The Ropac gallery opens in Milan

While Italy’s museums are gradually closing themselves to foreign directors under the impact of Giorgia Meloni’s nationalist policy, the gallery of Thaddaeus Ropac, the Austrian from Paris, is making the opposite bet and banking on Italy. In 2021, this hard worker with legendary composure opened a sixth space in Korea in Seoul in this wave which brings South Korea to the heart of the international Art market. This time, it is in Europe that he is focusing and announcing this morning the opening, in the fall of 2025, of a seventh space in Milan, in the Palazzo Belgioioso, near La Scala (Thaddaeus is crazy opera house and a regular at the Salzburg Festival) and the Via Monte Napoleone. A prestigious space of 280 m2 on the noble floor which overlooks Piazza Belgioioso where the sculpture of its artists should find its place.

This art globetrotter has just returned from Saint-Moritz, the hotbed of the jet set in Switzerland, where he successfully opened a “Pop up space” for the holidays of the “happy few” with a dedicated exhibition to the sculptor Hans Josephsohn. Why Italy? “I always wanted to have the ultimate European gallery. I am first of all a Europeanhe answers us with his usual enthusiasm. We have our districts in London, in Paris, in the German-speaking sphere with Salzburg. After settling in Seoul, we were thinking about a new location. We missed Italy. But Italy is the country at the heart of the avant-gardes of the 20th^e century. Before and after the Second World War.

Its director will be Elena Bonanno di Linguaglossa who has lived between Italy, Austria and the United Kingdom, and already has 25 years of experience in the art market, notably at the New York gallery Lévy Gorgy Dayan. She was also a guest professor at the Istituto Europeo di Design in Rome. His team will be Italian, even Milanese. « As in Seoul, we will take the time to integrate the gallery into the existing cultural infrastructure. There are only two conditions sine qua non, a great place and a great person. Everything else builds around it, little by little.” The opening, after restoration and development work on the historic building, will be in September 2025 at the latest.

Why Milan? « We thought of Rome, the eternal city of unparalleled beauty, and of Venice the city of biennials that we know well, whose absolute operatic beauty we savor, but with a more seasonal rhythm. Milan has established itself through the liveliness of its artistic scene. Its cultural dynamic in contemporary matters has developed greatly in recent years. His academy is most interesting. Its institutions will be close to us: the Pinacoteca di Brera, the Palazzo Reale which is rethinking the organization of its collections, the Museo del Novecento and the new contemporary art museum at Palazzo Citterio which opened three months ago. Its private foundations like the Fondation Prada with which we showed Tom Sachs or Donald Judd. Its collectors are among the most sophisticated. Many artists live there, such as Maurizio Cattelan“. Being where artists live and work is essential ».

Fifty openings per year

Why redeploy again, when the crisis threatens the art market? « It is not a necessity, but an opportunity. We grow organically. It’s not a question of business, it only comes second. We need to go to cities where our artists will feel inspired. Many of our artists are not represented in Italy in general and in Milan in particular. We want to explore the Italian and local scene, as we did in Seoul by measuring the importance of its historical and contemporary scene. It is, in my opinion, a win-win bet. ». The Seoul team has around a dozen non-European people. “In London we started with a team of the same size. Today, it has 25 people”explains Thaddaeus Ropac, whose empire now includes 150 people around the world. The challenge will be “to attend as many openings as possible” of its artists around the world. With 5 to 7 exhibitions per year and per space, we are approaching fifty!

Isn’t this swimming against the tide when Italian museums are chasing away their foreign directors? « It is not a strategic move imposed by the need to grow and develop, it is an intuition that came to me while walking with fire They are hiding in German who revealed to me all the historical corners, sometimes tiny, of thePoor Art. The stronger the rejection of foreign culture, the more intense the artists’ response will be, I am firmly convinced. The world of contemporary art is different from this point of view from more traditional institutions of collections and practices. If the current political context surprises me, if I believe that it leads to a loss of great intellectuals and great talents for Italy, artists will be there to take over », answers Thaddaeus Ropac who, despite his appearance as an eternal young man, can flaunt his 43 years as a gallery owner, his 35 years in Paris, his 13 years in Pantin and his 9 years in London.

Spring 2025 will be an opportunity to celebrate the centenary of the American artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), notably with a retrospective at the Museo del Novecento.