Photos by: Gilles Bensimon

Isabelle Bscher, proprietor of Zurich-based Galerie Gmurzynska, was headed to Los Angeles imminently when we spoke in late October for this article. The trip was to plan the upcoming exhibition of painter Anh Duong at Spring Place, in March, to coincide with the Oscars, she explained over Zoom from Switzerland. Bscher has recently been tapped as curator for the private membership club’s two locations, in New York and L.A., both designed by Kulapat Yantrasast of wHY Architecture, renowned for his work on major art spaces, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Bscher’s debut show at the L.A. outpost, of works by Louise Nevelson, is on view through January 15. “The response has been great, and they have such a wonderful member base, a lot of creatives who really appreciate the arts,” she says.

Shortly after arriving in the City of Angels, Bscher hosted Halloween cocktails for extravagantly costumed guests including actresses Anna Kendrick and Rebel Wilson, of the Pitch Perfectmovies, and Hollywood moguls like Modern Familyco-creator Steve Levitan. Days later, Bscher was at the Pacific Design Center for AmfAR’s L.A. fundraising gala along with Meg Ryan, Paris Jackson, and Madonna, who presented an award to fashion designer Jeremy Scott, one of the evening’s honorees. She sported a sharp white pantsuit at LACMA’s Art + Film gala in early November, hosted by Leonardo DiCaprio and honoring Steven Spielberg and artists Amy Sherald and Kehinde Wiley, whose Obama portraits were on exhibit at the museum.

Female art world dynasty

Isabelle Bscher was born into this world of art; it is her destiny. She is the third generation to run Galerie Gmurzynska,founded by her grandmother, Antonina Gmurzynska, in Cologne, Germany. Bscher’s mother, Krystyna Gmurzynska, took over the gallery in 1985, relocated the flagship to Switzerland in 2005, and mother and daughter now work together.

Bscher grew up in the gallery – a red cube designed by Swiss architect Roger Diener, connected to the family’s house in Cologne – surrounded by priceless artworks and glittering art-world personalities. She jokes that she learned to walk at Art Basel, accompanying her mother to the fair since infancy. “The gallery and my life have been so deeply intertwined, it’s hard to separate one and the other,” she says. “I felt from a very early point that I was part of it; I always knew I wanted to be a gallerist.”

Other family members have also occupied distinguished positions in various fields. Her godfather was Baron von Thyssen, the Swiss industrialist who amassed one of the world’s greatest private art collections – widely considered better than that of the British royal family.

Bscher’s father, Dr. Thomas Bscher, a banker, is a racecar driving enthusiast who won a world championship with McLaren at the GTR Euroseries in 1998. He later became CEO of Bugatti, the exotic carmaker.

The gallerist’s great grandfather was a prominent German banker, a Protestant, who aided Jews during the Nazi era and became influential in post-war politics.

Working full time at the gallery by age 22, Bscher remembers how excited she was to work with artists. “One of the first exhibits I was able to co-organize was with Hedi Slimane, who in addition to being a phenomenal fashion designer is also a great photographer,” she says. After relocating the gallery to Zurich, another early-career thrill for Bscher was working on the Alexander Calder show that launched the new space. “I remember specific shows that meant a lot.”

Now with four locations, two in Zurich, one in the affluent Swiss enclave of Zug, and another in New York City,they represent major modern artists like Picasso, Kandinsky, James Turrell, Robert Indiana, and Yves Klein, as well as Karl Lagerfeld’s photography, Sylvester Stallone’s paintings, and architects Zaha Hadid and Richard Meier, who has used the gallery’s catalogues in his collages, and who once designed their booth at Art Basel Miami.

Galerie Gmurzynska represents the estates of prominent artists including Wilfredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Nevelson, and Spanish surrealist Joan Miró, with whose family Bscher works closely.

Sought-after guest curator

An art historian who studied contemporary art in London and New York and earned a master’s degree from Sotheby’s, Bscher is in demand to curate shows at museums around the world.

Last year, she co-curated a Miró exhibit at Villa Paloma, the New National Museum of Monaco, under the guidance of Prince Albert. It included early works and lesser-known later pieces, some of which had never been shown before, as well as some that are a part of pop culture, like the painting behind Gordon Gekko’s desk in the movie Wall Street. “It was a great show. It actually drew the most visitors ever to the museum in Monaco, and it was at the height of Covid.”

