Business Finance Media Technology Policy Wealth Insights Interviews

Art Art Fairs Art Market Art Reviews Auctions Galleries Museums Interviews

Lifestyle Nightlife & Dining Style Travel Interviews

Power Lists Nightlife & Dining Art A.I. PR

About About Observer Advertise With Us Reprints

Oscar Sunderland and Chloe Stewart Would Rather Collaborate With Their Artists Than Represent Them

The young dealers are experimenting with a more fluid, collaborative gallery model that favors direct encounters with artists, unconventional exhibition formats and creative and geographic freedom.

The traditional gallery, with a permanent address, a fixed roster and back-to-back openings, is losing its grip, and some of the more interesting alternatives are coming from the newest “kids” on the art world block. OCD Gallery (Oscar Chloe Directory), barely a year old, is one such project. Working fluidly and in response to context while championing an exciting roster of young international artists, art historians and curators, Oscar Sunderland and Chloe Stewart, daughter of Sotheby’s CEO Charles Stewart, built OCD without a permanent space. Instead, the gallery travels from city to city, shaping each show around place and circumstance.

Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter

Thank you for signing up!

By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.

Their last exhibition was a curated group show in the historic setting of Palazzo da Mosto during the 61st Venice Biennale. For London’s Frieze Week, Stewart and Sunderland took over a 19th-century Fitzrovia building that once formed part of Pollock’s Toy Museum, turning its uneven floors, narrow staircases, accumulated layers of paint and history into an active part of the exhibition. Titled “The Bright Eyes of Children,” the show, which had a limited run on Oct. 15-17, celebrated looking at the world with curiosity before interpretation and reasoning and with the instinct to make before the need to explain.

The exhibition took its cue from an 1884 essay by Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured,” which Sunderland read at university and immediately connected with the space. “It said that children go in there to lose themselves in wonder, to build toy houses and imagine their future lives, while adults go in to seek what they used to feel: that innate innocence and creativity,” he told Observer during the installation. “Bringing together these contemporary artists, who all have incredibly playful styles that work in conjunction with each other, is about giving everyone that sense of innocence and the beauty of pure, unguarded creativity.”

On view were works by an international group of artists—Selena Corsellis, Talia Golchin, Luke Hamel Cooke, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, William Lowry and Atalanta Xanthe—who share an approach to the concerns of a generation raised in an increasingly unstable, often dystopian world. In this context,........

© Observer