Born in Pakistan, Kashya Hildebrand spent 19 years working on Wall Street before starting anew as an art dealer in Geneva. In keeping with a life she characterizes as nomadic, she’s now moving her gallery to London from Zurich.
Hildebrand, 52, was a partner at the hedge fund Moore Capital Management LLC in New York until 2000. It was there she met her husband, Philipp Hildebrand, who quit as president of the Swiss National Bank last year. He resigned under political pressure after dollar purchases made by his wife three weeks before the SNB imposed a currency cap.
An SNB audit of the transactions, published three months after he quit, cleared Hildebrand of any wrongdoing. He is now vice chairman at BlackRock Inc. in London and the family has moved to join him there. Kashya Hildebrand opens her new gallery in London’s Fitzrovia neighborhood on June 26.
“For me it’s a dream,” says Hildebrand, whose gallery focuses on artists from Iran, Syria and other Middle Eastern countries. “I am excited about it. A lot of people from the Middle East are choosing to have second homes in London as safe havens, and so you have the affluence, the dynamism, the multiculturalism and ethnic diversity.”
Police Raids
Her opening exhibition will feature the work of Reza Derakshani, an Iranian painter inspired by Persian miniatures. He left Iran in 2010 and divides his time between Dubai and Austin, Texas. The show’s title, “Pink House Stories,” alludes to police raids on parties in his native country. Prices range from $80,000 to $125,000.
“Our program is a very eclectic mix,” Hildebrand says in an interview in her Zurich gallery, whose last show features an Austrian artist, Robert Schaberl. “I have straddled three continents for most of my life and really resonate with what is going on in the Middle East and Iran in terms of art.”
Mirroring the region’s politics, the market for Middle Eastern art is volatile, Hildebrand says. She gives the example of United Nations sanctions against Iran in force since 2006.
“There have been some exogenous pressures creating price volatility,” she says. “Some of the bigger names people are starting to focus on are artists from Iran. Just as their auction prices were making new highs, the sanctions started kicking in, so suddenly a lot of affluent people from the Persian community who were hit by these sanctions started selling some of their personal assets to get liquidity.”
Greenspan, Oil