On Saturday, the Brazilian twins Os Gemeos, a.k.a. Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo, presented “Miss You” at West Hollywood’s Prism Gallery.

A two-story extravaganza of color, texture and sensation, the exhibit transformed the gallery completely, transporting an eager crowd of fans into the vivid fantasy world the duo has envisioned together since childhood. Besides dozens of richly hued paintings and several murals, there were a number of installations, beginning with a square floating head in the entryway, which featured a hollow core with a mirrored infinity space inside it. The dimly lit lower floor was embellished by dozens of head-shaped lamps with faces spraypainted on them, some contemplating the various paintings, and others staring toward the sky. A side room was dressed out as a living space, with a bed, refrigerator and assorted bric-a-brac forming the backdrop for a wall-sized interactive screen playing fractal video over which floated square yellow heads which could be grabbed and moved around the screen. Above the staircase, which was graced by a haunting mural of a man clad only in a sequined ski mask reaching out to the endless sky around him, a cascade of ski masks transformed into lamps glowed down upon the proceedings. Upstairs, the entire Pandolfo family was enlisted into the project, with a selection of woven and embroidered pieces created by the twins’ mother, and an evocative array of graphite doodles by their older brother forming the backdrop one of the show’s most compelling pieces, a painting of a smiling boy sinking into a pudding-like sea of heartfelt imagery. The twins themselves sported matching suits with ties and shoes accented by the yellow faces that are emblematic of their paired vision. According to reports, the entire show sold out to a series of high-profile collectors long before the opening, which is not surprising given the consistent quality of their vision and craftsmanship, not to mention the reverence they elicit from their fellow artists.

Dailydujour || Amanda Erlanson

By LAURA M. HOLSON

Published: October 02, 2011

TO describe the retrospective of Richard Hambleton’s art that was recently held at the Phillips de Pury & Company galleries as a zoo doesn’t even take into account the woman who strapped a bug-eyed monkey puppet to her chest. About 2,000 partygoers were crowding two floors at the auction house on Park Avenue, including wealthy Upper East Siders and a parade of models from New York Fashion Week, many sipping from flutes of Champagne.

Theodora Richards, the daughter of Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, shimmied around the room in a second skin of stretchy black lace, while the billionaire Stephen A. Schwarzman grazed past Alexa Chung and Karolina Kurkova. Around 9:20 p.m., Mr. Hambleton, the famously reclusive graffiti artist who descended into obscurity after the 1980s art gold rush went bust, arrived with a bandage on his nose, seemingly dazed by the crowd.

The real draw that night, though, was Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld, 26, and his business partner, Andy Valmorbida, 31, the show’s young curators and art dealers, who are reviving interest in Mr. Hambleton’s paintings. Mr. Valmorbida, the Australian heir to a food and coffee fortune, bounced around the gallery, chatting with buyers. Mr. Restoin Roitfeld, the son of Carine Roitfeld, the former editor in chief of French Vogue, stayed mostly in place, his curious Kewpie-doll eyes scanning the crowd.

It was a different scene two evenings earlier on the Lower East Side, where art dealers were opening their galleries for the beginning of the fall art season. Young 20-somethings, not recognizably rich or famous, wandered past the small storefronts in fedoras and jeans. At the Rachel Uffner Gallery on Orchard Street, about 150 people packed into a space the size of a large one-bedroom apartment and drank from cans of Tsingtao beer. The artist Sara Greenberger Rafferty’s opening show included work made using photographs, Plexiglas and acetate. And she hugged well-wishers that night despite a faulty air-conditioner that left most sticky.

But Ms. Uffner, 33, has more in common with her uptown peers than appearances suggest. Though one gallery owner may show an artist whose work now sells for $25,000 or more and another may show unknown artists whose work still goes largely unnoticed by big-name collectors or established critics, both are part of a new generation of New York gallerists who are slowly transforming the city’s art scene.

“There are new galleries popping up all over,” Ms. Uffner said, taking a break from the evening’s festivities. “People are beginning to recognize we have legitimate places to show.”

