed. Now, you find yourself staring down a blank wall and wondering where on earth to begin. At the back of your mind, there may be a nagging sense that there is a right way to do this.

First, take a deep breath and know you’re not alone. The fact is, crafting the perfect gallery wall is not a one-size-fits-all affair, which is part of what makes it an art in itself.

“There are no absolute rules when it comes to hanging art,” said Hirofumi Miyauchi, dealer at Andecian Gallery. “Trying to achieve perfection in the absence of rules can feel overwhelming precisely because of that absolute freedom.”

Still, interior designers, dealers, and artists all agree that there are some genuinely useful tips and tricks to crafting the gallery wall of your dreams. The biggest hurdle might be learning how to trust your own eye.

If hanging a gallery wall has been on your agenda, don’t shy away. We’ve consulted the experts and put together a step-by-step guide to demystifying the process, setting you—and your art—up for success.

Few tasks are as simultaneously exciting and daunting for a collector as hanging a home gallery wall, especially for the first time.

Gallery walls, also known as salon walls, are a popular way of hanging groups of artworks. Rather than centering a single painting on a wall, gallery walls hang several works in a clustered arrangement ranging from a handful of works to well over a dozen.

But where to start?

You’ve done the fun part and found and purchased a few artworks you love. You may have even had them framed. Now, you find yourself staring down a blank wall and wondering where on earth to begin. At the back of your mind, there may be a nagging sense that there is a right way to do this.

First, take a deep breath and know you’re not alone. The fact is, crafting the perfect gallery wall is not a one-size-fits-all affair, which is part of what makes it an art in itself.

“There are no absolute rules when it comes to hanging art,” said Hirofumi Miyauchi, dealer at Andecian Gallery. “Trying to achieve perfection in the absence of rules can feel overwhelming precisely because of that absolute freedom.”

Still, interior designers, dealers, and artists all agree that there are some genuinely useful tips and tricks to crafting the gallery wall of your dreams. The biggest hurdle might be learning how to trust your own eye.

If hanging a gallery wall has been on your agenda, don’t shy away. We’ve consulted the experts and put together a step-by-step guide to demystifying the process, setting you—and your art—up for success.

Start with the wall, not the art

Window Watcher 1,2,3 (Triptych), 2020
Robert Pokorny
aous

Choosing the wall you want to display art on before picking the art itself might seem like putting the cart before the horse, but trust the process. The wall is your canvas, and you can work backwards from there.

When selecting a wall, you’ll want to consider the dimensions, how light moves across it through the day, and what furniture sits below it. These constraints can become useful guideposts for selecting the right works.

But this is an art, not a science, so don’t get too bogged down in specifics.

“There isn’t really a strict rule for the ideal wall, except perhaps to favor the walls your eye is naturally drawn to when you enter a room,” said Sandra Benhamou, a Paris-based art collector and furniture and interior designer. Benhamou is not one to shy away from surprising spaces either. She encourages collectors to think about “hanging a work in an unexpected place, giving a forgotten corner or passageway a new purpose.” Her one suggestion, however, is to avoid walls that face direct sun throughout the day, which could bleach paper works and photographs over time.

Some sunlight, however, should be embraced, not eschewed. Gallerists and artists Nicky and Rob Carter, who run the London gallery space RNat5A, say “changing daylight is absolute magic” for art. In their dining room, they note that the shifting sun transforms the mood throughout the day.

How to choose artworks that belong together

"The Room of Ideas", The Architect’s Room, Geometric Abstraction, Pop and Contemporary Pop, 2025
Neo Bauhaus
GF | Gallery Fedoroff

When hanging a gallery wall, it can be wise to unlearn the impulse to make things match. Too much sameness can feel forced and stale. Instead, invite the possibility for unexpected discovery between seemingly dissimilar works.

“Don’t be afraid to place pieces together that may seem unrelated, whether in style, value, or historical importance,” said Benhamou. “A modest work can become incredibly noble when it finds its rightful place, and a masterpiece doesn’t need to be surrounded by other masterpieces or occupy the center of the wall to shine.”

