Galatea

Galatea is a gallery that emerges from the different and complementary trajectories and backgrounds of its founding partners: Antonia Bergamin worked for almost a decade as a managing partner of a major gallery in São Paulo; Conrado Mesquita is an art dealer and collector whose specialty is discovering great works in unlikely places; and Tomás Toledo is a curator who actively contributed to the historic institutional reform of MASP, from which he recently left as chief curator.

With modern and contemporary Brazilian art as its main focus, Galatea works with and sells both well-known names from the national art scene and new talents in contemporary art, while also revisiting historical artists. Such temporal amplitude reflects and articulates the conceptual basis of the gallery’s program: to be a point of support and convergence between different cultures, temporalities, styles, and genres, provoking powerful frictions between the old and the new, the canonical and the non-canonical, the erudite and the informal.

In addition to these connections, the gallery also believes in the relationship between artists, collectors, institutions, and gallery owners. On one hand, there is the dedication to the research process, the respect for creative time, and the support for the professional development of artists with curatorial guidance. On the other, the constant attention and transparency in commercial relations. By strengthening ties, with a sensitive eye for what is important to each one, Galatea praises the relationships that are created around art – because doing so is also praising art itself.

In this sense, the name of the gallery comes precisely from the idea of a relationship, borrowed from the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. This myth tells the story of the artist Pygmalion, who, when sculpting Galatea in ivory, a female figure, falls in love with his own work and begins to adore it. The goddess Aphrodite, moved by such devotion, transforms the statue into a woman of flesh and blood so that the creator and creature can, at last, live a true relationship.