When the stock market collapsed in fall 2008, many people feared the art market would be dragged down with it. But art auction houses, including Christie’s and Sotheby’s, are currently reporting healthy business. Individual prices are often strong: At Phillips de Pury in May, one of Warhol’s famous images of Elizabeth Taylor sold for $26.9 million: about $3 million more than a similar work at the height of the market at Christie’s in 2007. And while Larry Gagosian and other blue-chip dealers continue to dominate sales for the wealthiest collectors, gallery owners who have opened their doors in the past few years seem to be thriving despite the persistent recession.

The New Art Dealers Alliance, a national organization of art professionals or gallery owners in business less than 10 years, said that nearly one-third of its 300 members are based in New York City.

Choosing which up-and-coming gallerists to profile for this article involved considering art dealers who either opened New York galleries or began working together within the last three years. Then art critics, gallery owners and art collectors were interviewed to narrow the field of gallerists who represented promising artists or had an interesting take on contemporary art.

The final cut included Mr. Restoin Roitfeld, with that famous last name and the prized connections that come with it; two dealers positioning themselves as the angry young men of the art world; and a scrappy out-of-towner hoping to make it big in New York.

Despite their differences, all share the need to actually make a living at this. Owning an art gallery is an expensive proposition. That is why many new galleries are on the Lower East Side, where rent can range from $2,000 to $10,000 a month, compared with $25,000 or more for a gallery in Chelsea. (Ms. Uffner says she pays less than $4,000.) Many new gallerists, like Laurel Gitlen, find their art spaces after walking around the neighborhood. Some, like Mr. Valmorbida and Mr. Restoin Roitfeld, have forsaken the traditional gallery space, choosing instead to hold exhibitions when and where they choose. (Artists generally earn 50 percent of the sale price of their work at galleries, while the gallery owner might earn 30 percent to 50 percent of a sale, depending on discounts, or whether an art adviser of another dealer is involved.)

Michele Maccarone, whose West Village gallery is well respected among the junior set, is worried that, as larger galleries continue to become more brand-conscious or the economy continues to slide, emerging gallerists might lose their nerve. “I opened 10 years ago, and it was down and dirty,” she said. “But even I’m playing it safe myself. That punkness and rawness, it really doesn’t exist anymore.” But at least, for now, she said, “people are trying to keep it real.”

Ramiken Crucible

If Marcel Duchamp had a mischievous little brother today, he would probably be a lot like Mike Egan. Last year, this art-handler-turned-dealer helped organize the Art Handling Olympics, a competition among Mr. Egan’s brawny peers, roughly 50 in all, who bubble-wrapped paintings and hung 60-pound blocks of lead in front of 200 spectators at his gallery. And in September, the same night other galleries around the Lower East Side celebrated the opening of the art season, showing work that included photographs of people dressed in tutus and a sculpture comprising trophies, Mr. Egan hosted a screening of the disturbing cult film “Trash Humpers.” (No metaphor there.)

Fed up with New York’s commercial gallery ethos, Mr. Egan, 29, and Blaize Lehane, 32, who both worked at the now closed Goff + Rosenthal in the mid-2000s, partnered in January in Ramiken Crucible, a gallery originally founded in 2009 by Mr. Egan in an illegal Lower East Side basement. Liv Tyler and the artist Terence Koh showed up once to hear the funereal songs of Salem, a Michigan band with a devoted downtown following. Now aboveground and next door to a liquor store on Chinatown’s fringe, Mr. Egan and Mr. Lehane seem to delight in thumbing their noses at the so-called art intelligentsia.

“As an art dealer, you should spit on history, wipe it away and find something new,” Mr. Egan said.

The duo’s taste tends toward the comically subversive. Ramiken Crucible’s new show, “Stud,” featuring the artist Gavin Kenyon, is composed of a large-scale cast-iron axe with a bulbous handle that resembles a fleshy limb. And this summer, they exhibited “Vandal Lust” by Andra Ursuta, a 10-foot catapult made of wood and cardboard flanked by a replica of the artist’s lifeless body after being hurled into a wall.

Mr. Egan began representing Ms. Ursuta, whom he is now dating, after she sent him an unsolicited e-mail asking him to check out her Web site. “Every artist is scraping by, trying to get some attention for their work,” he said.

Mr. Egan studied at New York’s School of Visual Arts; Mr. Lehane has a computer science degree from Boston University. Together, they project a kind of us-against-the-world image. “There is almost an energy, anger even, between us,” Mr. Lehane said.

