ANTESALA Opens in London to a Brazil on the Brink

On the morning of 5 October, Flavia Nespatti was on the Tube, messaging me between stations. Brazil had voted the day before.

With 99.99 percent of ballot boxes counted, Flávio Bolsonaro, a right-wing senator and son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who was sentenced to 27 years and three months for his role in a coup attempt and is serving his sentence under house arrest, had 47 percent of the vote, against incumbent Lula’s 45 percent. Neither managed to secure the majority needed to win the presidency outright. The runoff is on 25 October.

Between two days that will decide the nation’s future, Brazilian-born Nespatti opens ANTESALA, a permanent space for Latin American art, down a quiet mews in Fitzrovia. Its name, she explains, means “the room that precedes a more formal, larger room”. Its figurative meaning in Spanish and Portuguese – to be on the verge or brink of a major event or transition – feels more in line with the moment.

“I think the Brazilian art market is much more established and international than it was even 10 to 15 years ago, and I don’t think this first election result changes that overnight,” she says. “Maybe some collectors will become more cautious, particularly in the short term,” she says.

“What really concerns me is how vulnerable cultural institutions and public support for the arts in general can become under Flávio Bolsonaro. Lula put culture back on the agenda, and another Bolsonaro government could change that quite dramatically. It will impact artists, museums, independent spaces and the whole cultural infrastructure.”

A few days earlier, Nespatti and I sat down in her newly renovated space, along with ANTESALA’s senior director, Laura González. With the first round still ahead, Nespatti had been breezier about the election. “As far as collecting is concerned, I don’t think it’s having a large impact.”

Where she was feeling its effect was in the timing of their opening. “I’ve spoken to some of the Brazilian galleries that are curious about seeing the space, and they’re not going to make it,” she said. “Some galleries are actually going back to Brazil to vote. Voting is mandatory.”

Nespatti, who first moved to London in 1995 and has made her home here since, with the exception of eight years in Madrid, was raised, she will tell you, to leave politics alone.

Raised to Leave Politics Alone

She was born in Brazil in 1971, seven years into a military dictatorship that would last another 14. Her father worked for the American consumer-goods giant Gillette and was moved around the continent on the expatriate postings that American multinationals used to season their managers for leadership roles. The family went to Rio, then, in 1985 – the year the generals finally handed power back – to Caracas.

She arrived not speaking Spanish or English and was put into an international school. “I loved it,” she says. “It’s that moment where your mind just opens up.” After Venezuela came the Dominican Republic and Colombia.

Her parents came from modest backgrounds, worked hard and sent their children to good schools; they are retired now, back in São Paulo. They were not, she says, very political. “Politics were off the table. I remember my childhood very well, and it was just definitely not part of the conversation.”

There was, however, a sense of national pride. “The key was really, really believing that I was raised in a racial democracy,” she says. “I was so proud.” Racial democracy was the state’s own account of itself – Brazil as a uniquely hybrid and harmonious society.

The claim, which served to paper over the nation’s history of enslavement, was formalised in the 1930s and taught in schools for decades. Many of those who finished school believing in racial democracy now sit on museum boards and buy art. Nespatti is one of them, and she knows it.

“It was so interesting,” she says of the moment in graduate school, decades later, when she started reading the history properly, “to look at what was happening right under my nose. Under my child's nose.”

Gego, Dibujo sin papel 86.12 [Drawing Without Paper 86/12], 1986.

From Finance to the Art World

Nespatti has always done her own thing, and her way into art was no exception. For 15 years she worked in finance, selling US equities. She and her husband, a Spaniard, met at university and moved to London in 1995, then to Madrid.

It was there that she walked into her first art fair, ARCO, and found a “world that just opened up to me, which I was not at all exposed to”. The couple started collecting.

Back in London, she quit her job in finance and joined a gallery-going group that met every Tuesday. Her interest grew into patronage: she began funding Brazilian artists’ residencies at Gasworks and joined the patrons of the Delfina Foundation, whose Latin American group she now chairs. That, she says, became “the base of my social and everyday thing”.