Others put it more bluntly. “Never match your art to your soft furnishings,” said Rob and Nicky Carter. “Works go together simply because you chose them,” they add.

Mohamed Benhadj, gallery director and curator at Al-Tiba9 gallery in Barcelona, encourages collectors to find relationships between works that are intellectual rather than visual. “A strong gallery wall is usually connected by the idea that relates each piece to another,” he said. That shouldn’t be confined to mediums, either, he adds: “Don’t be afraid to combine painting, photography, and prints.”

Miyauchi, meanwhile, suggests mixing several arrangements until something clicks visually. “Hanging multiple paintings could be compared to a chord in music,” he said. “An unexpected combination might beautifully come together.” He encourages collectors not to over-intellectualize the process to start. “It is more than enough to look at books or the internet and simply imitate what somehow catches your fancy,” he added.

Thinking about scale, spacing, and arrangement

Gathering, 2026
Allison Gildersleeve
Upsilon Gallery

When placing works together in a group, the frames don’t need to match each other. But they should suit each individual artwork.

“I don’t believe a frame should ever be separated from the artwork it belongs to,” Benhamou said. “It should reflect the work’s format, medium, and period.” The Carters agree. “Frame the artwork, not the room.”

Benhadj, who mixes finishes within his own collection—for example, thin natural wood on a set of drawings, a minimalist black frame on a large print, and an ornate gilt frame on a modern oil painting—recommends anchoring variety with one dominant style so the wall gains character without becoming too visually noisy. “I enjoy seeing different frame styles when there is a clear intention behind the selection,” he added.

How to know when to stop

Aura of an Interior, 2023
Degard
Visionary British Museum

Knowing when a gallery wall is complete is both subjective and essential. Benhamou tells collectors not to rush to conclusions. “The most beautiful arrangements evolve over time, just like the collection itself,” she said. The Carters offer a simpler test: “You stop when it stops making you smile.” A gallery wall, experts agree, is never truly permanent. Pieces can move, rotate, and rest until their moment comes back around.

Miyauchi even encourages collectors to rotate artworks over time. “I recommend changing your paintings on special days, such as the summer and winter solstices, birthdays, or Christmas,” he said. “You change them just like you would open a window to let fresh air into a room. The paintings you take down can rest until the timing is right for them again.”

All the experts believe that one key to crafting the perfect gallery wall is leaving it open to the possibilities of the future.

As Benhadj puts it, “what connects well on a particular wall today might connect even better with works that become part of their collection in the next 5 or 10 years.” A gallery wall that feels slightly too today, she said, can be an invitation to discover what’s next.

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Meet the Italian Shoe Designer Who Collects Art by Andy Warhol, Barbara Kruger, and More https://ift.tt/I2ohisk

Walk into a church in Naples, Italy, and you might stumble across a Caravaggio or an Artemisia Gentileschi. For Italian shoe designer and collector Ernesto Esposito, that proximity to beauty shaped everything that followed.

“I grew up in Naples, a city where beauty is not confined to museums but is part of everyday life,” Esposito said. “Art came first. Long before becoming a shoe designer, I was already fascinated by beauty, proportions, and the emotional power of objects.”

Esposito began his career in the 1970s with renowned shoemaker Sergio Rossi. His own collections pair classic silhouettes with more daring designs, including towering open-toe heels in leopard-print pony hair and red patent leather.

Over several decades, he has also built an art collection featuring works by Katharina Grosse, Richard Prince, John Baldessari, Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and George Condo, alongside those by younger painters such as Leonardo Devito and Adam Handler.

For Esposito, collecting is not simply about ownership, taste, or market value. It is a way of living with questions, memories, friendships, and creative risk.

Starting with Warhol

His first acquisition was a limited-edition silkscreen from Warhol’s 1971 “Electric Chair” series.

“I did not choose it because it was fashionable, nor as an investment,” he said. “I bought it because it moved me deeply. It is a work that is at once beautiful, unsettling, and profoundly human.”

That instinct has guided him ever since. “Great art does not provide answers, but instead asks questions that continue to stay with you throughout your life,” he said. “That work defined the direction of my entire collection.”

