If you attended a marquee auction at Christie’s in the past decade, there’s a good chance that you saw Andreas Rumbler at the rostrum. Rumbler was with the company for almost three decades, serving as deputy chairman of the house’s Impressionist and Modern Department, among other prominent roles. In 2019, he joined Lévy Gorvy to head their Zurich outpost, before starting his own gallery in the city in 2021.
In advance of Art Basel, Gagosian announced that Rumbler would serve as its new director in Switzerland where he will oversee operations across the art gallery’s spaces in Geneva, Basel and Gstaad. We caught up with him to discuss his new role, its challenges and the current state of the art market.
You were in the auction world for a long time before joining Levy Gorvy. How are the two worlds different?
In the auction world, clients have to make split-second decisions about how much they want a work and how high they are prepared to go. There is very little room or time for negotiation.
Whereas in the primary market, the client has time and the gallery’s focus is on representing the artist to their best advantage, placing the work in the best hands and increasing the artist’s reach to new audiences.
How are they the same?
Expertise, diligence, storytelling and relationship building.
What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in the art world in the last decade?
People don’t necessarily feel the need to see works in person anymore. This is not just to do with Covid—it was headed this way anyway—but I think it certainly accelerated the process. Ten years ago, there was a huge amount of skepticism about Online Viewing Rooms (OVRs), but now, people love them and they are widely accepted as a part of the sales process.
What do you make of the New York auctions in May?
Great provenance from great names clearly still plays an enormous role in the auctions. If you have a story to tell, and you can back it up with great quality, that adds at least 10% or 20% to the hammer price, if not more.
With these great collections coming to auction, you see everything displayed at the same time—masterpieces alongside other works—so once you view it all together you can see a given work that stands out more, so the comparison is easy for clients to make at auction.
How is the Swiss art market different from others? What are its unique challenges?
I see it all as an international market, and nowhere is it as international as it is in Switzerland. Maybe yesterday you saw your client at a dinner in London but tomorrow you can see them on the slopes in Gstaad. People live in one place but move around and have different times and locations where they can spend more time looking at art. It’s our job to bring the art to them.
What did you learn from last week’s Basel?
Having just joined Gagosian, it has been particularly inspiring to watch the team in action—both at the fair and the Basel gallery and elsewhere—working with finesse, care and incredible expertise. I’ve really noticed how much the gallery focuses on the long term, developing and maintaining strong, long-standing relationships with clients, supporting staff who stay with the gallery for decades and looking at the far horizon of artists’ careers. There is so much effort put into ensuring the younger artists are correctly placed within the canon of other great, historically significant artists. This longevity and level of care seems to dispel misconceptions that some people have in Europe about this large American commercial operation that is so fast-moving.
Are there any Gagosian artists you’re particularly excited to work with?
Georg Baselitz, because I really like him and I grew up with his works. From a painterly point of view, I really like Jenny Saville because her work is both powerful and strong, but at the same time the subjects can also be incredibly tender and for similar reasons, I also really like Amoako Boafo. Richard Serra, because I love sculpture and I like his purity of form and enormous scale. Twombly is truly great in every medium: draftsmanship, painting and also sculpture, which you can’t say about many artists. And another master who I really love is Giuseppe Penone because he is quiet, poetic, lyrical and subtle.
