Richard Saltoun Gallery is opening a new gallery space in New York’s Upper East Side on May 2.
The new location at 19 E. 66th Street will be the third for the eponymous London-based post-war and contemporary art gallery, which was founded in 2012. It opened a second space in Rome’s Via Margutta in 2022. nagapoker
The inaugural show at the New York location will be a showcase of African Canadian mixed-media artist Jan Wade in her first-ever solo show in the United States. It will precede the retrospective exhibition Soul Power at the Art Gallery of Hamilton opening on June 27.
In a press statement, Saltoun called it an “honor and privilege” to open a space in “a city renowned for hosting some of the most important exhibitions of the past 100 years.”
ARTnews spoke with director Aloisia Leopardi about the new space, what she’s most excited about, and why the gallery felt now was the right time to come to New York.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
ARTnews: What was the planning process for this new location? How did Covid-19 affect that?
Aloisia Leopiardi: The conversations had been going on for a long time. There’s moments in which things like Covid-19 slow [business] down. But this slowing down actually creates new opportunities. And that’s when we thought of opening a gallery in New York.
Actually, it happened quite fast. Richard and I were in New York for the Independent [Art Fair] last May. We both hadn’t been in a long time. And we were both like, “Wow, New York always has that feeling.” nagapoker
I think it’s something that as Europeans, living in London or spending lots of time in Italy, when you go to New York, everything is so vibrant. Everything moves at twice the speed. It’s really fascinating. So we immediately started thinking we need to open a gallery in New York. At first, it was more of a dream initially. And then we’ve been contacted about this opportunity.
We’re opening the gallery in this ex-gallery space that freed up recently. We made an offer on the space just at the end of the year, and the offer got accepted, weirdly enough.
Lots of galleries closed during Covid-19. I think it helped us in this case because we were able to make an offer, enter, get the space.
We’ve had the space from January until now. It’s been renovated a bit. We’re very excited. The process has been kind of simple in a way. It’s been very smooth.
We’re really excited to be opening in May, with Jan Wade, who is our Canadian artist. It’s going to be the first solo show she’s ever had in in America.
After 10 years in London and then opening in Rome, what do you feel like you learned the most from those experiences that you will bring to the New York space?
First of all, our program is quite unique. We focus a lot on women artists. Now, it’s something that has become more and more common, but if you think about 10 years ago, no one was really showing women artists.
The first reason why we also chose to open in Rome is because in the ’60s and ’70s, there were fantastic artists working in Italy, which is similar, to New York to the US, if you think about it, it’s like two different periods, two different groups forming in the cities at different times.
Women were not represented at the time. Working with estates, you manage to find huge bodies of works that you can work with. So Rome, in that sense, was a very special place for us because we really rediscovered lots of artists we would have never discovered if we hadn’t opened a gallery in Rome. like Romany Eveleigh, who is going to be in the Venice Biennale this year. She was completely unknown until we started working with her.
We hope to do the same: bring our artists to New York, bring our program that is heavily focused on historical women artists, but also discover new artists at the same time. It gives us the possibility of spending more time there doing studio visits and estates visits.
In terms of difficulties, yes, of course, there are thousands of difficulties, especially the beginning: finding your way around, building a new team from scratch. Each one of us will have to work way harder, that’s for sure. Especially at the beginning, traveling back and forth between the three spaces, thinking of a program that would fit. Also every program is different. So it has to be catered to the audience it’s being presented to.
But New York, in that sense, also has amazing curators. We collaborate a lot with curators. Often we invite curators to either work with a gallery artist or present group exhibitions. So the location will also facilitate a lot of the dialogue with a more US-based crowd which could include curators and artists.
We already represent a few artists that are based in the US so that will give us the opportunity of really working with their works in more depth and be able to do more exhibitions.
For now, we were just coming to New York for art fairs. It will be nice to have a real presence for collectors also to see that we’re investing in New York and we’ll be able to see them more often. They’ll be able to have a sense of what our program looks like by attending our exhibitions. I think that will make a huge difference in terms of our credibility as well with building stronger relationships with artists, curators, and collectors. nagapoker