Claudio Steiner at steinART. Photo: Disclosure

"DSince I was very young, I have always been an art lover. Early on I fell in love with Kandinsky, Polock and Miró”, says Claudio Steiner, one of the owners of steinART, art office recently transformed into a gallery. In the early 2000s, Claudio and his wife Yael founded steinART by starting their, until then, small collection. Having Administration as a background, Claudio says that, as his collection grew, the couple began to analyze the market and sell works when they felt the time was right. Before setting up his office, he had worked in the textile market for 25 years. “After leaving the company, I went deeper into the art market, combining my commercial experience with my love for the area. I started like art dealer, and steinART was born as an art office and now a gallery.”

“Abstract art has always been my preference, it moves me, enchants me, provokes me and leaves me in a meditative state”, he says in reference to the gallery's focus: abstractionism in Brazilian contemporary art. In the steinART collection, the dialogue is carried out by a generation of Brazilians and Latin Americans with trajectories already built and who break with modernism and experiment through colors and textures. Claudio says that the initial motivation for an acquisition by the gallery is the aesthetics and quality of the work. “We then investigated the origin and certification of the work. We recently acquired works by Amílcar de Castro, Amélia Toledo, João Carlos Galvão, Almandrade, Yutaka Toyota, Ascânio and Eduardo Sued, among others.”

Although they are focused on the secondary market, steinART has already set foot in the primary market with, for example, the retrospective of 60 years of Yutaka Toyota's career with the launch of his book at SP-Art 2019. In this year's edition, the gallery will exhibit 20 works in the fair's viewing room, with the continuity of the hybrid format of art fairs. However, Claudio confesses that the realization of sales, even if initiated over the internet, always happens in person. He also notes that despite the initial concern of the art market, sales continued and with a noticeable increase in people's interest in works of art. “I initially thought that business would stop, but it was the opposite: sales grew”, he says. For the future, the gallery owners plan an exhibition of their works and the continuation of their work, too, as art dealers and art advisors.

 


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