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Margaret Morrison
Woodward Gallery

By Joel Simpson

M eticulous transfiguration of the ordinary into the extortionary via paint on canvas has long served as an effective gambit to create novel images of reassuring subjects. From teacups to thumbtacks, such paintings typically offer more pleasure than challenge. But this work is different;  Margaret Morrison, in her series of rather large paintings of candies and cupcakes, renders in loving detail the essence of our collective memory. The candies in the painting, Gummy Worms, are practically alive; the chocolates in Hershey’s Kiss emerge from their foil wrapping, reflected on a table, and assume the dignity of a Tartar  crown; the treats in Candy Corn are virtually aromatic, they’re so real; and the Hostess Cupcakes, in which one cupcake has been broken open to reveal the creme inside, makes one yearn for a grade school lunch.

On the surface it’s all retro self-indulgence, the fruits of Halloween and pre-adolescent birthday parties, a celebration of the childhood fantasy of the pure pleasure diet, devoid of “parent foods” like broccoli and other villains.

But in another sense, Morrison’s paintings offer a highly ironic critique of eating and health trends in today’s obese and diabetes afflicted America. The scale and realism of these paintings render them readable as quasi-holy images. These are the saints of comfort, fueled by the grace of refined sugar and its avatars, one of the major addictions of our overly addicted times.

The title of the show then becomes doubly ironic. If sweets, like alcohol, are only safe in small doses, then rendering them in this scale — like ubiquitous larger-than-life liquor ads — reverses priorities. “Larger than life” equals “more important than life,” which is the subtext of every addiction. But, for the moment, I wonder where I can find one of those Hostess Cupcakes... M

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Nicky Nodjoumi
Priska Juschka Fine Art

By Mary Hrbacek

Nicky Nodjoumi’s Iranian background combined with American influences allows for a unique perspective in this work, an ironic metaphoric world view. His large-scale oil paintings employ visual conceptual puzzles to express obliquely his outrage at life’s modus unfortunate operandi. He communicates this outrage metaphorically to the viewer, who is challenged to analyze these hermetic works to discover clues to their alarming implications.  The beauty and perversity of the images add allure to the challenging iconography; they take the edge off the unknowable.

Moody skies serve as empty backdrops for his sophisticated scenarios where men and women, animals and morphed hybrids thereof, enact visual narratives that evoke classic literary works such as The Trial by Kafka, Fahrenheit 451 or Animal Farm. His works are philosophical testaments to the consequences of instability and change, the only constant in an evolving universe of incomprehensible social systems. 

Nodjoumi utilizes images of cut legs placed asymmetrically over one another to evoke the shifting fortunes in an unstable social order;  there is nourishment and rebirth. In many cultures the frog is connected with witchcraft or magic.  Nodjoumi’s fearsome image of a human-frog hybrid being beaten publicly with sticks evokes a sense of shame and foreboding. His use of metaphoric hybrids adds to the tension and drama of the works.

These works explore the relationship of the powerful to the powerless The holders of power are seen conversing in groups, observing what they consider transgressions performed by individuals or by the populace at large. Such “transgressions” involve the most innocuous actions, as a man and a woman holding hands in public. Some scenes resemble a show trial where the alleged perpetrators are placed on tables to be beaten, interrogated or ridiculed.  Anything that threatens the status quo is summarily isolated and denounced. Nodjoumi’s works articulate outrage at the ignorance and prejudice of those who maintain this pervasive control of individual and group behavior. 

The presence of Mullahs and Ayatollahs juxtaposed with bureaucrats dressed in business suits signifies a repressive response to the uncertainty of life. Intractable ideological constructs foster  a heavy-handed religious culture in Iran; domination and repression recur, of course,  from the earliest cultures to the present day. Nevertheless, the artist’s outrage at the intrusion of authorities enigmatic anecdotes are characterized by the complexity of the oblique situations they mimic.  Groups of men in suits appear as judges, condemning all spontaneous human expression.  Nodjoumi depicts images of Mullahs in robes with virtually the same societal role as the Western white male figures in suits, who exercise power behind the scenes.

