Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Gallerist Sylvia Kouvali found her calling, she says, meeting fellow creatives \u201cat great rave parties in the 1990s in Athens\u201d, where she grew up. \u201cIt was a great scene, with really good DJs and visuals, in underground places,\u201d she says. The art world \u201cis not so different in terms of being a space to come together\u201d.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. \u201cWe work quietly and resiliently. I don\u2019t shout about it,\u201d 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: \u201cIt\u2019s time to own it,\u201d she says.Kouvali launched Rodeo in Istanbul in 2007 \u2014 \u201cI visited a friend there and never wanted to leave\u201d \u2014 and ran a gallery in the city until 2015. Hers was the first such business to open in the developing waterfront Tophane neighbourhood. \u201cIt 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\u2019t behave as if you are superior to the rest of your surroundings,\u201d 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\u2019s Bourdon Street, faces public housing for low-income residents. \u201cI still want to be sensitive,\u201d she says. Recently she was working late in the gallery and a local resident wanted to come in. \u201cSo I opened up for her, she had a stroll around then walked out. That was absolutely fine by me.\u201dKouvali is replete with formative stories of happenstance. She met one of her first artists \u2014 the late, influential H\u00fcseyin Bahri Alptekin \u2014 in a queue for a talk in Istanbul. \u201cHe suggested to me and another person he didn\u2019t know that we go instead for fish, which we did, and that\u2019s how it all began,\u201d she says. Similarly, Kouvali discovered the artist Yiannis Maniatakos, currently on show in her London gallery, \u201cbecause I was swimming in the sea with a collector friend who told me that this was where he had painted\u201d. 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\u2019s Haus der Kunst.\u00a0(Arise Alive\u00a0travels to Vienna\u2019s Mumok and Tate St Ives.) There is some frustration, though: \u201cWhen I met [Lijn] in her studio, I could not believe that she wasn\u2019t as big as Barbara Hepworth. I still can\u2019t believe she is getting her first institutional show in 2024 rather than in the 1980s.\u201dIt 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. \u201cThe priorities of society shifted and the local market moved to safer, blue-chip artists, with a more conservative approach to buying art,\u201d she says.She has never looked back on the decision to develop in London, despite first planning to branch out to New York. \u201cI found a space, above a flower shop in Tribeca, but it felt a long way from Istanbul, to go on my own,\u201d 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\u2019s 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, \u201chas more and more good artists and has had great collectors since the 1930s\u201d. But today she finds, \u201cThere\u2019s a bit of a problem, we need a younger collector generation.\u201d One answer, Kouvali believes, is for collectors \u201cto be ambitious, to think big \u2014 not in terms of size, but to think differently, consider things like the environment, the local community, not to be so conservative.\u201dShe remains a firm believer in the happenstance which helped get her to where she is today. \u201cThe 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,\u201d she says, though admits \u201cthat\u2019s a bit easier if you\u2019re in Greece.\u201dsylviakouvali.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Gallerist Sylvia Kouvali found her calling, she says, meeting fellow creatives \u201cat great rave parties in the 1990s in Athens\u201d, where she grew up. \u201cIt was a great scene, with really good DJs and visuals, in underground places,\u201d she says. The art world \u201cis<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-136002","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136002"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":136003,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136002\/revisions\/136003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}