Kate Werble Gallery

When Kate Werble opened a space to show art in West SoHo two weeks before the financial collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, she was given a sage piece of advice: “People said you have to put at least one artist up on your Web site,” she said. So she listed John Lehr, a photographer whose work has shown at the Museum of Modern Art, and whom she had met years earlier while organizing a group show for a friend. Months later, she got a second piece of advice: “People said you can’t really represent just one artist.”

Those were tough days. But Ms. Werble, 31, took her time picking artists and now represents a stable of nine, including Mr. Lehr, a move that seems to have paid off. In December, she was awarded a top prize for curatorial presentation at the New Art Dealers Alliance show in Miami.

“Werble’s display stood out for the caliber of its assortment of artwork playing on the tradition of Minimalist art,” the art Web site Artinfo said then.

Unlike some gallerists who demand that only represented artists be promoted in-house, Ms. Werble had a more relaxed approach. “I wanted to use the space in a way that artists came together,” she said. During the lean early years, she invited two artists each month to show their work, a savvy business move, as some of them, like the conceptual artist Luke Stettner, stayed on. He has a solo exhibition at Ms. Werble’s gallery this month.

Last February, Ms. Werble held a solo show for Anna Betbeze, who teaches at Yale and applies dye and watercolor to wool rugs that are ripped, burned or cut until they resemble psychedelic animal hides. In May, one of Ms. Betbeze’s pieces was included alongside works by Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg in a show organized by the Palazzo Grassi, the Venice museum run by the foundation of the French billionaire François Pinault.

Ms. Werble lives with Christopher Chiappa, another artist she represents. But she is quick to point out that she shows no favoritism. “I love all my artists,” she said with a giggle. “I’d sleep with them all.”

Andy Valmorbida and Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld

In a starry field, Mr. Valmorbida and Mr. Restoin Roitfeld are perhaps the most luminous. Mr. Restoin Roitfeld, who grew up in Paris, has a fan blog (I Want to Be a Roitfeld) that chronicles the goings-on of his high-profile family, including his sister, Julia. And Mr. Valmorbida has reportedly dated Lindsay Lohan and the supermodel Rachel Hunter.

After dabbling and dropping out of the movie business (Mr. Restoin Roitfeld) and finance (Mr. Valmorbida), each began consulting on and dealing in art. They joined forces in 2009 after the art dealer Rick Librizzi introduced them to the all-but-forgotten Mr. Hambleton, a contemporary, if not exactly a peer, of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Artists from the 1980s, the two surmised, were due for a comeback.

Mr. Hambleton “had refused to work with any dealer,” Mr. Restoin Roitfeld said, “so no one had done anything for him.”

They spent three months scouring galleries for his paintings, buying them at low prices that they hoped would rise once they began promoting Mr. Hambleton’s work.

Instead of starting their own gallery, though, the two decided to market the artist’s work with a series of glamorous global art parties in Milan, Moscow, London and Cannes, paid for by corporate sponsors and attended by many of their famous friends. Their two-year effort with Mr. Hambleton culminated in a Fashion Week soiree, sponsored by Giorgio Armani, and where they showed 55 of Mr. Hambleton’s paintings.

“Andy, come on, you have to go!” Mr. Restoin Roitfeld exclaimed impatiently that night to Mr. Valmorbida, as he dragged his colleague by the arm across the crowded gallery. A buyer was interested in “Horse & Rider, 2006,” which Mr. Valmorbida owned. For 10 minutes, the affable Mr. Valmorbida regaled the man with stories of the artist, waving his hands in the air, his body rocking with restless energy. Mr. Restoin Roitfeld watched with keen interest.

That night, collectors bought all 12 paintings that were for sale, with an average price of $75,000. “When we started, people laughed, saying, you need to start a gallery,” Mr. Valmorbida said. “But we never saw ourselves as part of the traditional art world.”

Laurel Gitlen

In 2005, Ms. Gitlen founded a contemporary art space in Portland, Ore., called Small A Projects, which had a loyal following. So when she moved to Manhattan three years later with her husband, Samuel Richardson, the head brewer at Greenpoint Beer Works in Brooklyn, many of the artists she had worked with in Portland agreed to join her at a new Broome Street gallery.

