The Five Most Important New Dealers on the Forefront of Design

Maria Foerlev, Etage Projects, Copenhagen

Since opening her gallery three years ago, the Danish dealer has built her reputation on an unerring sense of what’s next in art, fashion and furniture. She was the first to show the colorful Brutalist sculptures of Pettersen & Hein and the neon-and-resin lights of Sabine Marcelis, and was an early supporter of Thomas Poulsen, better known as FOS, whose work now graces the interiors of Céline stores in London and New York. Although Foerlev studied at the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, her impeccable taste seemed almost predetermined: She grew up in a house built for her grandfather by the legendary architect Arne Jacobsen. (Her great-grandfather’s home, outfitted by the most cutting-edge craftsmen of his day, is now part of the National Museum of Denmark.) ‘‘I feel like I’m channeling their desire to work with forward-thinkers,’’ she says.

Amaryllis Jacobs and Kwinten Lavigne, Maniera, Brussels

Unsure whether commissioning artists and architects to make functional objects would pay the rent, two years ago Jacobs and Lavigne cleared out half of the apartment they share in a former 1920s lingerie factory and invited the public in. The risk paid off for the couple, who have shown at Design Miami, have sold multiple pieces to Belgian museums and are about to move to a 2,000-square-foot exhibition space. The new gallery’s first collection features tripod chairs by OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen and faux-stone shelves by the architect Anne Holtrop, and later this year they’ll host shows by local conceptual artists whose work is inspired by architecture. “If they create great buildings or design-driven sculptures,” Lavigne says, “odds are they’re going to create great furniture as well.”

Alexis Ryngaert, Victor Hunt, Brussels

In 2010, Ryngaert made his curatorial debut installing the work of a Korean furniture designer in the window of a Brussels fashion boutique. He was just 27, yet had already been collecting for years; his then-roving gallery, Victor Hunt, was an attempt to support the experiments of his young designer friends in ways that the established galleries weren’t. “I started not only paying for production, but also hired a production manager who handles fabrication, so that the designers can concentrate on their creative process,” says Ryngaert. And yet, Victor Hunt, so named to take the focus off its owner, is no idealistic underdog. It gained a permanent downtown address in 2011, and has garnered buzz at Design Miami and Collective Design with innovative glass lighting by Sylvain Willenz and kaleidoscopic clocks by Humans Since 1982. By early next year, Ryngaert plans to unveil a project that’s ambitious by any standards: an entire house and its contents, from soup to nuts, designed by Tomás Alonso.

Claire Warner and Sam Vinz, Volume Gallery, Chicago

Their idea was simple: to provide a platform for promoting the work of independent American designers, who they felt lacked exposure and were often overlooked by manufacturers. In addition to curating shows at their West Loop space with designers such as Thaddeus Wolfe and Tanya Aguiñiga, the pair act as advisors for young patrons, easing them into the Volume universe by packaging an inscrutably abstract Jonathan Muecke table, say, with Jean Prouvé chairs and a Wendy White painting. “Many galleries focus on reaching the same ‘big’ buyers — we all know who they are,” says Warner. “But we’re really interested in educating young collectors of art, and bringing them to the design side.”

Patrick Parrish, Patrick Parrish Gallery, New York City

He spent most of the ’90s dealing vintage design under the name Mondo Cane, but Parrish’s journey into the emerging scene began in 2010 with his blog Mondoblogo, which connected him to the conceptual Minneapolis furniture duo RO/LU. They became the focus of his first contemporary exhibition at Mondo Cane that year, with chairs that seamlessly married new ideas with references to icons like Rudolph Schindler and Scott Burton, and Parrish was hooked. In 2014, he opened his new gallery in TriBeCa, and this year is poised to be his busiest yet, with 11 planned shows ranging from paintings (Jesse Moretti) to architectural ceramics (Ian McDonald) to lighting (Marcus Tremonto). There’s an upside, he says, to working with living artists: “When one of them tells me I’ve helped them quit their day job, that’s my biggest thrill.”

Resource: http://www.nytimes.com