Growing up amid Naples’s layered history taught Esposito that objects could carry meaning beyond their function. “When I became a designer, I never considered a shoe to be merely a product,” he said. “To me, a shoe is a cultural object, capable of expressing identity, emotion, and creativity.”

He sees a direct connection between art and fashion. “All of my work in fashion has always been guided by the same curiosity and sensitivity that first made me fall in love with art,” he said.

Esposito also resists a simple distinction between craftsman and artist. “Great craftsmen possess artistic sensitivity, while great artists often have extraordinary mastery of technique,” he said. “Excellence is always born from the meeting of imagination and skill.”

Building an art collection of sensibilities

What unifies his collection is not a theme or medium, but a sensibility. “I am drawn to artists who possess an authentic and recognizable language,” he said. “I do not collect a particular style, but rather personalities.”

His approach was shaped in part by the legendary Neapolitan dealer and curator Lucio Amelio. “Meeting Lucio opened an entirely new world to me,” Esposito said. “Through him, I met extraordinary artists and discovered that art does not simply serve to decorate a space, but can change the way we look at and understand reality.”

Collecting, he said, then became “an integral part of the way I live and interpret the world.”

For Esposito, buying art requires conviction. “A true collector is someone who takes responsibility,” he said. “They choose according to their own instinct, not according to market consensus.”

One artist currently holding his attention is De Vito. Esposito admires “the consistency of his research, the quality of his painterly language, and his ability to address contemporary themes without chasing trends.”

Following a young artist’s development, he added, “is one of the most fascinating aspects of collecting.”

Collecting emerging and established artists alongside each other

Little Runner Abduction, 2026
Adam Handler
Trium Art Gallery

He refuses to rank emerging talent against established masters. “The great masters represent the memory and history of art, while emerging artists bring energy, freedom, and unpredictability,” he said.

In a market saturated with spectacle, sincerity still moves him most. “The works that truly stay with us are those still capable of conveying a personal truth,” he said. “Authenticity remains the rarest quality.”

Art’s influence on his footwear is rarely literal. “Sometimes it is a color combination, other times a proportion, or perhaps the courage to make an unexpected decision,” he said. “The influence of art is constant, often unconscious, but always present.”

Designing and collecting may appear to arise from the same impulse, but Esposito experiences them differently. “Designing allows me to create. Collecting allows me to listen,” he said. “When I design, I am the one making decisions. When I collect, I enter into dialogue with someone else’s vision.”

His most recent direct collaboration was a residency with American painter Adam Handler. Handler reminded him of a young Keith Haring, whom Esposito met in New York early in Haring’s career.

“It is not a stylistic comparison,” Esposito said, “but rather the energy, enthusiasm, and total dedication to work that I recognized again in Adam.”

Staged with Trium Art Gallery in Monza, Italy, and Noh-Art, the residency became more than a commission. Esposito credited Naples—its light, history, energy, and openness—with transforming it into “something far deeper than a simple artistic collaboration.”

“The work itself is certainly important, but what truly remains is the experience shared together,” he said. “Artists need places capable of inspiring them, authentic encounters, and human relationships.”

Looking ahead, Esposito imagines future residencies with artists chosen not for their market standing, but for their openness: “an artist capable of being surprised by Naples just as much as Naples could be surprised by them.”

It is from that encounter, he believes, that “the most authentic projects can emerge.”

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Artist Betye Saar dies at 99. https://ift.tt/jlEktsQ

Artist Betye Saar, whose assemblages transformed ephemera and heirlooms into meditations on Black history, racism, memory, and spirituality, died in her sleep on July 26 in Los Angeles, four days before her 100th birthday. Her death was confirmed by Roberts Projects, the Los Angeles gallery that represented her for close to two decades.

“Betye Saar was one of the greatest artists of our time, and it has been an immense honor to work with her for nearly 20 years,” Julie Roberts, co-founder of Roberts Projects, said in a statement. “Her singular vision transformed the course of contemporary art, and her legacy will continue to inspire generations of artists, scholars, and audiences around the world.”