Bscher organized a retrospective of Sylvester Stallone’s 55-year painting career for the Osthaus Museum in Hagen, Germany, opening December 4. “It’s abeautiful museum; it’s going to be a big show called ‘Painting for 55 Years.’ He’s been making paintings since the mid-1960s, and I think people have a certain perception of him, but he is very sophisticated, with a great use of color and form in his work.” Stallone is also a lot of fun, Bscher notes.

Galerie Gmurzynska began representing the actor’s paintings after he purchased some art there while in Zurich about twelve years ago. “He came in, he was very nice, and he started telling us about his work, and we looked at his work and were really impressed.” She’s also planning a future Stallone exhibition in L.A.

Forming alliances with creative geniuses

At various art fairs Bscher has collaborated with renowned creatives like Baz Luhrmann and the lateGermano Celant, artistic director of the Prada Foundation who passed away from Covid in 2020, on designing her gallery’s booths.

“We’re very well known for working with creative geniuses who might be from other backgrounds, like Zaha Hadid,” she says. In fact, the gallery’s Paradeplatz location in Zurich houses the late architect’s very last interiors project, a design for an exhibition celebrating Dada master Kurt Schwitters, in 2016.

Bscher brought film director Baz Lurhmann in to create a classroom-like set for an Art Basel Miami show with the theme “My kid could have done that.” “You know how when people see a great artwork and they say, My kid could have done that? We took great masters, like Kandinsky and Twombly, and we showed why your kid couldn’t have done that.

Lagerfeld’s wit, Zaha Hadid’s expertise, Von Thyssen’s extravagance

Living among such colorful characters, Bscher certainly has stories to tell. She calls Karl Lagerfeld “the king of the one-liner.” “Everything he said was incredibly funny. He’d ask me about somebody, and I’d say, ‘They have a lot of tattoos,’ and he would say, ‘Having a tattoo is like spending your whole life in a Pucci dress.’”

Lagerfeld, she recalls, was a fantastic drafter; constantly drawing. “The most exciting was when he would send drawings and sketches to the gallery as a surprise. It was always such a treat.”

She describes the late Chanel designer’s house in Paris as incredible; he did all the interiors himself and had impeccable taste. He was expert in many areas, like poetry and literature, constantly reading. “He was absolutely the most sophisticated person I’ve ever met.”

Zaha Hadid was an expert on the Russian avant-garde, on which she wrote her thesis. This was an area in which Galerie Gmurzynska was a pioneer early on, and which helped make its name in the art world. They brought Hadid in to curate a show of her own work along with pieces from Bscher’s mother’s collection. She came up with a black-and-white theme, with Hadid’s work in the black section and the Russian avant-garde pieces in the white. “We started working with her closely after that, and then she designed the architecture of the gallery,” says Bscher. “She was a phenomenal person.”

Bscher’s godfather, Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen, known as Heini, had one of the world’s most important art collections, full of priceless Old Masters, impressionists, and expressionists, with everything from El Greco to Picasso to Van Gogh. His massive collection was reputed to outshine the Queen of England’s, of whom he quipped: ”I think the Queen is not, perhaps, really a collector.”

Much of the baron’s collection is now in the Thyssen–Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid.

 “He had this spectacular house in Lugano, an Italian part of Switzerland, called Villa Favorita, which was the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen,” says Bscher. “It’s right by the lake, part of his collection was in the house, and there was a small, private underground museum and exquisite gardens. It was just extraordinary.”

 Heini had a colorful, scandalous love life, with five marriages to very different women, from models to fellow aristocrats. His second wife was English model Nina Dyer, whom he showered with lavish gifts including a Caribbean Island, two sports cars with gold-plated ignition keys, wildly expensive jewelry, and a pair of black panthers. The panthers went everywhere with her, including hotel suites which they heavily damaged. Nina left him for a penniless French actor, but soon after married another fabulously rich man, Sadruddin Aga Khan, son of the Aga Khan.

 Heini’s third wife, Fiona, had an affair with Artistotle Onassis’s son, Alexander, who was 16 years younger that she, and a teenager at the time.  

Christo relationship

Bscher had a close relationship with Christo, with whom she collaborated on exhibits at various art fairs, like TEFAF and Art Expo Chicago. They met after the artist’s wife and partner, Jeanne Claude, had passed away, and prior to his 2016 Floating Piers project in Italy. “We did a show of his finished and unfinished projects in St. Moritz, and I became quite friendly with him,” Bscher says. “Christo was the greatest.”