She decided to formalise her education in art at the Courtauld: first the graduate diploma, then the MA. The course she chose was a special option on revolutionary art in Latin America and Eastern Europe after 1945, taught by Klara Kemp-Welch, now Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the Courtauld.

“It really changed my life, going back to school.” It also produced the working relationship on which ANTESALA was founded. Kemp-Welch was the one who told Nespatti she had to meet González.

A Space Between Gallery and Institution

ANTESALA has been described in the press as a commercial gallery, a hybrid, a platform and a venue for non-Western art. While she and González are open-minded about the potential of the space, Nespatti is also clear about what ANTESALA is not. It will not represent artists, and it will definitely not “be walls for hire”, she says.

They want it to be a space of exchange and are “in talks with a few organisations in Latin America to showcase artists and movements that have not received so much attention, if at all, ever in the UK”, González told The Art and Other Futures podcast. The aim, she said, is “to try to expand the vision locally of what the Latin American twentieth century was in terms of its conceptual diversity”.

But ANTESALA is also not a foundation. “It’s not funded. I don’t have an endowment. I have to be very, very careful.” When galleries first heard about it, Nespatti says, “people kind of wanted to classify us. Are you a gallery, or what are you? Well, we’re not any of those things. We are our own thing.”

There is no lift at 13 Tottenham Mews. You climb a flight of stairs past the ground floor, currently occupied by LBF Contemporary, a gallery of emerging artists that opened in 2023, and arrive in a generous white room with three steel-framed windows and a pale timber floor.

Nespatti owns the building, and the rent from the ground floor covers part of the cost of the first. The programme designed to expand London’s understanding of Latin American art will also sell it.

The plan: works are consigned by galleries, estates, collectors and sometimes artists; ANTESALA takes a commission on the sale, and the consignor gets the rest. On primary-market work, the artist receives their half from the gallery, and ANTESALA shares the gallery’s cut. Nespatti and González will also do advisory work.

González is clear that ANTESALA is a commercial entity. “Our goal here is to make this more or less self-sustaining,” she says. “There's a discipline that comes with financial sustainability, that I think positively affects the creative angle,” she says. “We are trying to keep those two sides as balanced as possible.”

But she also emphasises that they won’t operate a one-size-fits-all model. “So the way we work with a small gallery based in Mexico that doesn’t usually do European fairs is going to be very different from the way in which we work with a bigger gallery that represents a big estate and always does Basel.”

They will help in other ways, too. There is storage for galleries consolidating shipments to European fairs, “because that’s a huge issue that holds the region back as a whole”.

González puts the importance of owning the freehold more sharply than her founder does. “The reason galleries often pay artists late is because they’re using what belongs to the artist to pay overheads until they get another sale. We don’t have to do that.”

The freehold may ease the pressure González describes; whether artists are paid promptly will depend on how ANTESALA runs its business. For Nespatti, “It’s a statement of intent. It’s a personal statement of intent, but it’s also a professional statement of intent.”

Friends left after Brexit; she did not. “I’m here in London, and this is where we have our home.” London, she says, “is a hub, whether you like it or not, whether you like Brexit or not. This is where all the amazing [art] schools are.” Many of the Brazilian artists she knows studied here. “When they finish, they want to stay.”

The Cost of Crossing Borders

To understand why a permanent space in Fitzrovia might matter to a market nearly 10,000 kilometres away, one must understand why that market behaves as it does. The short answer is tax.

Bringing a work of art into Brazil has for decades meant paying a substantial part of its value again in duties and sales taxes, high enough that the heads of the country’s two gallery associations and its two main fairs wrote publicly in 2024 that Brazil held ‘less than 1 percent’ of the global market as a result.

Tax reform now being phased in does not lower the barrier. Under the new dual VAT regime, the rates on specified artworks produced by Brazilian artists are reduced by 60 percent. Works by artists who do not meet that criterion do not qualify for the reduction. All else being equal, a work by a Brazilian artist could therefore incur less than half the tax applicable to a work by a non-Brazilian artist, such as Argentine artist Amalia Pica.