Born Betye Irene Brown in Los Angeles in 1926, Saar was the eldest of three children of Jefferson Maze Brown and Beatrice Lillian Parson. Her father died when she was about five, and her mother moved the family to Pasadena to live with a maternal aunt, Hattie Parson Keys, whose belongings later inspired a series of assemblages made in her honor. Saar spent summers at her paternal grandparents’ home in the Watts neighborhood in L.A., watching artist Simon Rodia construct his monumental architectural sculpture Watts Towers by hand, inspiring Saar’s passion for using found and repurposed materials.

Saar studied design at UCLA and worked for years as an interior decorator, at one point running a studio called Brown and Tann with fellow designer Curtis Tann. In 1952, she married ceramicist Richard Saar; the couple settled in Laurel Canyon, Hollywood Hills, and had three daughters, Lezley, Alison, and Tracye, before divorcing in the late 1960s. Saar remained in the Laurel Canyon house for the rest of her life.

The Long Memory, 1998
Betye Saar
CLAMP

Her turn toward fine art came almost by chance. Enrolled at Cal State Long Beach to pursue a teaching credential, Saar wandered into the printmaking studio and immediately changed course. “The move into fine art, it was liberating,” she later told the Los Angeles Times. “It gave me freedom to experiment.” Her early prints carried mystical and occult overtones, drawn from books on alchemy and palmistry, and she began framing them in old window frames scavenged from junk shops.

A 1967 exhibition of Joseph Cornell’s boxed assemblages at the Pasadena Art Museum pushed Saar toward three dimensions. In 1969, she completed Black Girl’s Window, built around a salvaged window frame layering autobiographical imagery, astrology, and racial identity. Trips to Chicago’s Field Museum, where she immersed herself in African art, and to Haiti in the early 1970s, where she explored voodoo and folk magic, further shaped her visual language.

Saar’s best-known work, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972), transformed a stereotypical “mammy” figurine—armed with a rifle and grenade—into what she described as a warrior against servitude. First shown at the Rainbow Sign, a Black cultural center in Berkeley, California, near the headquarters of the Black Panthers, the piece connected Saar to the Black Arts Movement and led to a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975. Activist Angela Davis later credited it with helping to spur the Black women’s movement. “I wanted to empower her,” Saar said in a 2015 interview. “I wanted to make her a warrior.” The original assemblage now belongs to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

4 Doors in a Window (Bellagio, Italy - 1994), 2004
Betye Saar
Roberts Projects

Over the following decades, Saar continued mining flea markets, yard sales, and family heirlooms, producing works including Records for Hattie (1975), Mojotech (1987), and the altarpiece Wings of Morning (1992), alongside installations like House of Fortune (1988). Scholar Kellie Jones, who curated the 2011 exhibition “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980” at the Hammer Museum, said in a TK that Saar’s reach extended well beyond the U.S.: “She has works with Mexican milagros, she has titles in Spanish, she at certain points has Asian influence and Haitian influence... She was a person in the world.” Her practice inspired a generation of artists, including her daughter, the artist Alison Saar. Saar’s work is held in the collections of more than 80 institutions worldwide, and she had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Fondazione Prada in Milan, as well as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the California African American Museum. “I’ve always done what I did and never felt I was competing with what was going on,” she told the Los Angeles Times of her career.

She continued working into her late 90s, including a commissioned installation at the Huntington Library’s gardens, made at 96 and now on view as “Betye Saar: Drifting Toward Twilight” through November 2027. “Even in death those things can be really beautiful,” she said of the installation in an accompanying documentary. Two other shows remain on view during her centennial year: “Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar” at Roberts Projects, in Los Angeles, through August 22, and “Betye Saar’s Black Dolls” at the New York Historical Society, through October 4. Her works are currently included in “Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions” at the Morgan Library & Museum.

Saar is survived by her daughters, Lezley Saar, Alison Saar, and Tracye Saar-Cavanaugh, as well as six grandchildren, including the artist Maddy Inez, and a pet tortoise named Rojo. Her artistic legacy is now overseen by the Betye Saar Legacy Group, a coalition of scholars and curators the artist assembled in 2025 with Roberts Projects. A biography by Zoé Whitley, co-curator of “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” is expected in 2027.