Beneath the painted ground structure, various figures appear; repetitions of ape heads, upside down feet and legs, and chairs lying sideways.  These chaotic underpinnings stress the repressed animal instincts and unconscious confusion that drive insecure authority figures toward sexual and social repression. It is all about their fear of losing control. Ultimately, the artist speaks out against a totalitarian climate that crushes natural human instincts and desires. As such, this work comes across as a call for individual freedom and reason.  M

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Mary Ellen Mark
Staley-Wise Gallery

By Joel Simpson

We mustn’t let the early work of Cindy Sherman fix our notion of the Movie Still as the single frame that summarizes a key scene of an escapist feature film that trades in smooth-skinned stereotypes or voyeuristic peeks at the star powdering her nose. Mary Ellen Mark doesn’t even go near that kind of movie. The images in this exhibition of photographs, Seen Behind the Scenes, focus on the masterpieces of cinematic literature from the 1960s through the present decade.

The 1970s and 1980s, became reference points for the political and aesthetic growth of “babyboomers” who took their movies very seriously. Mark’s thirty-nine 20x24 inch and 16x20 inch black and white photographs catch film directors at work with actors, creating scenes that would touch us and live from one generation to the next. The black and white medium inherently shuns embellishment, placing these photographs in the context of photojournalism; we sense that we are seeing our film icons as they really are, which would be a cliché, except that there’s so much playfulness in it all, and this is the show’s ballast.

We see Fellini feigning sleep on the Satyricon set as his photographer, Giuseppe Rotunno, hugs him from behind; and actors Karen Black and Bill Atherton naked in bed together, while the bed is moved to another location on the set of The Day of the Locust; and a stunt elephant on elephantine water skis on the Honky Tonk Freeway in Sarasota, and there’s even Donald Sutherland, stretched out naked on his stomach in a bathtub, his toes protruding beyond the tub. There are many more such images in the show catalogue published by Phaidon Press, including Duston Hoffman making a cross-eyed bunny face at Sir Lawrence Olivier (who was playing a secret Nazi in Marathon Man) behind his back.

The thirty-nine photographs on view, though, seem to favor more poignant moments and static portraits, including an 84-year-old Henry Miller outdoors in a wicker rocking chair, attended to by the voluptuous Twinka Thiebaud in 1975; and Luis Buñuel conferring with star Fernando Rey dressed as a Guardia Civil in Tristana; a closeup of Dennis Hopper’s face from the set of Apocalypse Now (1976); double portraits of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow on the set of Shadows and Fog (1991) and those of Jessica Lange and Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie (1982).

But Mark is not afraid of ambiguity; indeed, she seems to embrace it in the portrait of a solemn and menacing Marlon Brando playing the autocratic Kurz in Apocalypse Now with a large beetle ensconced on his bald head, and the eternal Lone Ranger, Clayton Moore, at home in full regalia — mask, hat, and neatly pressed trousers, shirt and bandana — staring fixedly at the camera beneath an ornately framed photograph of his ancestor, and behind an 18-inch tall plastic polychrome effigy of himself on a rearing Silver (his horse), seemingly ready to be called back into action. Mark captures real tenderness (as opposed to the movie kind) when she photographs Louis Malle in 1980 excitedly kissing his new bride, Candace Bergen, who seems unprepared for his impulsiveness; and her father Edgar Bergen two years earlier, the year of his death, lifting the ever perky and impertinent Charlie McCarthy out of his suitcase.

In addition to the film directors and actors, Mark has also caught a number of the cinematographers, including Fellini’s  Rotunno and Bergman’s Sven Nyquist, and most significantly, Conrad (“Connie”) Hall (1926–2003) the legendary master of light, to whom the Phaidon Press catalogue is dedicated. 

The story Mary Ellen Mark tells in these photographs, supplemented by texts contributed to the catalogue by her subjects, transcends those of the individual movies whose creation she documented. It is the story of the most visionary, the most idealistic sector of the movie industry, and although this can be no more than a representative selection of all the “art” films of the period, it’s broad enough and nuanced enough to allow viewers to revel in momentary intimacies with our heros — we, who do not read movie magazines.  M

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Interview

Twenty-Five Years Later:
A Conversation with Jack Tilton

By M. Brendon MacInnis

There is an uncanny resemblance between Ed Sullivan, the iconic host of a television variety show that for two decades introduced “cutting edge” performance artists who often became superstars, and Jack Tilton, the deadpan poker face gallery owner who, over the course of two decades, has introduced many cutting edge emerging artists who have often gone on to achieve art star status. Like Ed Sullivan, Tilton exudes an utterly unpretentious “let’s see what they can do”   spirit in showing emerging artists, and a keen eye for what’s coming around the corner. This conversation took place at Jack’s favorite luncheonette nearby, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Tilton Gallery. We both ordered tunafish on rye.

