Brazilian Artists’ New Global Prominence Couldn’t Come at a Better Time for Its Faltering Galleries

The Art Newspaper offers numbers to illustrate the emerging global interest in Brazilian artists and their art. With reports from galleries that 2016 sales in country are down by a third, Brazil’s art market lies abroad for the time being:

Latitude, the platform for Brazilian art abroad, issued a report on 40 Brazilian galleries in 2015, which found that they earned 85% of revenues in Brazil in 2014, and private Brazilian collectors accounted for 73% of overall sales volume. But it also noted increasing sales abroad, especially to the Tate in London, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Guggenheim in New York.

A number of galleries abroad have had confidence in Brazil’s artists for years: Alison Jacques Gallery has represented the estate of Lygia Clark since 2010, while Lehmann Maupin’s relationship with Adriana Varejão dates back to the 1990s. Now some of the art world’s biggest players are entering the market. Varejão is scheduled to show her work at Gagosian Gallery in Rome, and Hauser & Wirth, which already represents the Mira Schendel estate, will mount its first exhibition of Lygia Pape in London this month (23 September–19 November). The gallery’s senior director, Graham Steele, is confident that the Brazilian market will return, but the gallery’s focus is “all about” institutions and collections abroad. “It’s very interesting to be representing such influential artists, who, outside the curatorial world, are substantially less well known than the ‘American’ story of New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Rome and Berlin,” he says. “There’s no time like the present to rewrite art history.”

Can foreign collectors and museums sustain Brazil’s art market? (The Art Newspaper)