Kimsooja, To Breathe (2025). Kate Glicksberg Photography

Last month during New York City’s marathon of spring art fairs, GSH Contemporary, a newly launched advisory firm from Zurich, unveiled a thoughtfully curated exhibition in a penthouse on the 78th floor of the luxury Sutton Tower, set against Manhattan’s iconic skyline. While collaborations between art advisory firms or galleries and real estate developers are nothing new—especially as a strategy to promote ultra-luxury properties—this project moved beyond decorative staging. Unlike ventures where art merely adorns a space, the works in “SUTTON 78” featured ambitious installations that responded to the site’s interior and exterior architecture in genuinely integrated, site-specific ways—including a mesmerizing intervention by South Korean artist Kimsooja, who transformed a window into a radiant portal that refracted the expansive view, amplifying its magic.

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“This project came about somewhat serendipitously,” GSH Contemporary project lead Hannah Halbheer said as we walked through the space. “Last November, I was in New York and attended an event in one of the Sutton Tower penthouses. The skyscraper had only recently begun selling its apartments, so many units were still empty—a blank canvas ripe for a project like this.”

At the event, Halbheer was struck by the space’s sweeping city views, soaring ceilings and vast white walls. The idea came quickly, and she struck up a conversation with Josh D’Ambrosio, who leads marketing and sales for Sutton Tower, about the possibility of staging an exhibition. The Sutton Tower team was immediately enthusiastic, and that exchange became the foundation for the collaboration from which “SUTTON 78” was born.

GSH Contemporary officially kicked off the project in mid-January, giving the team just four months to put the exhibition together. Not long after, Annie Taylor came on board to oversee logistics, project planning and on-the-ground operations in New York. “Her presence and connections in the city were crucial; we couldn’t manage everything from Zurich,” Halbheer told Observer.

When planning began, GSH Contemporary had yet to officially launch as man official firm. The advisory group that debuted last April, was spun off from Gerber & Stauffer—a leading Zurich-based art dealer focused on the secondary market—to pursue contemporary art projects with a broader, more experimental scope. “While we do offer advisory services, our main goal is to create new platforms for artists in the art world,” Halbheer explained. “Staging an exhibition in a space like this—featuring five artists from different parts of the world, at varying stages in their careers—aligned perfectly with our mission.”

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