Bal Harbour

Thank you to Bal Harbour Magazine for this beautiful article about the Amelie, maison d'art adventure! 

"Before she opened her Paris gallery nine years ago, Amélie du Chalard had no art world experience. After years working in finance, she’d been considering a career change when she began to notice many of the small galleries she enjoyed frequenting in her neighborhood on the Left Bank of the Seine closing up shop—and yet, she observed, the Paris art scene was still booming.

“I was trying to understand why you have maybe ten, fifteen big galleries that are very successful—Perrotin, Hauser & Wirth, Gagosian, et cetera—and then these very tiny ones, very artisanal, struggling without much visibility, and nothing in between,” she says. 

Using her business skills, from her years working in mergers and acquisitions, du Chalard conducted her own market study of the small galleries she loved. Their problems, she found, lie in their modest spaces, narrow focus, price opacity, and often elitist demeanor. “I thought all you have to do is change all those things,” she says. 

Recalling the deals she’d done for fashion brands like Sonia Rykiel and Isabel Marant—“accessible luxury,” she calls them, in between the “Chanels and the Zaras”—she saw a similar void in the middle of the art market and set out to fill it. 

“I’m not really risk-averse,” says du Chalard. “I figured, if I fail, I can always go back into private equity. I gave myself a year to succeed.”

Today, du Chalard has built a thriving, disruptive enterprise with 20-plus employees, galleries in Paris and New York, and her own artist residency in Provence and studio space for young artists in Paris. A side business curating corporate collections works with luxury hotels, like The Emory in London and The Lana in Dubai, along with fashion retailers like Dior. “The idea is to create the best collection for the place with the best story,” she says, sitting in her flagship gallery in an 18th-century hôtel particulier just off Saint-Germain-des-Prés."