Trim and elegant in a neat blue-and-white summer dress, Hildebrand says her hedge-fund background is helpful in the art world, though she was “very naive” about the market when she first set up as a dealer.
“What I loved about my work at a hedge fund was that exogenous news events would impact the markets in a very serious way,” she says. “I still remember the day when it was announced that Paul Volcker was being replaced by Alan Greenspan at the Fed, or how the Iran-Iraq war impacted on oil. This idea of a commodity, of supply and demand, of events structuring the narrative, exists in the art market too.”
The new London gallery will be on Eastcastle Street in the Fitzrovia neighborhood, which Hildebrand says is “kind of like Chelsea was 15 years ago -- young, emerging, contemporary.” She said an Istanbul gallery plans to set up across the street and an Asian gallery is also opening there.
“In the next year this will really be the vibrant center,” Hildebrand predicts.
Royal Clients
Among her clients, she says, are different strands of the royal families of Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Hildebrand attended the Art Dubai fair seven years ago and is now a regular, she said.
“I was fascinated by the multiculturalism of Dubai,” she said. “It’s an hour away from Kabul, from Karachi, from Tehran, from Damascus -- the big hotspots today, and yet everyone was living in total calm and respect for each other and you could just see the moment for cultural dialog, these markets starting to burgeon and emerge.”
London may prove a better market for her artists than Zurich, she says.
“People love to talk about Switzerland as a very sophisticated center for art and I am sure it is,” she says. “Swiss people on average speak three or sometimes four languages and they travel, they are very cosmopolitan and worldly. There is a lot of affluence here -- a big banking and financial community.”
Yet Zurich, she says, is “very conservative.”