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Guggenheim Abu Dhabi announces 2026 opening date. https://ift.tt/DpBNu1i

The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will open to the public on December 11, Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism has announced. First announced in 2006, the museum is one of the most anticipated museum openings in decades.

Designed by the late Frank Gehry, the building is defined by ten sculptural cones rising to heights of up to 88 metres. Nine are surrounded by stainless steel mesh, providing natural ventilation and shade while giving the structure its distinctive skyline. Its 30 galleries, across 11,600 square meters of interior space, are connected by a central atrium, with a further 23,000 square meters of outdoor exhibition areas. The total built-up area totals 80,000 square metres, the largest of the four Guggenheim locations.

The museum will focus on modern and contemporary art from the 1960s to the present, with a particular emphasis on North Africa, and West and South Asia. Rather than presenting art chronologically, the collection will be organised around thematic and geographic groupings. Among the sections are “Abstractions,” “Popular Culture,” “Land,” and “Language and Storytelling.” The collection has been in development since 2009.

Guggenheim Abu Dhabi joins the Guggenheim Foundation’s constellation of museums in New York, Venice, and Bilbao, while maintaining, its organisers say, a distinct identity rooted in the cultural and historical position of the United Arab Emirates. It is located on Saadiyat Island, where several high profile museums have opened in recent years, such as Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Zayed National Museum, Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi, and teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi.

“The Guggenheim Foundation is proud and delighted to be a longstanding partner with the Department of Culture and Tourism –Abu Dhabi in shaping a museum of contemporary art of magnificent scope and aspiration,” said Dr. Mariët Westermann, director and CEO of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, in a statement. “The museum’s art collection is uniquely local and global, centered in the region but with works from all continents.”

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National Portrait Gallery acquires Harley Weir’s portrait of Charli XCX. https://ift.tt/lRXQZ3Y

The National Portrait Gallery in London has acquired a portrait of pop star Charli XCX by British photographer Harley Weir. The photograph, which was shot in 2024, will be added to the museum’s collection this week. The untitled work shows the singer leaning against a wall in a white crop top and unbuttoned black jeans and is now on view in the gallery’s History Makers Now space, which spotlights figures who have shaped contemporary culture.

The image became one of the defining pictures of Charli’s Brat era, the 2024 album that turned her into a mainstream phenomenon on the strength of its candor and “debauched swagger,” as the BBC described it. The acquisition was funded by a gift from the Bukhman Foundation.

“Harley Weir has developed a distinctive photographic language that combines intimacy with a powerful sense of presence,” said Brandei Estes, the gallery’s senior curator of photographs. “We are delighted to acquire this striking portrait of Charli XCX, which captures one of the defining cultural figures of her generation.”

The acquisition arrives the same week Charli released her eighth album, Music, Fashion, Film, built around chopped-up guitar samples and distorted melodies that find her reflecting on fame and artistic identity in Brat’s aftermath.

Portraits of pop stars have been grabbing headlines recently. In March, the National Portrait Gallery acquired West End Girl (Lily Allen) (2025), a painting by Spanish artist Nieves González that doubled as the cover art for Allen’s album of the same name. Charli herself was previously the subject of a portrait by painter Issy Wood, commissioned for the November 2025 cover of Vanity Fair.

Beyond music, Charli has been expanding into film, with recent roles in the Polish drama Erupcja, the ensemble film Sacrifice alongside Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Evans, and the mockumentary The Moment, based on the release of the Brat album. She is set to headline the Reading and Leeds festivals in the U.K. next month before a North American tour in the fall.

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Georgia O’Keeffe Ghost Ranch paintings to go on display in the U.K. for the first time in 2027. https://ift.tt/4eXqS2o

The Courtauld Gallery in London will open “Georgia O’Keeffe: Ghost Ranch” in October 2027, an exhibition of nearly two dozen works that explore how the American artist’s New Mexico property shaped her painting practice. Most of the works have never been exhibited in the U.K., according to the Guardian, which first reported the news. Only six of the roughly two dozen paintings in the exhibition have been previously exhibited in Britain, it revealed.

