Sophie Mainier, director of the Modern Movements gallery

It takes a lot to remove Sophie Mainier’s radiant smile. Even after a year of health crisis, hectic programming and the deprivation of salons, the director of the Mouvements Modernes gallery retains her legendary optimism and pragmatism. She is even delighted that this period of global paralysis has put art galleries back at the center of cultural life, when they struggled to attract the public and customers to their white cubes, most of the time deserted.

Sophie Mainier has long chosen flexibility. Through “Boredom of the permanent place”, she decided not to have a fixed address and to change space according to each project. At the moment, she is hosting a duo with the decorator and designer Hervé van der Straeten in her gallery in the Marais.

The works of sculptor Nadège Desgenétez and visual artist Daniela Busarello converse with the designer furniture of ultra-contemporary luxury. “A way of renewing our perspective on our respective pieces and sharing our resources”, explains Sophie Mainier, who has always liked working with other professionals and who is betting on a more collective spirit in the future.

Tribute to his mentor

The Covid ordeal only reinforced his motivation to transmit. “To be a gallery owner is to be passionate, otherwise it’s not worth it, she confides. Today I want to indulge myself even more by defending artists whose work and thoughts I love, and to offer it to others. “ To achieve this, the quadra, trained at the Louvre School and passed through the Center Pompidou and contemporary art galleries, uses all the means at its service, social networks as well as online sales sites, convinced “That you shouldn’t be afraid to show”.

“Pierre Staudenmeyer shaped my gaze, pushed me to be curious about everything, from ancient art to the most emerging forms. With him, I learned to create conversations between works. Sophie Mainier

She knows that it is not just a matter of “merchandise”: architects and collectors trust her for the acuity of her gaze and her ability to create a dialogue between writings, typologies and eras. His next exhibition, which brings together painters of the new generation in dialogue with design pieces from the 1980s and 1990s, will be yet another testimony to this. His title, ” Just think about it ”, is an undisguised tribute to her mentor, Pierre Staudenmeyer, of whom she was the faithful collaborator until her death in 2007.

Arrived at design through psychoanalysis, economist by training, bargain hunter and esthete at heart, the gallery owner was the precursor of collection design. First with Neotu, his first gallery founded in 1984, then with Modern Movements, he launched the first limited editions of designers and a whole generation of creators then unknown to the general public: Ron Arad, Jasper Morrison, Martin Szekely…

Sophie Mainier was only 28 years old when she took over the reins of the gallery, determined to bring the memory of Pierre Staudenmeyer and his discoveries fundamental to the history of design to life. “He shaped my gaze, pushed me to be curious about everything, from ancient art to the most emerging forms. With him, I learned to create conversations between works. Pierre knew how to do this better than anyone. His eye was shifted, free, and still punchy. “

A glass installation by Jeremy Maxwell Wintrebert during his solo show in October 2020 in the Marais, Paris.

Sophie Mainier inherited her daring. No question for her to lock herself in a genre, an era, a material. In October 2020, it presented for the first time the new monumental and hypnotic glass installations by artist Jeremy Maxwell Wintrebert in a space in the Marais adapted to the XXL formats of the works.

Direct contact with collectors

Today, she is preparing to reveal in another Parisian place new talents in painting, including fashion designer Vanessa Seward, who will unveil her first paintings around femininity. At the same time, this handyman, passionate about manufacturing processes, is working on the limited edition of several pieces of contemporary design. “Today, Mouvements Modernes brings together what Pierre undertook in his two successive galleries and cultivates the same freedom of approach”, she sums up.

“Portrait of Sylvia Kristel”, by Vanessa Seward.  The work will be presented, from June 1 to 22, in the “Just think about it” exhibition, designed by Sophie Mainier.

At 42, Sophie Mainier has made her place in a still very masculine market. “Being a woman in this profession is a strength”, observes this tall brunette, whose model is Chantal Crousel or Anne-Sophie Duval, two gallery owners recognized for the power of their convictions. “As women, we bring a different perspective and surely more sincerity in human relationships. “

Despite distance selling and digital platforms like Artsy, where she recently organized the exhibition “French savoir-faire! “, this profession requires, according to her, direct contact with the public and collectors. It’s not easy to sell works in volume, especially when it comes to furniture as atypical as that of Garouste & Bonetti or Pucci de Rossi, and a photo can distort the scale and do not allow the object to be seen. from all angles.

“Galet”, by Armelle Benoit;  Corbini sofa, by Garouste & Bonetti and “ElapsedTime Paris Coronavirus I”, by Daniela Busarello.  They were part of the online exhibition “The French Savoir-Faire!  », On Artsy.

“We do a business of transmission which involves exchange. Not having a permanent space pushes us to reach out to our customers without waiting for them to come to us. We regularly present pieces to our collectors, who are delighted to view the works in their interiors. “ A proactive approach that fits in with a desire to escape established codes to initiate a new type of discussion around a work, in a more personal and more intimate way, far from the glances and speculative frenzy.

Daniela Busarello and Nadège Desgenétez at the van der Straeten gallery, Paris (4e), until May 29. “Just think about it”, 16, rue des Minimes, Paris (3e), from 1er to June 22.