Every few minutes, planes zip in and out of Air Service Basel, the private terminal just outside the Swiss art capital. Most everyone there is just passing through—collectors traveling from far-flung corners of the world to find their next purchase. Then there are Vincent Lo Brutto and Pablo Stahl, the Frenchmen who opened an outpost of their gallery, Lo Brutto Stahl, there last year.
Since Lo Brutto and Stahl’s arrival, paintings and sculptures have dotted the terminal’s corridors, hangars, and even its offices. When one of their exhibitions opens, they host dinners and parties just feet from the tarmac, with guests raising their glasses as planes take off and land around them.
“There’s the sound, the smell, the whole atmosphere of the airfield right at the table,” Lo Brutto says. “It’s a space to project the future.”
The Basel gallery became the talk of the art world when it opened, in June of last year. Though Lo Brutto, 30, and Stahl, 29, have spent a portion of their time in Switzerland since then, France is still their country, and Paris their town. Next week, as the Art Basel fair kicks off in the French capital, they will unveil a solo show of paintings, objects, and works on paper by the Chicago-born artist Shelby Jackson at their gallery in the Third Arrondissement.
Over the last two years, Lo Brutto and Stahl have come to represent artists including Simon Callery, a British painter in his 60s whose work is in the Tate and the British Museum; Philip Seibel, a German sculptor in his 40s who has exhibited pieces at the New York gallery Magenta Plains; and Carlotta Amanzi, an Italian painter in her 20s who recently presented a solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Paris. Their aim for their roster of artists is to bridge generations and geographies.
Art is anything but new for the young men, both of whom grew up in Mulhouse, the French city just a 30-minute drive from Basel. “As children,” says Lo Brutto, whose parents are artists, “both of us went to the Kunstmuseum and Fondation Beyeler on weekends.”
Though they lived a few streets away from each other, Lo Brutto and Stahl never met as kids.
They finally crossed paths in 2015, at the Haute École des Arts du Rhin, a university in Mulhouse. “Vincent was pretty much the first person I spoke with on the first day of school,” Stahl says. “We talked about art all the time,” Lo Brutto adds. “About life, but mostly art.”
They parted ways briefly after graduating, Lo Brutto going abroad to London’s University of the Arts to get his M.F.A. in sculpture, Stahl pursuing an art-law degree in Strasbourg. A year later, in 2019, they joined forces in earnest, first with solo shows of Lo Brutto’s work, curated by Stahl, and then by organizing group shows together in parking lots, vineyards, and basements back home. They dreamed of one day turning an airport into an exhibition space.
A few months into their guerrilla-gallerist career, they began discussing something more permanent. “The white cube was like an absolute, you know?” Lo Brutto says. “It was the goal.”
Lo Brutto and Stahl decided to travel west, to Paris, to set up shop. “In France, there’s really only one option, and that’s Paris,” says Lo Brutto. After viewing hundreds of spaces, they settled on an elegant, 1,600-square-foot gallery on the Rue des Vertus, a 10-minute walk from the Musée Picasso.
A year later, having established a more traditional curatorial approach in Paris, they began seeking ways to revisit their early interest in giving artists the freedom to experiment with space. “The airport always fascinated us, both as a poetic metaphor of departure and waiting, and as a curatorial ground open to new forms of exhibition,” Stahl says. In researching airports that would allow for vision, they came across Air Service Basel, whose proximity to their hometown felt serendipitous. “It’s a place where we can give artists carte blanche,” Stahl says.
For now, Lo Brutto and Stahl run both of their galleries themselves. Though they’d like to expand to other cities, they insist the only way to rival blue-chip galleries is to grow organically, showing idiosyncratic artists in unconventional settings. “We want exhibitions that feel alive,” Lo Brutto says. “Places where artists, collectors, and visitors collide.”
“The Idea of a City” will be on at Lo Brutto Stahl’s Paris gallery from October 20 to November 22
Elena Clavarino is the Senior Editor at AIR MAIL