Ghost Ranch, a remote property in the high desert north of Santa Fe, became O’Keeffe’s summer home starting in 1934, when she began renting a room on the 21,000-acre estate before eventually purchasing it. “As soon as I saw it, that was my country,” she once said. “I’d never seen anything like it before, but it fitted to me exactly.”

Dr. Karen Serres, senior curator of paintings at the Courtauld, told the Guardian that O’Keeffe’s relationship to Ghost Ranch remains under-recognized in Britain despite its centrality to her work. “Ghost Ranch was such an important part of her life, and it illuminates a large part of her art in general,” Serres said, pointing to works like Red and Yellow Cliffs (1940) and Gerald’s Tree I (1937) as direct responses to the surrounding landscape.

The show also arrives against a history of uneven critical reception to O’Keeffe in the U.K. In 1993, a Hayward Gallery exhibition drew dismissive reviews from British critics, and more recently, the reception to her 2016 Tate Modern show was largely framed around disputing assumptions that her flower paintings depicted female genitalia. “She’s known as just this formidable female artist,” said Serres. “But actually seeing her work, understanding what she’s about, I don’t think we are there yet.”

The Courtauld exhibition follows a fresh wave of attention to O’Keeffe elsewhere. The Detroit Institute of Arts opens “Georgia O’Keeffe: Architecture” on September 11th, an exhibition of nearly 40 works examining her engagement with the built environment, from Manhattan skyscrapers to New Mexico adobe structures, anchored by Stables (1932), which is owned by the museum. On October 3rd, Hauser & Wirth inaugurates its new Palo Alto gallery with “Calder | O’Keeffe,” the first exhibition devoted to the artist’s decades-long friendship with Alexander Calder, developed with the Calder Foundation and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. A documentary about the artist, directed by Academy Award– and Emmy Award–winning filmmakers Paul Wagner and Ellen Casey Wagner, was also released earlier this year.

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Legendary Gallerist Claes Nordenhake on Artists, Arguments, and 50 Years in the Art Business https://ift.tt/05iaVIT

“As a young gallerist, I was a cleaner, a security guard, an interiordesigner, a carpenter, a courier, a warehouse manager, and a stock clerk,” said Claes Nordenhake, the Swedish art dealer whose eponymous enterprise, Galerie Nordenhake, celebrates its half-century this year.

Over five decades, the business has grown from a modest space opened in 1976 in Malmö on the southern coast of Sweden, showing contemporary art—favoring Minimalist, often conceptual, works—into a powerhouse brand with galleries in Stockholm, Berlin, and Mexico City.

Talking to Artsy from his Berlin branch, Nordenhake’s stocktake of his early duties doesn’t end there. Starting out, he was obliged to be a photographer, philosopher, business strategist, psychotherapist, and a divorce counselor, he explained. He could be a “sympathetic drinking buddy” one day and an “arrogant bastard” the next. And, when the occasion allowed, he was an art dealer.

Roots in Malmö

Nordenhake was born in 1948 and grew up in the Skåne region of southern Sweden, where his family owned several quarries celebrated for their Ebony Black granite—a material highly sought after by artists such as Isamu Noguchi and Max Bill. “Coming from a rather conventional business family, sort of a bourgeois upbringing, the artists that I encountered offered another different view on life,” he noted.

And there was art at home. “My old man had a collection of mainly Swedish artists, but at some point, he got absolutely fascinated by Lucio Fontana. He had three paintings: one red, one white, and one blue. Fontana in the 1960s was like the ultimate avant-garde.”

Green Felt Piece, 1983-84
Robert Morris
Galerie Nordenhake

Wandrelief, 1988
Ulrich Rückriem
Galerie Nordenhake

Nordenhake initially trained as a lawyer but quit his studies to pursue his interest in art. I suggest that Malmö in the 1970s could hardly have been a center of Conceptual art. “No, for sure. But the advantage of Malmö was that it was very close to the rest of Europe,” Nordenhake explained. “I would drive my car, and if I left Malmö in the morning, I would be in Cologne in the afternoon or evening. It would take the same time from Malmö to Stockholm.”