I thought we might start with a little biography.  You’ve been around a long time in the art world and you’re associated with showing some pretty hip artists. You manage to be contemporary, and at the same time you’ve got all of this blue chip stuff going on too. I thought it might be interesting to talk about how you started out; how got from there to here.   You want a Charlie Rose type summary?

Yeah.  I think one uncle said it was like the family curse; this art thing. My grandmother and my great-grandfather, and my father were either part-time artists or artists. So I grew up always aware of art.

You grew up where, in New York?  No, I grew up in New Hampshire; but my father was from New York City and my mother was from Montclair New Jersey.

Where in New Hampshire?  In the White Mountains, in a little town up there.

I’m also from around there, from Boston. My family used to vacation in New Hampshire.    Oh, whereabouts?

I don’t remember anymore, just a bunch of trees and lakes. I think it was called “Big Island Pond” where we used to stay; it was a pond with a big island in it. Sometimes we would go up to the coast too, and get some lobsters.  Winnipesaukee has islands...

Oh, okay.  That’s the biggest lake; there’s a lake region. But we were doing art in New Hampshire.

You were doing art to New Hampshire?  No, referring to art…  Nature is an important part, that’s why a lot of artists, the Hudson River guys used to go up. Of course back then you had the train, you could take the train in New Hampshire and be at the White Mountain Hotel, and the train went right to the port of the hotel. You could get out — if you got on a sleeper train — the following day you’d be at the hotel, right in front of the hotel. It was very convenient.

I love the trains in Europe, but I never...  They used to be great [in America].

Oh, I’m sure.  Actually I tried taking the train once from New York to Chicago; I thought it would be this great American experience. But it turns out that the freight trains have all the priority here; you would just sit there stuck in the middle of nowhere, somewhere in the Midwest, waiting until these huge freight trains went by and the tracks were free again.  Anyway, you had; I think because of the nature thing, it was a magnet for artists. Even Alfred Barr, he used to go to Vermont, but occasionally he would dip into New Hampshire. I mean, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost; a lot of great writers wrote about the old man in the mountain, right near where I was. Robert Frost lived in Franconia a third of his life.

Where’s Franconia?  That’s in New Hampshire; it’s in the White Mountains basically. And then, in the Sixties there was a thing called Franconia College. I think Kenneth Nolan, when they were all in Vermont, there was a group of them, and they would come to Franconia. Robert Creeley was teaching writing there; he was actually writing to Ezra Pound, trying to get him out of prison I think.

So, you know, even though it’s devoid of culture, there are hints of culture even within that place. As a kid my dad would take me to Saint Johnsbury in Vermont, and there in this museum they had the great Bierstadt paintings, or we would go down to Boston to a Jasper Johns show. So even though you’re up in the middle of nowhere, people did come to New Hampshire, and there was Boston, as you pointed out, which was the major city nearby.

And then the fact that my father was, sort of a struggling artist who worked with a Christmas card company to design Christmas cards; and my grandparents, I mean my great-grandfather, he could paint; he would paint scenes like the Bierstadt church up on the hill. They would set up the umbrellas on the side of the mountain and do pictures. There was actually a thing called “artists bluff” where the artists used to sit and paint the White Mountains.

Well it makes a lot of sense, even today, to get away to a retreat in nature or something like that and do art. I remember that Roni Horn did an artist residency program in Iceland where it was all about getting in touch with nature.  Yeah, she loved that. So then, well I didn’t go become an artist;  I went to business school.

Where... In Boston?  Wellesley Mass.

That’s my old neighborhood, basically.  And I was studying finance and math. But I was still interested, you know; I would read on this side about exhibitions occasionally.

When you say your father was a struggling artist, did he make a living at it eventually?  Well he did for a while with the Christmas cards; he didn’t make it off his art.  More often an artist has to do commercial work to survive. He never made it off his artwork.  And his style would go from sort of a WPA American regional style, to later in life, a folk or primitive style. So then at college, I did buy a work of art in my senior year, which was unusual. Then I was interviewing at banks in New York to, you know, try and get a job, and then I realized it wasn’t cut out for me. I went back to graduate school for about two semesters, this was at the university they had in New Hampshire, and I thought, I’m not going to hang here; I got to get in the real world. So my grandmother knew Betty Parsons, and there was also this connection with Marlborough.

