In Rio, the Art Market Plays It Safe

“It’s never a blast when it comes to sales, it’s more about attracting new clients,” says Brazilian art dealer Luciana Brito, owner of the eponymous gallery in São Paulo, fresh off her morning jog near Ipanema Beach, in Rio de Janeiro. She is sitting down for breakfast with another titan of the art market in Brazil, the dealer Luisa Strina. Her friend is not in the best of moods, upset that works at the higher end of the price spectrum didn’t sell at this year’s ArtRio, which concluded its five-day run on 20 September. Some 76 galleries, mostly Brazilian, took part. Sales aside, it’s a fair that still holds the position as the most spectacular setting in the world – it’s hard to think of a convention centre with anything matching this view of the iconic Sugarloaf Mountain and sailboats floating on the silvery waters of a marina.

“I just sold cheaper things,” Strina continues. She, together with the rest of the moneyed elite in Brazil, is nervous about how the country’s uncertain political situation might affect the art market. The upcoming national elections pit the incumbent leftwing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is vying for a fourth mandate, against far-right candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, son of now jailed former president Jair Bolsonaro. They are going neck and neck in recent polls.

But moods, like the angry tides of Ipanema at the end of winter in this part of the globe, change. At the end of the interview, Strina makes sure to tell me that business improved as the sun broke out during the final moments of a fair drowned in rain from the start.

Views of the fair exteriors. Photo: Courtesy of ArtRio

‘The grande dame of the Latin American art world’, a title coined by The New York Times, and one at which she scoffs delightedly, managed to find buyers for works by artists known for minimalist conceptual work. These include Rio-based Fernanda Gomes, who creates poetic works with found materials; the newly discovered Sidival Fila, an artist and a Franciscan friar in the Vatican among others. None of them, however, break the £30,000 barrier price point, in a fair that had multimillion-pound works on offer, such as an Alexander Calder sculpture valued at around £3m at Almeida & Dale.

Overall, sales were not a disaster, but hovered at modest values. It’s a snapshot of a global scenario of cautious buying. When it started, ArtRio was an unmissable juggernaut, albeit one surfing the waves of speculation to attract international galleries such as Gagosian, Lisson and David Zwirner. These top-tier galleries have long abandoned Brazil, and the fair is now a very local affair, a pastime for the same superrich faces that trade air kisses in São Paulo, sometimes Buenos Aires or Bogotá; and whose fortunes remain unaffected by economic turmoil.

The international crowd has thinned out, despite the much-hyped visit by Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, head of Qatar Museums – a presence that had dealers all riled up – and appearances by Manuel Segade, director of Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía’s, and representatives from Tate, the Centre Pompidou and other institutions.

At the fair, most of the works on sale were safe choices and did not distinguish the fair’s offerings from those of its other regional counterparts. For example, a Lucio Fontana valued at just over £2m and seen a few months ago at SP-Arte, in São Paulo, has resurfaced here.

Bruno Lyfe, Em silêncio sentido o que não foi dito (2025). Photo: Courtesy of Artrio

That said, there is still a benefit to buying art in Rio over São Paulo: a temporary tax exemption for galleries with a fiscal base there. (The government sales tax on cultural goods can go up to 60 percent.) So the galleries keen on closing a deal bring some of the best of their blue-chip pieces out of the closet, in hopes of finding buyers. Victor Perlingeiro, a partner at Pinakotheke, one of the influential secondary-market dealers in the country, says collectors are less nervous than expected around the electoral turmoil. The gallery sold some Brazilian modern masters, among them José Pancetti, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti and Tomie Ohtake.

Nearby, the dealers at Dan, a São Paulo-based gallery with both an Old Masters branch and an operation devoted to the primary market, had pieces on sale ranging from less than £3,000 to over £1m. A rare portrait of an outlaw from far northeastern Brazil by Candido Portinari, a display of his period of flirtation with socialist realism, was left unsold by the end of the fair.

Overall, political content doesn’t seem popular at the fair. This could be due to a general mood of apathy. “There is such a feeling of anaesthesia before this electoral theatre, which has kind of become a big soap opera,” says Akio Aoki, head of the São Paulo branch of the global Galleria Continua franchise. “It seems people don’t really care about any of this.” One of the boldest pieces on display was Ouroboros, a 2026 work by conceptual artist André Komatsu referencing Dilma Rousseff’s 2016 impeachment and the economic debacle that rocked the country’s finances in its aftermath. To me, its price of US$13,000 was somewhat suggestive of a political leaning – to vote for Lula at the polls one must mark the number 13 on the ballot. The work remained unsold.