He targeted a “cosmopolitan” clientele. “There were maybe five collectors who were interested in international art and wanted to be part of that scene,” he said. “I was convinced of certain things. I was very interested in Concrete art…and I made these few collectors follow my interest.” He kept costs low—“hand to mouth”—and acquired a reputation for showing monochrome paintings by internationally renowned artists such as Robert Mangold, Alan Uglow, and Marcia Hafif, as well as Minimalist sculptures by Robert Morris and Ulrich Rückriem.

Closer to home, he championed the work of the Swedish modernist painter Olle Bærtling. “He was absolutely exceptional,” recalled Nordenhake.

“He was working with colors that, I mean…the blue would never be the blue of the sky, the green never the green of the grass. They were sorts of fields of energy.”

How Nordenhake expanded its footprint

The business moved to Stockholm in the mid-1980s, when Nordenhake was offered a “sensational space” in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts building. “I’m sure there were a lot of discussions in the gallery about whether one should let the enemy into the house?” he said, laughing, referring to the inclusion—or contamination—of a commercial gallery in a museum context. The rooms allowed him to present larger sculptures, including works by Richard Serra.

In 2000 he opened in Berlin, when the city had become a magnet for both artists and gallerists taking advantage of the low rents for studios and a sense of zeitgeist. “I thought it would have been easier,” he recalled. “It was an experiment to come with three kids and my wife and move the entire family. I come from a shit-kicking little town in southern Sweden, so I have no experience of big cities.”

At the time, Berlin’s reputation as an artistic hotbed following the fall of the Wall was more than a cliché, said Nordenhake, at least to begin with. “From 1990 to 2010, even a young artist could find an apartment and a studio rather easily,” Nordenhake said. Collectors would visit from abroad to experience the scene.

Rents rose over the subsequent years, and the tone shifted. But Nordenhake has helped to foster a collegiate atmosphere among the city’s galleries. In 2005, he co-founded (with Max Hetzler) the first Gallery Weekend Berlin, which, two decades later, now includes some 50 participating galleries and has become a template copied in major cities around the world.

Nordenhake opened a third gallery in 2018 in Mexico City, on the suggestion of his former intern, Toni Sadurní Viñas (the gallery’s current director). “Mexico City is the new Berlin,” he declared. “

At the beginning of this century and until recently, Berlin was a place where artists, even young artists, could afford both a studio and an apartment. Which is still the case in Mexico City.” And, he noted, the general public appreciates its artistic heritage, “from the pre-Columbian artifacts to Frida Kahlo and the muralists. Art means something for Mexicans.”

Lessons from 50 years in the art trade

Is it easy to work with artists over a long period? “I would say usually no. But of course, there are always exceptions,” he smiled. The artist-gallerist relationship is similar to a “marriage,” he said, with all the “conflicts” that implies. And being a gallerist is a work in progress. “You learn stuff,” he noted, adding that his opinion on artists’ work can change over time. “I’m much more generous than I used to be. My art world has gotten bigger.”

“Contemporary art is a notoriously slippery commodity in which to do business,” said Philip Hook, author of Rogues’ Gallery, a History of Art and its Dealers. “Very few art dealers remain at the forefront of the avant-garde beyond one generation.” Claes’s son, Sten, is now a director at Galerie Nordenhake, offering a future path for a gallery that needs exceptional mental and commercial agility to continue interpreting the ever-changing new.

This is illustrated by the gallery’s 50th anniversary group exhibitions, staged across its three locations, showing artists from its past and present roster, from Bærtling’s last known painting, Ksard (1980), to newly commissioned works by Lap-See Lam (winner of the prestigious Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award last year).

And while he is aware of the challenges—both commercially and intellectually—Nordenhake stated that “curiosity is the most amazing driving force. I’m a traveling salesman and a schoolteacher.” Just two more professions to add to his list.

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