One of this ready group was Jessica Jackson Hutchins, who uses ceramic, old furniture and papier-mâché to create large-scale pieces, including “Couch for a Long Time,” which was included in the 2010 biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The two met when Ms. Hutchins called Ms. Gitlen and asked how to ship some sculpture. “Connections were easy to make in Portland,” Ms. Gitlen, 35, said. Later, she secured a studio visit after she ran into the artist at the grocery store. Ms. Hutchins’s work now sells for $7,000 to $50,000 and is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

Another artist, the Richmond, Va.-based sculptor and performer Corin Hewitt, recently had a solo exhibition at the Whitney. Ms. Gitlen worked with him in 2007 when she exhibited his piece “Weavings,” for which he built an enclosed space that viewers could look inside and see the artist making sculpture and taking pictures. Ms. Gitlen introduced him to curators at the Seattle Art Museum, which in 2009 displayed the artist’s photographs from the performance.

A student of art history, Ms. Gitlen seeks strong relationships with museum curators. “I come from a curatorial background, so I am looking for artists who will have a place in the historical conversation,” she said.

But she prefers to remain mostly quiet, unlike in the 1980s when art dealers like Mary Boone were often more controversial than the artists they represented. “These days, I don’t know if you want to have a personality or you want the gallery to have it,” Ms. Gitlen said.

Rachel Uffner Gallery

Rachel Uffner, 33, has hit most of the art world’s marks. After graduating from Washington University in St. Louis in 2000 with a bachelor’s degree in art history and painting, she earned a coveted job at Christie’s. After that she worked for a private collector and, in 2003, joined the D’Amelio Terras gallery in Chelsea, where she tended the front-desk phones. By the mid-2000s, she had worked her way up to become gallery director. Ms. Uffner even wanted to be an artist at one point. “But I never had the rigor of spending the day in the studio by myself,” she said. “I liked being out with other people.”

So she started her own gallery, with pieces that cost mostly $3,000 to $10,000. “I do like being the conduit between two worlds,” she said.

In 2007, she saw the plaster and paper works of the little-known Hilary Harnischfeger in a contemporary art journal and tracked her down. Ms. Uffner courted her after leaving D’Amelio Terras and signed her the summer before she started her gallery, where Ms. Harnischfeger has already had two solo shows. Ms. Uffner’s first exhibition, in 2008, featured Roger White, the painter, writer and co-founder of the journal Paper Monument, and was scheduled within days of the Lehman Brothers collapse. “People were comfortable spending in the hundreds of dollars, not thousands,” she said. “I thought I would go back to school and become a dentist.”

She scheduled a second show for Mr. White last year, and his works sold out. Ms. Uffner also represents the conceptual artist Sara Greenberger Rafferty, whose work is now in the permanent collections of MoMA and the Whitney.

“Artists and their art dealers are a lot like kids and parents who have weird dynamics,” Ms. Greenberger Rafferty said at the September opening of her new show. “But we are the same generation. I never feel sheepish about saying what I think. At a more established gallery, you are lower on the totem pole.”

Sydney City Council has been accused of vandalism after a visiting American artist has controversially painted Tank Stream Way near Pitt Street in the CBD.

Artist Barry McGee, well known for his street art across the US since the 1980s, has been given $15,000 of local council funding to paint a wall as part of the Art & About festival that takes art out of the gallery setting and into the streets of Sydney.

7News says that McGee was given permission to paint a certain wall along Tank Stream Way, but has painted another wall by mistake.

Sydney City Council has reportedly apologised for the artist.

Critics are claiming Barry McGee’s artwork is glorified vandalism. The art community supports the work saying taste in art is personal.

“I think it’s subjective, art is very subjective. If we all thought the same thing it would be a very boring world.” says Gail Minervini, Director of Art and About.

Alternatively Shayne Mallard, Sydney City Councillor says, “Well, I see no artistic merit, this is just graffiti that ordinarily the council spends hundreds of thousands, in fact more than a million dollars a year to scrub off the walls of this city.”

