Two movers and shakers from the international art scene reunite to open new contemporary Zetland gallery Palas
Two movers and shakers from the international art world reunite in Sydney to open new contemporary space Palas.
When Matt Glenn moved back to Sydney in late 2021 after a decade working for various respected commercial galleries in London, he couldn’t shake the feeling there was room for something new and different in the local gallery scene.
Glenn knew just the person to tackle the challenge with him. He had worked as an artist liaison with Sadie Coles HQ and the David Zwirner Gallery in London and New York. Perth-born, Tania Doropoulos had also enjoyed a successful international career as artistic director of the Frieze London art fair and, later, director of the connected Frieze Studios. Like Glenn, Doropoulos had recently moved back to Sydney, where the pair first met early in their careers while working at neighbouring galleries – Doropoulos at Sherman Galleries, and Glenn at Martin Browne Contemporary.
“I’d always thought Tania would be an amazing gallerist and would own her own gallery and thought, ‘I’ll bet she’s thinking that’,” says Glenn.
“I never wanted my own gallery,” counters Doropoulos with a laugh, before explaining that her ambition was always to work with a large company, an experience she then had and found deeply satisfying at Frieze, where her team of 50 would triple during the annual art fair. Ultimately though, she missed a hands-on role with the artists and, given her more than 20 years working in various roles and locations, thought she had more to give once she moved home.
“I felt I could represent artists in a different and better way to what I was seeing. That led to me wanting to do something on my own terms. Matt and I had a phone call early last year, and the stars just aligned.”
Palas (pronounced “palace”) is based in the former industrial Sydney suburb of Zetland and was incorporated last April. Less than a year later, Glenn and Doropoulos are preparing to launch its inaugural exhibition, a solo show featuring Australia’s 2022 Venice Biennale artist Marco Fusinato.
“I can easily say already it’s the best thing I’ve ever done,” Doropoulos says of their decision to establish a new gallery.
One might argue Sydney is already well-represented when it comes to commercial art galleries. Not true, argue Palas’s co-founders, who strongly believe there is generational change afoot among gallerists, collectors and artists, all of them seeking new things.
Doropoulos and Glenn are calling on their combined decades of experience in the international and local art world with the aim to connect the two more closely. Beyond traditional gallery programming, the pair will also run an agency supporting its artists interested in collaborating in film, fashion, music, performance and mixed-reality digital projects.
It’s clear they mean business, if their roster is anything to go by: three former Venice Biennale representatives – noise artist Fusinato, video artist Shaun Gladwell and Irish sculptor Eva Rothschild – alongside Canadian-born Canberra-based multimedia artist Tamara Henderson, whose work ranges from sound to painting, sculpture, glass, costumes and film. Henderson is represented by London gallery Rodeo and held a large solo exhibition at Frieze 2023. She is joined by Sydney-based Canadian artist Nick Collerson, whose work conflates ancient references with contemporary pop culture.
“We’ve known all the artists a significant amount of time and have felt directly or indirectly invested in their practice, so we knew what they wanted from a gallery,” says Glenn, noting that Gladwell and Fusinato were previously with Anna Schwartz Gallery, but were at turning points in their careers and seeking something different.
The deliberately small number of artists is part of what the duo believes is a generational shift towards doing things differently. They point to similar models by local contemporaries Ryan Moore of Fine Arts, Sydney, and Cassandra Bird, whose gallery opened in January.
“There is the model of gallery that represents 40 to 50 artists, but what we’re doing, what Ryan is doing and Cassandra Bird will essentially do, is having a much more focused, smaller roster of artists and to be able to service them in a totally different way,” says Doropoulos.
“We’re also very interested in being as elastic as we can be, for our artists,” adds Glenn. “There will be elements of Palas that are traditional gallery roles – hosting exhibitions, helping our artists with production – but, increasingly, artists are interested in opportunities in other fields as well, such as extended reality,
[or] working in collaboration with somebody who sits outside traditional gallery workings such as a dance company or fashion brand.”
Both are quick to point out they are standing on the shoulders of giants and have the utmost respect for the established commercial galleries whose role continues to remain relevant. “We have immense respect for Roslyn and have always seen her shows and still see all her shows,” says Doropoulos of Roslyn Oxley, who has represented more than 350 artists in her 42 years successfully running her Paddington gallery.
But collectors’ behaviour is changing generationally, say Doropoulos and Glenn. Where once a collector started with a work on paper or print, building up to a $55,000 purchase, today’s young collector may well start with the $55,000 painting. “It’s becoming much more normalised that, if you’re making a certain amount of money and have a home and travel, then art may be something you start to build a collection of to define your taste, style and personality,” Doropoulos says.
This new group of collectors may well be interested in Fusinato’s upcoming exhibition at Palas. The works, which feature up to eight large painted silk-screens, are a follow-up to his Desastres performance at the Venice Biennale, in which Fusinato spent 200 days straight improvising slabs of noise on an electric guitar that triggered various disparate images on a floor-to-ceiling LED wall. Those images are now the subject of quiet, meditative silk-screen paintings and include a close-up of opium poppies and an arresting, enlarged mosquito. The screens provide an interesting juxtaposition in the Palas exhibition space of exposed brick walls and concrete floors that contain the marks of nearly a century of stories from this former denim factory.
The duo has already been offered a good half a dozen definitions for “palas”, from a tarot card to a beautiful tree to Sanskrit connotations of “protect” and “nurture”.
“If we’re ever asked, ‘Does it mean this?’, the answer is always ‘yes’,” says Doropoulos. “We both like that, because something that’s really crucial to a business like ours … and in relation to working with contemporary artists, is we always have to be fluid and never fixed.”
Marco Fusinato’s Nothing Is Universal, Not Even Air, is on now at Palas, palas-inc.com
This story is from the March issue of WISH.