Marlborough?  Yeah, the original partner in the Marlborough Gallery. So I came down and I interviewed with Marlborough and Betty Parsons. At that time it was the height of the big war between Betty and Marlborough; Marlborough being very corporate, and Betty not. Betty basically said  if you get a little experience comeback in the fall.

You wanted to be the director there?   No, I just wanted to work. 

When was that?  This was 1975. So I took Betty’s advice;  I did about three jobs in one summer on Long Island. I went with the Benson Gallery, Elaine Benson; then at a museum, and I think I collected tickets at a movie center for a while.

But then I came back in the fall; Betty said come in and “I’ll see...”. she was very vague. So I came in and she was unwrapping a painting. She was with her gallery secretary, and she said, well, like “What you want?”.  I said well, I was here to hopefully work, you know, and so forth and so on. 

Basically she said if you want to work then help me out. So I started working.  She’s short, you know, and her secretary is short, and they were trying to unwrap this humongous painting, trying to get the plastic off, it was really hard for them. So I started working. Then the two guys that were supposed to come in, the art handler and the director, they never showed that day.  I think they came in like a week later; it was very casual back then. 

So I helped hang the show; I was, you know, doing everything from painting the walls to doing the accounting. And then by the time they arrived [the art handler and the director] I had already sort of made myself invaluable. I was working for free at that point, and then after a while I worked long enough that I convinced them to give me like eighty-five bucks a week plus commission if I sold stuff. Then I slowly just worked my way into a job, basically.

Was this in Soho?   No, her gallery was always on 57th Street, 15 East 57th, and then 24 West 57th.  Most of the guys showed at 15 East 57th. The space was designed by Tony Smith, and certain details were done by Barney Newman; the rounded corners were Barry Newman, and the actual proportions and the layout of the space was Tony Smith. It was a white box, with a gray floor. And the space at 24 West 57th Street; she moved in, in 1961. 

She had a very famous fight with Sidney Janis at 15 East 57th — I don’t know how much art history you want to do — basically Sidney was trying to get her lease at 15 East 57th. She had an option to renew her lease, but Sydney cut a deal with the landlord behind her back, and Betty took Sydney to court and won the case and then left the space anyway, to teach him a lesson, so to speak.

Today, 24 West 57th Street is known as a major gallery building in Midtown.  Yeah, Marian Goodman was up on the 10th floor and I told Mary, I said, look, on the fourth floor there are high ceilings, there’s a big space that just opened up and you should take it.

I remember seeing that space when it was  under renovation. I was amazed that someone would take the whole floor; those floors are usually cut up into several galleries.  Well she’s grown into it; she’s a great dealer. 

What happened with Betty?  She died in 1982, and I started my gallery in 1983.

Where did you start it?  In Betty’s old space at 24 West 57th. So I was there for about ten years, and then the recession hit; the dot-com bubble in 1990, 1991.

That’s around the time I came to New York myself, in 1992, to open a gallery in an artist studio building on 42nd Street. It’s the same building where Jim Dine had his studio. Rita Ackermann had a studio there too, and Moriko Mori also did a project in one of the studio spaces.  Kiki Smith had some bar or something in a space over there.

Yeah? It could be; there was a lot going on around the edges, it was basically a red-light district so you could do anything. Now of course it’s all gone, they turned 42nd Street into a Disneyland family destination.  The world keeps changing.

Sure. So, how do you do that with your gallery? It’s a wild balance between staying in one place, and getting around. From 1983 until now, it’s been an evolution.

After 57th Street you went to Soho; what brought you down there?   The dot-com bubble burst, and things got too expensive. It was a common joke then, that people said to each other: “Have you heard anything new; like any telephone calls?” And then the answer would be: “No, all I can hear is my overhead.” So it was disastrous for most galleries. Pace was sold to raise money; a lot of big guys felt the pain. Wildenstein said in his book that that recession hit him harder than the Great  Depression in the late 1920s. So it really hit everybody hard; it was about 3 ½ years is of pain.

That was 1990 to 1993?.  Yeah. After that it picked up. But there were three years where it was very painful. I lost, I might have lost 100 grand, and some people lost millions. I’m from New Hampshire, I’m a little conservative; but it was painful.

Did you have backers?  I’ve had backers throughout; but I don’t have any now. I’ve always bought them out or paid them off. Yeah, I did have backers at the beginning, I had one partner and another partner; I had three transformations of partnerships.