Examinging themes of mercy in fine art, Kleemann juxtaposes Old Master paintings with documentation of Marina Abramovic’s and Chris Burden’s early performances and contemporary sculpture by Monica Bonvicini and Sterling Ruby. Simultaneously, the  “mini community center” Valmorbida has built with partner Jared Najjar has become an it-spot for actors and artists alike, with this, his most important show to date, drawing yet another hip crowd (Rachel Zoe, Juliette Lewis, Mario Testino) on par with the ones his brother, Andy (along with partner Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld), has rated for pop-up exhibitions with artists like Richard Hambleton. With an Oscars-timed collaboration in the works between Prism and Phillips de Pury, a new Lead Apron-curated bookshop in place, and solo shows for Ryan McGinness and fellow Aussie Jonathan Zawada, the young dealer is already looking to take the venture on the road. “Prism is kind of a brand in a sense, so we can definitely do it,” says the enterprising Valmorbida, who called in after the opening to talk about the space, his budding passion for photography, and the seemingly unstoppable L.A. art scene.

SLENSKE: How did it go last night?

VALMORBIDA: It went really well. It was a long night, which started at like six o’ clock and ended up at like five in the morning. We had the after-party at a guy named Jim Goldstein’s house up in the hills in Benedict Canyon. He bought this house in ‘74, it’s such a great place, and I’ve always wanted to do something there. Everyone had a really good time, it was actually a very fun night.

SLENSKE: So from the first show to now the gallery has progressed quite rapidly. How would you describe it?

VALMORBIDA: This is our biggest show. Myself personally, to be very young, opening a gallery at 23, obviously didn’t have much knowledge of the art world, and in the past year I’ve learned a lot. It’s coming together in a lot of ways for us, but this is by far the most important show we’ve done and having the great privilege of working with Birte. She’s obviously a very respected curator for Pace in New York and it’s kind of a museum-quality show. Being so young and jumping into the art world, for us, it’s been slightly difficult and it’s taken a bit of time to build a name for ourselves and build credibility, and to be taken seriously as a gallerist and an art dealer people. That’s something I felt more in the past and it seems like people are taking us much more seriously. LEFT: VALMORBIDA WITH ANTHONY KIEDIS AT THE OPENING OF “MISERICORDIA.”

SLENSKE: What were people saying before?

VALMORBIDA: People weren’t saying anything before, but I think people were just curious about what we were doing because we were very young, and opened this gigantic space on Sunset Boulevard. It had a big impact, and it came out of nowhere. As you know the L.A. art community is quite small and people were blown away by the space and curious to see how we were going to proceed and where we going to go with it, but this show was extremely good for us.

SLENSKE: What was your introduction to the art world?

VALMORBIDA: This kind of came as a surprise to me, opening the gallery. I knew I wanted to do something in art, I’m more artistic, and I’ve got a creative mind more than anything else. My family collected and so forth, so I had a knowledge and I started taking photographs when I was very, very young. That was my hobby for a very long time and photography was what brought me into the art world and really got me intrigued by it, and I still take photos today as a hobby.

SLENSKE: When did you start shooting?

VALMOBIDA: When I was 15 years old. I would call myself a snapshot photographer. I’ll shoot anything. I developed my own kind of eye and what I wanted to shoot. I do it as a hobby, but I produce my own photographs, and I print my own photographs. I did one show in New York two years ago in collaboration with Louis Vuitton and two other photographers. I think I’ll do another show soon; it’s a big passion of mine.

SLENSKE: How does your practice differ from your brother’s?

VALMORBIDA: Well, Andy has been representing Richard Hambleton and other artists and working with big sponsors to do pop-up shows around the world-big art events. You could compare their shows scale-wise to a fashion show. It’s a big, one-off event; a lot of people come and it’s been a great success for them, but it’s a different model and I’ve gone the slightly more traditional route.

SLENSKE: Were you studying art history growing up?

VALMORBIDA: No, I didn’t.

SLENSKE: What did you study?

VALMORBIDA: Photography. I went to school for about a year and a half at ICP [International Center of Photography] in New York and the School of Visual Arts.

SLENSKE: So, why L.A.?

