BB: You've described the gallery as "a relationship" rather than simply a space with walls. As relationships inevitably change over time, has your understanding of what a gallery should be changed as Nicoletti has grown?
CHN: Our understanding of what a gallery should be has continuously changed, especially because Nicoletti emerged quite organically and somehow became a gallery before Oswaldo and I took the time to establish what a gallery could or should be. Nicoletti was created as a curatorial project and at the time the idea was to test alternative ways to run a programme of exhibitions. We were thinking of operating like this for 2, 3 years but then we were offered a good deal to keep the space on Vyner street we initially rented for a temporary exhibition so we decided to transform the project into a gallery. This is only when we sat down and thought of what our gallery should be, as we were running it already. In retrospect, a lot of the positive things that happened around the gallery at the beginning have precisely occurred because we planned or calculated less, although from a business perspective we realise we took risks we would be more conscious about today.
Regarding change, I think that as we've grown, the work has become more demanding, but not fundamentally different. When we started, we imagined the gallery primarily as a structure that could create the conditions for artists to develop ambitious work over time. We still believe that. What has changed is our understanding of how many different relationships that actually entails – not only with artists but with collectors, institutions, writers, fabricators, other galleries, and even with the city around us –, i.e. the understanding of a gallery as a set of ‘relationships’ rather than a space with walls.
A gallery is one of the few places where people can meet around objects that don't have a fixed meaning. Our role is to care for those encounters. Sales matter of course – they are what make everything possible – but we’ve come to think that relationships are the gallery's real currency. If the relationships are strong enough, the exhibitions, acquisitions and institutional projects tend to follow naturally.
BB: You have spoken about trying to operate "as little as possible as a gallery", placing artistic quality before commercial considerations. Has maintaining that philosophy become easier as the gallery has become more established, or does it require constant negotiation?
CHN: I said this in the context of a conversation about commercial strategy. At one point, and I guess like many other young gallerists, we wondered if we shouldn’t become a more commercially driven enterprise, but ultimately realised it wasn't the right path for us. So when I said I wanted to operate "as little as possible as a gallery," I wasn't making a grand theoretical statement. I simply meant that we have little interest in presenting works just because we already know they will sell. We'd much rather play the long game by supporting practices that may not yet have an established market, but that we believe are genuinely significant.
Maintaining that philosophy requires constant negotiation. In some ways, it has become easier: our network has grown, and we benefit from the trust of a larger community of collectors, curators and institutions who support the programme. At the same time, the gallery inevitably became more expensive to run. As an organisation grows, so do its responsibilities, and with them the pressure to make commercially secure decisions. There is a particular kind of freedom, and a willingness to take risks, that is often easier to sustain when a gallery is smaller. The challenge is to preserve that spirit while building a programme that is financially sustainable in the long term.
BB: You’ve spoken about representation beginning with belief in the artist rather than market potential. What happens when conviction in an artist and commercial success point in different directions? How can belief survive commercial uncertainty?
CHN: We said this because, as I mentioned earlier, we quickly realised how difficult it is to predict the market potential of artists at the very early stages of their careers. Trying to focus on commercial success alone ultimately introduces another kind of risk: choosing to work with artists for the wrong reasons (or worse, artists whose work you don’t genuinely believe in).
Commercial success is, of course, an important measure of an artist/gallery collaboration, but it is not the only one. Institutional exhibitions and acquisitions, critical writing and publications are equally meaningful forms of success. Some artists gain museum recognition long before the market catches up; others experience the opposite. These trajectories rarely unfold at the same pace.
I think there is sometimes a delay between what the market finds immediately compelling and what proves aesthetically or intellectually significant over time. Focusing exclusively on market potential can therefore be as risky as ignoring it altogether.
So to answer your second question I think belief survives commercial uncertainty when the relationship continues to create value beyond sales. If a gallery cannot yet build a market for an artist, it should be building an institutional and critical context around the work. Ultimately, our role is to help bring those different forms of recognition into alignment, even if they don't arrive at the same moment.
BB: Nicolletti began with a clear discursive framework centred on ecology, but today the programme appears much more responsive to individual practices than to a single overarching theme. Has that shift changed the way you think about curating as a gallery?
CHN: The initial focus on ecology grew out of research started during university and from a shared concern about a problematic that we think will end up connecting all the other socio-political questions in the future (this is something we began exploring, for instance, through our series of exhibitions total climate, for instance, which focused on the relationship between ecology and colonial history). We also felt that mainstream media were addressing ecology in terms that were both obsolete and counter-productive, and seeing the work of contemporary philosophers in repositioning questions of perception and aesthetics at the centre of ecological thinking, we wanted to explore how exhibitions could contribute to that conversation. We also felt the topic could give us an interesting framework for bringing together artists working across very different media and practices.
All that being said, and although it is still an important component of our programme today, the focus on ecology felt particularly relevant to Nicoletti as a curatorial project, when our research was essentially leading to thematic group shows instead of long-term relationships with artists. Soon after becoming a gallery, we realised that working within the confine of a single thematic, as rich and complex as it may be, could become limiting to run a gallery programme (both for us and our audience).
Shifting from curating to representing artists led us to pay more attention to other dimensions of artistic practices, as representation requires responding to the singularity of each practice rather than asking artists to fit within a predefined framework. In a way it became more about positioning artists at the centre of the programme rather than our curatorial voice. This has certainly changed the way we think about curating, incorporating a wider range of topics while working towards a form of programmatic consistency that has more to do with the political force of aesthetic modalities than the issues being addressed.
It’s a constant negotiation but in summary we now think the gallery has become less about advancing a curatorial thesis than about creating the conditions in which artists can develop distinct positions that have the potential to resonate beyond the immediate context in which they were produced.
BB: One thing I noticed is that Nicolletti consistently positions itself as more than an exhibition space; it commissions work, supports production, collaborates with institutions and develops long-term relationships with artists. As those responsibilities continue to expand, do you think the role of a contemporary gallery is becoming fundamentally different from what it was even a decade ago?
CHN: This is how we've always understood our role as gallerists, despite the challenges it brings!
I also think there’s always been different models of what a gallery can be, so I'm not sure there is anything particularly new or different in what you describe. If you look at someone like Leo Castelli for example, commissioning work, supporting production, placing artists in museum collections, collaborating with institutions and building long-term relationships was already central to his model. In many ways, this remains the benchmark.
What has changed, perhaps, is the context in which galleries operate. Artists today work across increasingly complex institutional, social and economic environments, so galleries are often expected to provide different kinds of support. But I don't see that as a fundamentally different role so much as an extension of the same responsibility.
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