There are exceptions at the fairs, but the tax relief is conditional, and the arrangements differ by state. A federal ICMS agreement authorises Rio de Janeiro to grant certain exemptions for transactions at ArtRio; São Paulo’s relief for SP-Arte is covered by separate state rules.

For the other 51 weeks, the result is a market that Nespatti describes with one word: domestic. Brazilian collectors buy Brazilian art from Brazilian galleries, in reais, the Brazilian currency.

Recent trade figures offer a measure of the imbalance: Brazil imported about $20 million worth of art in 2025 and exported $227m worth. The Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2026, published last week, examines collectors’ purchasing habits across 10 markets, including Brazil.

The Art That Stays Abroad

The second reason it matters has to do with where the money already is. Brazil’s Central Bank recorded $654.5 billion in assets held abroad by residents for 2024. Annual reporting is required of residents with at least $1 million in foreign assets – a group that includes potential art buyers, though the figure is not a measure of money available for art.

A collector with a flat in Miami, Madrid or London has, for decades, bought and kept the work there, because a work that never enters Brazil never meets its import-related taxes. The habit is not only Brazilian. Collectors across the region are ‘aware of these political swings’, María Sancho-Arroyo of Sotheby’s Institute of Art said on The Art Market Podcast this month, and so ‘they also have a backup outside the country, whether it’s Miami or Madrid or London’.

ARCO Madrid, the fair where Nespatti first discovered the art world, describes itself as ‘a Latin American focal point in Europe’ and drew more than 30 percent of its international galleries from the region this year. Currency is part of the same calculation, and for Brazilians, particularly in this moment, the real’s value follows the politics.

After the first-round result on 5 October, the real gained more than 4 percent against the dollar and the Bovespa rose 7.7 percent to its first close above 200,000, its biggest one-day rise since March 2020. Investors appeared to read the result as favourable to Brazilian assets. Whether it is good for Brazilian museums is an entirely different question, and the one Nespatti raised while messaging me from the Tube.

What ANTESALA offers Brazilian collectors with a base in London is the opportunity to buy Latin American art, keep it here and avoid Brazil’s import-related taxes. The comparison with a purchase in Brazil depends on the work and its tax status. Nespatti, asked about the tax regime directly, declined to dig into the details.

“These limitations have existed for decades, and the Brazilian art world has had to structure itself around them across multiple administrations. In this context, having a space like ANTESALA where collectors can acquire works that are already in London should act as an incentive.”

Whatever the incentive, the gallerists I spoke to seem keen – though neither has yet confirmed a consignment or collaboration. Marcio Botner, co-founder of A Gentil Carioca in Rio, visited ANTESALA while the building was still being restored.

“Flavia’s project could be totally a bridge,” he says. “We want to do a kind of collaboration. We just need to find the right way. Which artist? Which project?”

Maria Ana Pimenta, partner and international director at São Paulo- and Rio-based Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel (FDAG), is interested in ANTESALA’s “potential as a London platform for artists who may not yet have gained significant visibility beyond Latin America, as well as for historical rediscoveries”. Would Fortes consign? “If it is a meaningful project for us and for them, we are always open!”

ASSEMBLY LINES. Photo: Ollie Hammick

A Venn Diagram Under the Junta

ANTESALA’s opening show is called Assembly Lines: 14 works by seven artists, made between the 1940s and now, that treat drawing as something that can extend beyond paper.

The work Nespatti keeps coming back to is Memorial for Intersections #15 (2015) by Amalia Pica, the London-based Argentinian artist represented by Herald St, whose work was in the main exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2011.

The sculpture is made from sheets of coloured Perspex – a red disc, a yellow triangle, two rectangles – hung on thin steel rods so that, where they overlap, they make a third colour. It is a Venn diagram, Nespatti explains.

Pica went to school in Argentina in the years after the dictatorship and discovered, as an adult, that the junta had banned the teaching of Venn diagrams. She has never found an official reason. Pica’s theory is that the diagrams teach cooperation; they show what two things have in common.

“I had some women my age come in yesterday,” Nespatti says. “One from Costa Rica, and two from Colombia.” She told them the story. They had no idea. “We were all manipulated.”