VALMORBIDA: Again, it was so spontaneous. In my mind I always wanted to open a gallery, I just didn’t think it was going to happen. But I came out to Los Angeles, I spent a lot of time here, I would do the basics: go to LACMA, go to MOCA, occasionally. But I wouldn’t go to the galleries because they were all down in Culver City and they didn’t really feel like they do in New York City where there’s so much around you and they’re thriving. In Los Angeles, unless you go out on a mission and see everything and get in your car and travel, you don’t get a sense of that. I didn’t really get to do that. Then I came across this space that my friend and partner Jared Najjar showed me. I was not even thinking about doing a gallery, I was just thining we could do an amazing art space here. At the time I was 22 years old and this was a gigantic undertaking, so I thought, “Just give it a shot.” And we came out, slightly disorganized from the start, but now I think we’ve got it together. We have a good infrastructure, good people working for us, and we’ve got a lot of exciting projects in the making and I’m excited and want to start doing shows around the world, like Prism pop-up shows.

LEFT: THE GALLERY. PHOTO BY JOSHUA WHITE. RIGHT: WORK BY JONATHAN MEESE FROM MISERICORDIA.

SLENSKE: Anything specific in mind?

VALMORBIDA: Yeah. But what we do is different, because I look at our space as a project space. We’re not solely representing artists. We are just doing larger scale exhibitions with longer exhibition times. More curated shows, more museum-quality shows is what we want to focus in on. We just opened a bookstore this show, which is kind of fantastic. It makes us look more institutional.

SLENSKE: What’s in there?

VALMORBIDA: Books, artifacts. It’s done by a guy named Jonathan [Brown] who has this bookstore calledLead Apron. It’s a curated selection for this show, “Misericordia.” So we have all the books for those artists.

SLENSKE: Where did the idea for this show come about?

VALMORBIDA: I met Birte through a friend when she curated the Joseph Beuys show [at Pace]. She walked me the through the show and we started speaking and I said, “I’d love to do something with you guys in Los Angeles.” She had a concept in mind and I really loved it. I thought it would be perfect for L.A. and I really pushed for it for a long time and we came together and did it. We put it together kind of fast, put the catalog and everything together in two months, which is kind of insane. But it came together and this show has given us much more credibility.

SLENSKE: Why this show now?

VALMORBIDA: Misericordia is Latin for mercy and we’ve integrated all these Old Master painters with contemporary sculpture and at the same time it’s very intriguing. It’s different and I just think all around she’s done a very strong show and people loved it.

SLENSKE: So what was this space before this?

VALMORBIDA: Nothing, it’s a brand new space. It was built originally as a retail space. We came in just before completion and emptied it and ripped it up to be a gallery as best as we possibly can. It’s an interesting space, it’s not your average gallery in terms of wall structures, perspective, design. It’s great for sculpture.

SLENSKE: It seems like you have a big interest in street art, judging from that first show?

VALMORBIDA: I do. That’s what I did early on in my life; I was really into graffiti. That was what originally got me into art.

SLENSKE: Were you writing graffiti?

VALMORBIDA: Yeah, I was writing, but I wasn’t a bomber. I didn’t really go around and destroy things in a sense. But that was a fun period in my life and then when I moved to New York I was still really interested in graffiti so I was exploring that and seeing that. I’m from Australia originally and working with Barry McGee on the first show I couldn’t speak more highly of a person. He’s always been an idol of mine and working with him has been an absolute pleasure.

SLENSKE: Yeah, it’s interesting because there was talk that The Hole was going to do a show with Barry for their debut.

VALMORBIDA: That show was curated by Pat Tenore, who’s a good friend of mine. He’s the founder of RVCA, and he’s got that this artist network program and got good relationships with all these artists. So I went to him and said, “Let’s do something great together. Wed’d love for you to curate our first show.” For me, people visit galleries in Los Angeles but not anywhere as near as they do as in other major cities around the world. People don’t really get out so much. You’re lucky to get 10 to 15 people a day walking through your space so my aim was to really attract a lot of people. That’s why I went on Sunset Boulevard-it’s great, it’s different, it’s new. Obviously, with the Barry McGee show there’s a cult following of people he has and we had 1700 people at the opening, and 50 or 60 people a day coming through the space. It was thriving, it was really, really great, and that’s what makes me happy.

PHOTO BY JOSHUA WHITE

SLENSKE: So what do you think has allowed you to get this caliber of artists this early out? Especially with you being so young and new to the scene. The shows seem to be ramping up.

