Gallerist Sylvia Kouvali: ‘The market moved to safer artists, with a more conservative approach’

Gallerist Sylvia Kouvali found her calling, she says, meeting fellow creatives “at great rave parties in the 1990s in Athens”, where she grew up. “It was a great scene, with really good DJs and visuals, in underground places,” she says. The art world “is not so different in terms of being a space to come together”.

For 17 years, Kouvali, who opened first in Istanbul and now operates in London and Piraeus, near Athens, has applied an understated style to champion lesser-known artists of all generations, many from the eastern Mediterranean. “We work quietly and resiliently. I don’t shout about it,” she says, sitting in her open-brick Mayfair gallery just ahead of showing at Art Basel.

Kouvali is getting a little louder though. Until this month, the business was called Rodeo Gallery, partly a reference to a love of horses that she says unites the sometimes-sparring countries of the region, including Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon and Cyprus. She has now rebranded under her name: “It’s time to own it,” she says.

Kouvali launched Rodeo in Istanbul in 2007 — “I visited a friend there and never wanted to leave” — and ran a gallery in the city until 2015. Hers was the first such business to open in the developing waterfront Tophane neighbourhood. “It taught me that you have to be careful how you treat your neighbours, who can feel threatened by a gallery. The future of a changing area is in your hands, you can’t behave as if you are superior to the rest of your surroundings,” she says. She never faced any issues, she says, though recalls that some local galleries which opened after her in the area were attacked, perhaps from anger at the gentrification they represented.

The dynamics are different in London, where she opened initially in Soho in 2014 and where there are hundreds of art galleries. Kouvali notes, though, that her latest space, in a former garage on Mayfair’s Bourdon Street, faces public housing for low-income residents. “I still want to be sensitive,” she says. Recently she was working late in the gallery and a local resident wanted to come in. “So I opened up for her, she had a stroll around then walked out. That was absolutely fine by me.”

Kouvali is replete with formative stories of happenstance. She met one of her first artists — the late, influential Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin — in a queue for a talk in Istanbul. “He suggested to me and another person he didn’t know that we go instead for fish, which we did, and that’s how it all began,” she says. Similarly, Kouvali discovered the artist Yiannis Maniatakos, currently on show in her London gallery, “because I was swimming in the sea with a collector friend who told me that this was where he had painted”. Maniatakos, who died in 2017, made his fine paintings underwater in his spare time.

Her other artists are still going strong. Christodoulos Panayiotou has just closed a year-long show at Luma Arles while Kouvali is pleased that the London-based sculptor Liliane Lijn is finally getting her due, with a museum show at Munich’s Haus der Kunst. (Arise Alive travels to Vienna’s Mumok and Tate St Ives.) There is some frustration, though: “When I met [Lijn] in her studio, I could not believe that she wasn’t as big as Barbara Hepworth. I still can’t believe she is getting her first institutional show in 2024 rather than in the 1980s.”

It was with a heavy heart that Kouvali left Istanbul in 2016 as she sensed a change in taste amid a tumultuous political time in Turkey. “The priorities of society shifted and the local market moved to safer, blue-chip artists, with a more conservative approach to buying art,” she says.

She has never looked back on the decision to develop in London, despite first planning to branch out to New York. “I found a space, above a flower shop in Tribeca, but it felt a long way from Istanbul, to go on my own,” she says. Piraeus, a port town where she opened in a former indoor market in 2018, helps fill the gap of leaving Istanbul, she says.

She has just opened three shows in Piraeus for the summer. There is a new work by filmmaker Leslie Thornton and Kouvali’s first solo exhibition of the young Ukrainian painter Veronika Hapchenko. In her side gallery, a converted shop attached to the building, is the Italian artist-led project MMXX, which brings surreal scenes of nature by Luigi Zuccheri (1904-74).

Greece, Kouvali says, “has more and more good artists and has had great collectors since the 1930s”. But today she finds, “There’s a bit of a problem, we need a younger collector generation.” One answer, Kouvali believes, is for collectors “to be ambitious, to think big — not in terms of size, but to think differently, consider things like the environment, the local community, not to be so conservative.”

She remains a firm believer in the happenstance which helped get her to where she is today. “The art market can be everywhere. You could be sitting on a rock, looking at the sun in your bikini and someone could sit next to you and you could sell a work,” she says, though admits “that’s a bit easier if you’re in Greece.”

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