Design & Decoration S04 ep12 : Ben Brown, Ben Brown Fine Arts, [STATE]

Interview with Ben Brown

Ben Brown founded Ben Brown Fine Arts on London’s Cork Street in January 2004 after spending 10 years as a director of Sotheby’s’ Contemporary Art department, and two years as co-managing director of Waddington Galleries. Ben Brown Fine Arts has a particular focus on 20th Century Italian Art, exhibiting works of established artists such as Lucio Fontana, Alighiero Boetti and Mimmo Rotella alongside internationally renowned gallery artists such as Ron Arad, Tony Bevan, Candida Höfer, Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, Heinz Mack, Heribert C. Ottersbach, Matthias Schaller, Not Vital and Jan Worst. Consequently, the gallery has become attractive to those collectors with an appreciation for the old as well as an eye for the new.

 

Male Voice
01:05.
Ben Brown put together great shows of individual artists who we think represents the cutting edge of modernism.
01:13.

01:23.
During my university days I actually did internships in museums, in art galleries and auction houses and I thought that at the
bottom of the pile, the most interesting and steepest learning curve was in the auction house.
01:35.

01:46.
When you’re in an auction house on the primary market directly with the artist, you’re always just trading and I think the most
interesting people in the art business, are the artists themselves. Not the dealers, the collectors, the museum directors. It’s the
artists themselves.
02:01.

02:10.
The next great thing, it’s one of those things that you just feel. It’s a bit like you do or you don’t love a person. You do or you
don’t love the food. It just takes the way it does.
02:19.

 

02:25.
The artists they find you because they hear about what you’re doing. Somebody puts you together. Usually there’s somebody as
an intermediary. Now whether that’s a personal friend who’s another artist or a colleague of mine. Let’s say in America who has
an American artists who doesn’t have representation in Europe, they’ll call me up. So there’s a lot of that going on.
02:45.

02:55.
I started with a show of Candida Hofer . She is the only photographer who has ever shown at the Louvre. And she was
commissioned by Louvre to take photographs of the museum and then was offered a show within the museum later on. And it
was extremely successful commercially. We sold basically everything and I was kind of a bit surprised it being my first show that
everybody wanted to buy so much art. It was a really wonderful.
03:18.

Female Voice
03:30.
It is really a long time ago when I decided to get an artist. At this point for me, it was impossible to do paintings. And then
finally I worked with the camera and I found an outlet to do photos. Thats my metier.
03:47.

03:58.
So in the beginning it was more of documentation, but later I get involved by each area. So I started this photography more than
30 years ago. This was a time where photography as art was not well known and so I think I have started in a time when it was
good to start. Of course, in the beginning it was difficult.
04:25.

 

04:34.
In the beginning I have been working with the ROLEIFLEX [4:47] 6 x 6 cm and of course Nikon and later I worked with HASSELBLAD
[04:44] and now I’m working digital.
04:46.

04:52.
It’s very strange, it’s more difficult to work with digital. I have this camera where you can do stitching. What is very good, is that
you can look at the pictures on a computer. So you have a bigger image 77 looking through the Nikon or whatever. But I think
the process to create the image starts later so when everything is done. This of course because with digital you have so many
possibilities. It takes a time but much more longer.
05:22.

05:27.
The quality I think is better. I like to work with digital now.
05:32.

05:37.
Last month I was in Rome. I took photographs of the villa Borghese [05:41] and so this would be an exhibition in July.
05:44.

Male voice
05:49.
Museums tends to be the arbiters of taste even in the contemporary art world. And placing things in museums on behalf of your
artist, on behalf of your client is very important. Getting the museum shows is really wonderful. We had a, I think one of those
funding again with Canada the capital of Montevideo and Nepal came to us and asked her to photograph Nepal. And then we
had a show in the museum at the end of it. That was extremely successful.
06:19.

06:24.
We had a wonderful time with Tony Bevon where the curator from the Getty actually came here to Maastricht [06:31], saw a
painting that was after Messerschmitt and decided and asked to put Tony Bevon in the show at the Getty alongside
Messerschmitt. So that was extremely satisfying, that kind of marriage of people and minds.
06:45.

06:51.
The art market is completely global. The guy who runs my Hong Kong, Gary he’s German, sold two pieces by Claude Lalan in a
Hong Kong gallery to a man in Austin Texas. So that just tells you a little about what’s going on.
07:07.

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