‘We bring culture to your city’: gallerist on his Hong Kong woes, private equity, and an eyebrow-raising costume
- French gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin talks about helping artists realise their dreams and why Hong Kong should make more effort to accommodate foreign galleries
In 1993, a 25-year-old art dealer from Paris called Emmanuel Perrotin made his art fair debut in Yokohama, Japan.
In 2012, Perrotin chose to open his only gallery outside France in Hong Kong. That second key moment in Asia ushered in a decade of rapid global expansion.
The gallery now has around 8,000 square metres (86,000 square feet) of prime real estate in Paris, Hong Kong, New York, Seoul, Tokyo, Shanghai and Los Angeles.
With 65 artists and an annual revenue of €140 million (US$153 million) in 2022, Perrotin is among the largest art dealers in the world, even if there is still some distance between him and the so-called megas: Larry Gagosian has 19 galleries and reportedly sells more than a billion US dollars worth of art each year; David Zwirner told an interviewer in 2021 that he achieved more than three-quarters of a billion US dollars in sales the year before.
But Perrotin is poised for a new phase of growth. In summer 2023, he announced a plan to sell a 60 per cent stake in the business to private equity firm Colony Investment Management.