Okay.  Now I’m Solo [in New York]. I have partners in different cities;  I have a partnership in LA, I have a partnership in China,  70/30.  In LA it’s 50/50

In China it’s 70/30?  Yeah, I’m 70%

How did you manage that?  I thought you couldn’t go over 50% in China.  Maybe not in business; but in real estate you could. But that’s all changed now.

When you moved to Soho, were the rents cheaper than on 57th Street? Didn’t the dot-com bubble drive the rents up in Soho too?    Well, we were below Broom Street; below Broome it was reasonable, above Broome it was pricey. Below Bromme, I mean, my neighbor was David Zwirner and Marianne Boesky. We all went there about the same time. I left a little bit late; I should have left a little earlier for Chelsea, and because of that I sort of decided to do a contrarian thing. It was too late for me to do something economically feasible in Chelsea, it wasn’t viable for me to move there; so I did the jump from Soho to 76th Street. 

I did have, say, a millisecond thing with Kustera-Tilton in Chelsea, but I decided to let her run that; I’m actually a partner in that, but I’m a silent partner. I let her do her thing.

Is that a 50/50 thing?   It is, but I’m hoping she’ll buy me out, or that she’ll make a ton of money. But that isn’t the…

What’s it called now?  It’s called Anna Kustera, the Kustera Gallery.

You’ve got a pretty impressive space where you’re at now on 76 Street. I mean; it’s a townhouse.  Yeah, It took me two years to find it, a lot of my friends like David Hanks and Richard Tuttle said, you know, Chelsea is pretty saturated. Why not try something different?

Did you give the Lower East Side [LES] any  thought?  No. No, I’m too old for that. I mean I don’t mind visiting, but there are only so many moves left in me. I want to move to a place where I want to stay, and not keep moving. I’m active with the New Museum, I’m friends with a bunch of the people near the New Museum. But the Bowery and Christie, they’re not cheap; your talking $9000 to $15,000 a month, and those rents are not cheap. It’s not such a deal. I mean I have a deal, compared to what they’re paying, because I was early enough in this neighborhood. I think I got the deal, I don’t think they’re getting a deal.

Do you own your place on 76th Street now?  The bank owns it. But yeah; I technically own it. But I control my costs because of that. Down there [LES] it usually escalates, and then when the lease runs out you usually have to move. But you know, I can see getting a little tributary space at some point, but I’m in no rush. 

I mean Larry; you have to understand, Larry Gagosian and Acquavella, C&M Arts — a lot of the big guys — Gagosian, he’s never in Chelsea.  All of his action is up here [Upper East Side]. So you get an interesting perspective being Uptown; you may get less lookers but the people that do come in and are really serious. Usually they are the movers and shakers in the museums — on the board and trustees. High-end people. For the efficiency of time put in, it’s very well spent. Whereas in Chelsea you’ve got to answer still zillions of questions, a lot of tire--kickers, here you’ve got people ready to buy. It’s different.

But you still do art fairs; do you need to do art fairs? I hate art fairs, but it’s partially advertising for your artists. It’s good to do a bit of it for the sake of the artists; I don’t think it really shows their work properly, or helps the integrity of the art properly.

So you don’t really count on selling work at art fairs?   I do; but I just want to break even. It’s not like I’m going to get rich on these art fairs; it’s more about PR.

Do you believe all of these stories, when they say so and so sold this amount, or that their booth sold out everything and so on?  I never publish any of those figures the fairs send us because we can’t verify them. But you read that stuff all the time in other magazines.  Well, some of that’s been true lately; but now that we’re going in recession that’s probably going to change dramatically. It’s going to be like: How much did you lose? Versus: How much did you make?  I’ve been personally responsible for some of that stuff too, but we’re due for a slowdown now, so that will all change. I think it usually magnifies, you know, the prices.

What are you doing in China?   Well, China started about nine years ago for me. I did this show with Xu Bing. He came to me with an idea; he said let’s do a show about China.

Who is Xu Bing?  He’s a very important Chinese artist.  He’s here in Brooklyn, but now he moved back — a lot of them have moved back — to the Academy after Tiananmen Square. He’s now the head of the Academy.  But he and the others, it was four guys, left because of the massacre. And now; now they’ve all come back and are doing, fabricating their work in China. They are very involved in China.

