Lévy Gorvy pioneered this model at its other two galleries, which occupy an imposing three-storey heritage building on Madison Avenue in New York and the first floor of a listed Italianate townhouse in London.

“At our last exhibition in New York, Calder / Kelly, Alexander Calder is represented by Pace Gallery and Ellsworth Kelly is represented by Matthew Marks,” says Gorvy. “We worked with the estates of both artists as well as with those galleries because we wanted to have a great show. Most of the works in that show were on loan—they weren’t for sale. That’s the kind of collaboration we want to continue to do in Asia.”

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Record-Breaking Sales

The gallery can only afford to operate in this way because, as Gorvy admits, “we have other revenue streams”—and very successful ones at that. Although Lévy Gorvy does represent leading contemporary artists, including Frank Stella and Seung-taek Lee, it specialises in private sales on the secondary market, dealing in works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, Cy Twombly and many others.

In Asia, Lévy Gorvy may be best known for selling a Willem de Kooning painting at last year’s Art Basel in Hong Kong for US$35 million, breaking the record for the most expensive work ever sold at the fair. That sale was announced to the press, but most of Lévy Gorvy’s sales are negotiated privately—and some of them involve works even more valuable than that De Kooning painting.

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“Working in the secondary market, you don’t even need a gallery,” says Gorvy. “You can have a small viewing space and that allows you to have a one-on-one with the client. But when Dominique and I first formed Lévy Gorvy, we both had this sense of, ‘If we’re going to do this, we’re going to have a space and we’re going to have a space that allows for shows.’"

"Something that Dominique and I fundamentally believe in is that when you’re doing these shows, you have to have a strong viewpoint on something and do the show not just to sell paintings but to have some purpose in the trajectory of art history. Ultimately, the gallerists that we have great admiration for throughout history—the Pierre Matisses, the Leo Castellis—when they did a show, it actually moved the paradigm of art history forward.”

See also: Art Insider: Pascal de Sarthe

First Show In Hong Kong

Lévy Gorvy’s first show in Hong Kong, Return to Nature, reflects this ambition. Featuring a wide range of artists, the exhibition explores how painters have responded to crises throughout history, be they moral, economic, cultural or political.

“I think there are two ways that artists deal with crisis—they either react in anger or they return to a sense of nature and to a fundamental aspect of spiritualism in their work,” says Gorvy. He sees this recurring throughout history in various countries, whether it was Wu Dayu secretly— and illegally—making abstract paintings during the Cultural Revolution in China or Claude Monet pioneering impressionism in Paris in the upheaval of the 1860s.

The pair’s sense of what is right for the Hong Kong audience has been honed by years of work in the city, including Lévy’s participation in Art Basel in Hong Kong since it was founded.

“At Art Basel in Hong Kong we’ve always put together a curated booth. We’ve always tried to do something that we would be as proud to show in Switzerland, Miami, Paris or London,” she says. “It’s the same approach with the gallery. We are not looking at Hong Kong as a third location or a fourth location. We are looking at Hong Kong as the core of what we do.”

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