Beyond the Tropical Line

“There are a lot of people that are still on the fence to see what our programme is really going to be,” Nespatti says, “and whether we are just going to ride that tropical line.” She knows what buyers expect from a Latin American space, and what they expect is colour. “It’s a reduction,” she says.

González explains that a new collector often wants “the instant gratification of a beautiful painting that has been validated by everything, and it happens to be from Brazil”. It feels safe and “it makes people with the best intentions feel like they’re getting in on something important and that they’re being accepted into this almost club.”

The 2025 Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting found that Brazilian collectors held the highest share of works by established artists in their collections, at 53 percent, ahead of Japan and mainland China. Of those established works in Brazilian collections, 54 percent were by deceased artists, also the highest share in the survey.

To make the same collector want a difficult, political work “is a profoundly different intellectual mechanism”, and it takes longer. But ANTESALA has no intention of simply catering to desires for representations of a tropical idyll.

“Indigenous and Black communities in the Americas have been historically, incredibly marginalised, to the point of erasure. We also have a duty to have a programme that is diverse enough to encompass all of those complexities,” González says.

The Institutions at Stake

Which brings it back to 25 October. Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency offers a point of comparison, though it cannot tell us what his son would do. In April 2019, three months after Jair Bolsonaro dissolved the Ministry of Culture on his first day in office, The Art Newspaper reported from SP-Arte that the market was ‘emboldened’.

Pedro Mendes of Mendes Wood DM reported ‘a rise in art collecting, especially at the middle-to-upper market, blue-chip, level’; Alexandre Roesler of Nara Roesler said collectors, ‘those with disposable income’, had ‘high expectations from Bolsonaro’; Botner, the dissenter, said ‘I don’t think he has a good policy regarding culture, or the well-being of society. I am worried… but people who buy art in Brazil are hopeful’.

Botner has not changed his mind about the Bolsonaro family. On the Wednesday after the first round, he spoke to me from Rio between meeting a collector and a studio visit. As he watched a group of twenty-year-olds in red Lula T-shirts passing the café where he had stopped for a coffee and our chat, he said: “I still think in the same way. I think [Flávio Bolsonaro] doesn’t have any idea regarding culture. He doesn’t care… I think it is going to be worse for museums.”

He remembers the last Bolsonaro government: “People could not be naked in a museum if you needed someone for a performance piece, these kinds of things,” he says. “So, I think we are going to have a repressive moment for culture, in all directions.”

The market is another matter. He guesses that probably half of his collectors support Bolsonaro, “but if you are a collector, if you have a good work of art, you are going to continue buying”. He says there is a mix of motivations for buyers – from those who are not interested in politics but view art as a commodity to next-gen collectors who are learning about art and “realise it could be something important to be a part of, that as a collector you are more a part of society”.

Pimenta, messaging from Milan, where FDAG is representing artists included in the Vatican’s inaugural Catholic Universities Art Triennial – this edition is entitled Exercises in Empathy – put it bluntly: “The general mood is disheartened. This is an election in which the stakes are incredibly high,” she says. “If there is fatigue with one party on one side, the alternative is chaotic, dangerous, and threatens democratic values. So it is scary.”

In a follow-up exchange after the first-round result, I asked Nespatti a harder question: could ANTESALA do better out of a Bolsonaro government than a Lula one? Her reply turned to the economic outlook: “Cuts in public spending and interest rates are now on the cards.” She did not answer directly.

What a Bolsonaro win would hurt, on her account and on Botner’s, is the institutions. If museums and public programmes are cut off from funding again, more of the showing of Brazilian art, and more of the deciding which of it matters, will fall to galleries and collectors, and to private spaces like ANTESALA, some of them abroad.

Flavia Nespatti has watched one Bolsonaro presidency from London already, and listened, in those same years, as her parents’ generation began to speak fondly of the military regime that was never discussed when she was a child. Her parents now reminisce about the safety, the order.

“Of course there was corruption,” she says, “and if you were on the other side of the fence, there was also no safety.” They talk about politics together now. “It’s very interesting,” she says. “It’s not always an easy conversation.” Whoever wins on 25 October, it is not about to get easier.