Marco Poggiali Q&A

-Marco, let’s start with the simplest question, and maybe for that reason the hardest one: how are you, really? Both as a person and as someone who watches the art world closely, a world that in recent years has gone through sudden stops, unexpected accelerations, and some pretty profound shifts. How are you feeling about this moment?

- That’s one of the hardest questions to answer honestly. But I'll try, because I think the relationship we have with our own life depends a lot on the angle we choose to look at it from. You have to make an effort to see the glass half full, not out of naivety, but out of survival. If you start focusing only on what's wrong, you end up in a spiral that pulls you under. It's the positive things that give you momentum, the leverage to keep growing, to want something more. So yes, I'm good. And I mean it, because beyond the daily frustrations, which are very much there, I think we should remind ourselves more often that we're privileged. Not in the superficial sense of success or money. Everything is relative. But the simple fact of being here, today, on a Monday afternoon, talking about things we care about, should already be enough to say: I'm doing well. It's almost a principle worth keeping on the wall. Because when you lose that perspective, everything gets heavier. And one thing worth saying: appreciating what you have doesn't mean settling. Actually, settling is dangerous, because it flattens your gaze and drains your creative tension. You can acknowledge that you've done good work, but the next project should already be underway. Not out of anxiety or restlessness, but because there's a deeper need driving you. Otherwise we would have chosen a different life. People who want stability do something else. This work requires a constant openness to creativity, and often the hardest part isn't even the artist's. Sometimes the most radical inventiveness happens behind the scenes. The gallerist's job is to intercept an intuition, recognise it, protect it, and then elevate it. You need enormous sensitivity, but also a certain madness, a total openness of mind. And paradoxically, in some cases, it demands even more mental freedom than the artist themselves has. It's a job almost nobody really sees. The only ones who truly understand it are the intelligent collectors, the ones who walk into a gallery and don't just look at the work, but sense the project, the effort, the vision holding everything together. And when they recognise it, they don't just say so. They back it up, by buying the work and allowing you to continue. Because at its core this isn't simple buying and selling. Being a dealer would be much easier: buy at one, sell at one and a half. The gallerist's work is something else entirely. It's building meaning, creating context, accompanying ideas through time.

-Your path begins inside an important story, one that takes shape as a gallery in 1984 but goes back much further than that. Growing up in a family where art is simply part of life means absorbing it almost by osmosis, as part of the daily landscape. Tell us the story of Galleria Poggiali, and when you understood that this world would become yours too.

- My father comes from a farming family. My grandparents weren't landowners, they were sharecroppers in the Tuscan countryside, near Fiesole, on one of those beautiful estates where life was genuinely hard. My grandfather worked the fields, my grandmother looked after the landowner's children, and in exchange the family had an apartment. Twenty people under the same roof. And yet my father always described those years with a phrase that stayed with me: "There was nothing, but there was love." I think my optimism comes from there. These feel like distant stories, but almost every Italian family has one tucked away somewhere. My father is not an intellectual. At thirteen he went to work in the centre of Florence, where a friend suggested he join him at a framing shop that doubled as a small gallery. The real turning point came at sixteen, when the owner began sending him to collect work from artists' studios around the city, thirty pieces picked up, two kept as gifts. Those were completely different times. The economic boom, houses to furnish, people buying local painting with real enthusiasm. The contemporary art market as we know it today simply didn't exist yet. At twenty-five, in 1973, he opened his own framing shop with a colleague. Ten years later, in 1984, the gallery was born alongside the workshop. In the beginning they worked mostly with Italian modern art, Migneco, Cassinari, artists they could actually afford. Serious, grounded work, but still tied to a fairly traditional world. The real shift came between the late nineties and the early two thousands, when my father started spending time in Milan and met Giovanni Frangi, stepping into a completely different scene. Through those relationships came names like Pignatelli and Fantini. The work around the contemporary began to take real shape, with shows organised both in the gallery and in museum spaces, contributing to those artists' growth and market visibility. But the true leap in scale happened when he met Aldo Busi. The writer was drawn to him intellectually, sensing something familiar, another self-taught man who had come from nothing. They met at an art fair in Montichiari. My father had no idea who he was. Someone on the staff had to tell him: "That's Aldo Busi." But he spoke to him exactly as he would have spoken to anyone else. That has always been his strength, treating the person who arrives on a private jet the same way he treats the person who comes to clean the stand. From there, everything changed. To use a music analogy, it was like a small local label suddenly finding itself at the centre of the national scene. Busi introduced him to Enzo Cucchi, who at the time was working exclusively with Bruno Bischofberger, the gallerist behind Basquiat and Warhol. My father and my brother travelled to Switzerland, to a castle deep in the snow, where Bischofberger named an enormous figure to organise a show. My father, who doesn't speak English, looked at him and said slowly: "Bruno, I am a very pragmatic person. I don't have that kind of money. But I brought you oil from my olive trees.” Two bottles of Tuscan olive oil, handed to one of the most powerful men in the global art market. Bischofberger was thrown. He called his wife, had bread brought out, tasted the oil, and visibly delighted, got Cucchi on the phone. The show happened, on considerably more favourable terms. I came into the gallery right around those years. My first fair was Arte Fiera Bologna, in 1998. The energy was extraordinary. Pignatelli was everywhere, the market was growing, everything seemed to be happening at once. But I should be honest: at first I was running away from all this. As a kid I experienced it almost as something that took my father away from me, he was never around. I spent most of my time with my mother, who held everything together with extraordinary patience. I played football, school didn't interest me much. But the moment I was free I'd head to the workshop near Santa Maria Novella, among the framers. And there I met a cast of characters that felt almost Fellinian. I didn't grow up among intellectuals and dinner parties. I grew up on the street, among craftsmen, unlikely characters, ex-boxers, neighbourhood people. And I'm glad, because that DNA stays with you. You can become as polished as you like, but certain things don't leave. For years I watched this world from a distance. Then, at my first fair, I understood that maybe I could actually belong inside it. I felt at ease with people, with the public, with that particular energy. And I realised this might be my place. The most beautiful thing is that my father never pushed us. Not me, not my brother. He always said: "If you want to come, I'd love that. But it has to be your choice." And that freedom, probably, was the greatest gift he gave us.

-Thank you so much for sharing with us this amazing story. Listen. The role of the gallerist has changed enormously over the years. Today it seems to involve a constant balancing act between curatorship, instinct, cultural enterprise and the management of human relationships. What qualities do you think a good gallerist needs today? And do you feel a concrete sense of responsibility toward the artists you work with?

- The responsibility is something I feel deeply, in every sense. And it connects directly to what we were saying before: when you do this work because you genuinely love it, because you're profoundly invested in the outcome you're trying to reach, everything shifts. A gallerist today needs vision, courage, patience, seriousness. But above all they need to be psychologically prepared to deal with any kind of personality: the artist's, the collector's, the system's own particular demands. That's the hardest part. The very top international galleries, and there are very few of them, can afford to delegate certain dynamics. Their name is strong enough that the mechanism feeds itself. But in most cases it's you who has to build, over years, a community of people who believe in your eye. And that is an enormous responsibility. Because when I sell a work to someone, I'm not just thinking about the sale. It's not essential that the work becomes a spectacular investment. But I need to be able to demonstrate, over time, that the trust that person placed in me made sense. That the artist grows, evolves, shows, builds a real presence. That, for me, is what the gallerist's work actually is. And it's also what real collecting actually is. There are of course people who buy purely to speculate, but that's a different world entirely.