LONDON — Gérard Faggionato, a prominent Mayfair dealer who for 22 years has run his own gallery specializing in postwar and contemporary art, is joining the sales team of the New York mega-gallerist David Zwirner.
Beginning in April, Mr. Faggionato, 54, will work with Angela Choon, the director at the gallery’s London branch, which is based in a Georgian townhouse on Grafton Street in Mayfair. He will concentrate on sales of new works and on the re-sale market for older material. A former head of both the Impressionist and Modern and the contemporary art departments at Christie’s, Mr. Faggionato has been the British and European representative of the Estate of Francis Bacon since 1998. That relationship is expected to continue, the New York gallery said in an e-mail.
“London has a particularity,” Mr. Faggionato said. “It’s extremely international. There are more collectors here than we’ve ever had, but it’s not as straightforward as it is in New York. It’s great to have a new challenge.”
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At the moment, Ms. Ordovas is trying to get their attention with an exhibition of three unique David Smith metal sculptures from the 1950s, offered direct from the estate of the American artist, priced from $1.5 million to $7 million. These are shown standing in “conversation” with two loaned Alberto Giacometti bronzes from a similar period. Smith’s 1955 varnished steel “Forging VI” is marked at about $2.5 million, the price at which the Mnuchin Gallery of New York sold another Smith “Forging” at the Frieze Masters fair in London in October. As of last week, none of Ms. Ordovas’s sculptures were confirmed sales.
“The problem is we don’t have ‘collectors’ in the old sense of the word; we have buyers,” said Ms. Ordovas, who, like many of today’s gallerists, finds herself tailoring gallery hours to the schedules of individual clients. “In the old days, you couldn’t imagine Castelli or Marlborough having to stay open for all hours just for a Hong Kong collector to say hello.”
A version of this article appears in print on February 23, 2015, in The International New York Times. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