She traveled with the artist extensively, even to Asia, where the gallery arranged for Christo to give a talk at the University of Hong Kong. Christo is the most disciplined person Bscher has ever met. He’d arrive at his studio by 8 a.m., he didn’t have a chair there, he’d work standing up all day long. He didn’t eat lunch – he was very thin – and at night he’d dine out with his entourage, consisting of his nephew and other loyal acolytes who accompanied him everywhere.

He had very strong principles, refusing to take sponsorships, and pouring all proceeds from his work into financing his other projects. He was also an old-school gentleman, insisting, for instance, on taking the street side when walking with a lady on the sidewalk.

She was stunned by the prolific artist’s death in May 2020, at age 84, from natural causes. “I couldn’t believe it, I thought we’d work with him for many more years to come because he was, like, the fittest person around,” she says. “The last time I’d seen him he was so vibrant and healthy; I really didn’t see that coming; I was quite shocked.”

Galerie Gmurzynska held shows of Christo’s work in Zurich and New York this fall as a tribute, coinciding with the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, a lifelong dream that he didn’t live to see completed.

Family saga from communist Poland to a new space in New York

Bscher’s grandmother, Antonina Gmurzynska, was left an orphan in Poland after the Nazis killed her parents and siblings; she eventually escaped to Germany in the 1960s and founded Galerie Gmurzynska in Cologne in 1965. She had no connections or business experience, but she knew art, having worked at a well-known museum in Poland.

Gymurzynska initially built her gallery’s program on surrealism, international constructivism, and the Russian avant-garde, and later added modern art into the mix. She did attract prominent buyers, and the gallery built a fine reputation.

The center of the German art world later gravitated away from Cologne to Bonn and Berlin, and many galleries relocated to Berlin or London. Galerie Gmurzynska had already opened a Swiss venue in Zug, in 2003, and had manySwiss collectors, so making that country their base made sense and they opened in Zurich.

Now, Bscher is planning a new space in New York, a 6,500-square foot town house on East 78^thStreet down the block from the gallery’s current location. Architect Drew Lang is helming the renovation, which they expect to complete in fall 2022.

It was Bscher’s grandmother’s lifelong dream to have a gallery in New York. “She wished that she had expanded to New York sooner, because she felt like she did so many important shows early on that were later taken up by museums. She felt that if she had done these shows in New York, more people would have gotten to see them. It was a dream of hers.”

Great grandfather saved Oppenheim bank

Bscher’sfather came from a very old German family that had started out as cotton merchants. Her great-grandfather Robert Pferdmenges was a well-known banker, head of the banker’s union in Germany, and prominent in the Protestant church. He joined Oppenheim Bank, then the largest private bank in Europe, as a partner around 1930. Under Nazi law, Oppenheim’s Jewish owners were forced to step aside, and the bank was “Aryanized”, its name changed to “Robert Pferdmenges & Co.”

After the war,he returned control of the bank to the Oppenheim family. It was one of only two businesses seized from Jews that were given back to the original owners after the war. Oppenheim continued in business until 2010, when it was acquired by Deutsche Bank in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

Pferdmenges then became influential in German politics,helping Konrad Adenauer, a close associate, to become the country’s first post-war chancellor. The Marshall plan for the reconstruction of Germany was designed at Pferdmenges’ house, and he co-founded the Christian Democratic Union, which was the party of Angela Merkel. He is often given credit for Germany’s post-war economic miracle.

Philanthropy: Prince Albert II Foundation, animal welfare

Environmental issues are a passion, and in recent years Bscher has worked with the Prince Albert II Foundation on saving the oceans. “I curated art for their auctions numerous times, and we were able to get great artists to donate work to raise a great deal of money.” One piece, donated by Francesco Vezzoli, was a portrait of Albert’s mother, Grace Kelly, that the artist did specially for the auction.

Bscher also supports animal welfare organizations; she often brings her beloved Maltese, Lolly, with her on her travels.

Upcoming shows

In addition to Anh Duong and Stallone, upcoming exhibits include photographs by Ezra Petronio, founder of Self-Servicemagazine, in Zurich. “Ezra is one of the great art directors of our time; in fashion he’s an absolute legend,” says Bscher. In art he’s well known for his Polaroids, which are in the tradition of Lucas Samaras and Andy Warhol. “Self Servicemagazine is celebrating its 25th anniversary, so we’re doing a show that was previously at the Dallas Contemporary Museum of Art.”