VALMORBIDA: I’ve been directing it. I’m kind of the creative director. Barry was Pat. Pat gave me my introduction to Barry, we got along from the very beginning and that was fantastic. Araki, the following show, I’ve always been a very big fan of and have always wanted to do an Araki show, I’m fortunate to know people who were supportive of the idea who helped me put it together. The Warhol show was black and white paintings, and basically most of we’ve gotten via personal contacts. A lot of work has gone into it, obviously, but we’re very privileged to work with such great shows.

SLENSKE: Now with you pushing this museum quality for the shows, are the works being sold?

VALMORBIDA: We are selling the works, definitely. It hasn’t been my main focus. Eventually we’re going to have to, but it is a commercial gallery, even though I look at it more as a mini cultural center. I want to incorporate non-profit aspects into the gallery, I want to collaborate with museums.

SLENSKE: What’s on the horizon?

VALMORBIDA: I will be working Phillips de Pury on something during the Oscars. The artists are not for sure yet, but it’s something we’re really excited about.

SLENSKE: Is it an auction?

VALMORBIDA: It’s not going to be an auction. Phillips does exhibitions and I want to start collaborating with a lot of people and Phillips doesn’t really have a presence out in L.A. so I think it will be great for us to start working with them. We did two screenings and a lecture, and got sidetracked a bit, but we will start doing more community based things in the near future. That’s something that’s going to come into focus big time: screenings, lectures, talks, parties, a whole range of things.

SLENSKE: And then is there any intentions to do solo shows with younger artists?

VALMORBIDA: I am actually. There’s on artist I’ve always loved. He’s an Australian artist. His name is Jonathan Zawada. He’s someone I’m going to back and push. I think it’s fantastic what he does. The guy’s been making a living doing illustrative work and the guy is a genius artistically, but he hasn’t really had the opportunity to branch out, so I’m going to give him the opportunity to do it and I’m actually going to give him a solo show after this show actually. And I think giving artists the opportunity to do large scale shows with grand openings and great recognition, which I think we can offer artists, a lot artists are into that. The representation of artists is quite an undertaking as well these days, but I think artists like what we’re doing at Prism.

SLENSKE: Are there any other programs here or abroad you’ve looked to as something you’d want to emulate or take notes from a bit?

VALMORBIDA: There are some galleries I do love very much. I love CFA in Berlin, I love the Serpentine in London, I love the Garage in Moscow, I think that’s fantastic, Jeffrey [Deitch] of course. I’m a very big fan of all the stuff he’s done. I’m going to be doing another show with one of his artists, Ryan McGinness, in May. It will be his new sculptures. It’s very different work from what people are used to from him, but I’m very excited about the work. It’s going to be fantastic. They’re like women’s forms. You know the Matisse paintings of the blue ladies?

SLENSKE: Sure.

VALMORBIDA: It’s similar to that, but in sculpture. It’s hard to explain.

SLENSKE: What are they made of, exactly?

VALMORBIDA: We’re looking into that at the moment, actually. I’m not too sure. We have a few different options. He’s going to have a big impact on Los Angeles. He’s been holding off on L.A. for many years. He’s having a big show of his paintings at Michael Kohn Gallery, we’re going to be doing his sculptures for him, he’s doing a big billboard project. The guy, it’s crazy, he’s got a million things in mind that he wants to do out here. And we want to help him make as big an impact as possible.

SLENSKE: In general it seems like every other week there’s a story about L.A. is on fire in one way or another.

VALMORBIDA: That’s why I came out here. I feel like I’m here at the perfect time because it feels like L.A. is thriving harder than it ever has art-wise, with what Jeffrey’s doing, and what Michael Govan is doing. Los Angeles isn’t as close to Europe as New York and you don’t get the crowds as big, but the only big events in L.A. today are art events. Tonight there’s a LACMA thing, and L&M has their thing, there’s a lot of fantastic stuff happening out here. And obviously you have some of the best living artists living out here, but I think from a collectors point of view you have a great base and a lot of other people are starting to get interested in contemporary art, especially from a contemporary audience, which is great.

SLENSKE: Do you plan to take this outside of L.A.?

VALMORBIDA: Definitely. Eventually we will, for sure.

SLENSKE: Where will you go?

VALMORBIDA: I don’t know. Good question.

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