Did they leave because of persecution, or because they didn’t like the situation?  They didn’t like the situation; some of the kids that were killed were their students. That upset them tremendously, you know, to see a tank roll over the head of a student, stuff like that. No, they didn’t like that at all. But now we’ve had enough post-trauma healing that they’re all back there in the globalization, fabricating stuff there,  and then there’s people — the big collectors that own their work over there. So, it’s all changed.

Who are the collectors?  There are about 22 in China, but outside of China there are thousands or more buying Chinese art. So, well, let’s go back to New China; Xu Bing and I picked,  I think it was five artists, he had tons of publications. He picked what he liked and I picked what I liked; we went back and forth and so then we came to five.

New China?  That’s the name of the show nine years ago. Then I decided, okay;  I did the show and I really liked the art and so I said, I got to go and visit China.  So, a year after that I visited China, and then I did a second version.

So this was eight or nine years ago you did that?  Yeah.

You were really way ahead of everybody on this Asian thing.  And then I did a second version…

In Beijing?  No, here. And then in the second version, there was one year — I think I pissed off some of my artists — about 60% of my artists in shows were all Chinese. Well, Fred Thomas and some of these guys, they all got their egos up because of it.

So then, after multiple visits to China I realized that all of the artists lived in this one area called Tong Xien, it’s a district on the outskirts of Beijing. It’s like a farming village, if you drove off the road, you know, the car would sink into the mud. It was really pretty gnarly back then. But now it’s gentrified; there are some 3000 of the top painters, they all live in Tong Xien.  So I decided; I had this crazy idea to do an art center of there — to lease a piece of land.  I leased a piece of land and, it’s been a long time coming, but  now we’ve got four buildings. We’ve had like maybe eight visitors, but this summer [2008] we have some from Yale, some from Hunter [Hunter Collage], people from all over the world a are visiting now.

You mean students in exchange programs, and stuff like that?  Not really exchange; they’re just welcome to stay there. I mean we have space. There are some friends of the Thomas’s staying there, and like an elder statesman African-American. We have a group of sculptors from Yale, and some photographers. 

Is it connected to the city?  No, it’s just the artists; they’re the heart of it.  I mean within walking distance, just across the street, there are the most famous artists, right across the street. You can just walk across the street. And all of the big guys, they’re like within bicycle distance. And you walk down the street and there’s this restaurant where they all hang out. Also at the restaurant there are collectors. We’re right in the center of the art community there.

So, are there galleries opening up around that area too?  No, there are more artists; I mean the galleries aren’t far, 798 [the art gallery district] is in that direction, but we’re a little farther.

Did you have to build everything there?  Yeah, we had to build everything, all of the buildings. You can build them for between — one of them was very expensive, I won’t give you the cost of that — but you can build buildings for between $30,000 and $60,000.  One of them was over $200,000 because we had to hire an architect from Boston to do it. They are terrific architects, they did the first building.

When was the first year that you went to China?  Eight years ago; now I go twice a year. The problem with going is the jet lag on the way back. Going, you can adapt in about two days, but coming back takes a full week to adjust.

It’s a tough flight; it’s like 14 hours [from New York].   Yeah, it’s murder. You’ve got to drink a lot of fluids, stretch; and it’s like you’re an astronaut really. If you’re blessed with a plane full of adopted babies, you get screaming all the way. You got to be very careful…

Yeah, I guess I was pretty lucky the first time I went. This space you have in China [in Tong Xien], is it  a gallery?   No, no it’s not. We have exhibition space, we’ve done one or two exhibitions, but they were not-for-profit.

What’s it like doing business there?  China; doing business there is not easy. You sort of start out thinking that the system is like your own, like something you’re used to. But they are figuring out a whole new way, like a post-capitalist way of doing business. So I did a bunch of shows and then I slowed down a bit.  Then I picked up again. I did, like three years where I did a lot, and then I slowed down for a couple years. Now I’m very active again. So it wasn’t like, the last nine years I was fully concentrated [in China]; because I’m involved with artists from Amsterdam, Germany and all parts of Europe; LA and New York.  It’s not just China; now were involved with India and looking at Russia. I just bought some artists stuff from Brazil. So we’re looking at young art, emerging art everywhere.  M

Ed. Note:

The Tilton Gallery is located in a landmark upper east side townhouse, at 8 East 76 St., New York, NY 10021.The gallery marked its 25th year anniversary this year.