Around the same time in 2017 that the French president, Emmanuel Macron, promised that the repatriation of African artifacts from French museums would be a “top priority” for his government, Cécile Fakhoury discovered a number that truly shocked and unsettled her: About 90 percent of the sales from her gallery in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, were to international collectors.
Considering that her reason for setting up Galerie Cécile Fakhoury had been to sell West African contemporary art to regional collectors and help strengthen a local art scene, it felt to her that history was repeating itself. Read more
LONDON — Amrita Jhaveri gently jokes that she was rescued by a Bollywood star. When the actress Sonam Kapoor Ahuja, a client of Ms. Jhaveri’s art gallery, approached her in the summer of 2020 to ask if she would like to use Ms. Kapoor Ahuja’s London office as something of an exhibition space, Ms. Jhaveri was intrigued.
“She said, ‘I have this space, you can use the walls as you like,’” said Ms. Jhaveri, who is based in London but who, like Ms. Kapoor Ahuja, used to travel back to India frequently (she and her sister own Jhaveri Contemporary, in Mumbai). Read more
It was an odd yet endearing interaction that would likely have stuck out in anyone’s memory. While in the countryside outside Oaxaca, Mexico, almost a decade ago, the Mexican artist Rodrigo Hernández saw a pigeon on the street. All of a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere, a monkey came up and gave the bird a hug. Read more
LONDON — For fans of Pre-Raphaelite art — the mid-19th-century London-born Victorian artistic movement — Martin Beisly’s gallery in St. James’s is a fantastical treasure trove of sumptuous paintings, drawings and sculpture. Read more