Antesala Brings Latin American Art to Fitzrovia With Sales, Advisory, and Public Programming
London’s Latin American art scene is gaining a new address this October. Antesala, a commercial space founded by Brazilian collector Flavia Nespatti, will open in Fitzrovia with an unusually broad remit: sales exhibitions, art advisory, and public programming under one roof.
The project grew out of Anteroom, Nespatti’s itinerant salon for artists without representation. That earlier format was shaped by a practical concern as much as a curatorial one. Many of her friends, she has said, were intimidated by the white cube. Antesala keeps that spirit of access while moving into a permanent space, a shift that reflects both ambition and long-term commitment to London.
The opening exhibition will bring together a sculpture by German-Venezuelan artist Gego and drawings by Brazilian artist Mira Schendel. The pairing suggests the kind of multigenerational conversation Nespatti wants the space to foster, one that complicates familiar assumptions about drawing from Latin America and places formal experimentation alongside historical depth.
Laura González will co-run Antesala as senior director. González, an art adviser originally from Puerto Rico, founded the Latin American department at Phillips auction house in New York in 2011. Her involvement gives the project a strong market and institutional pedigree, while Nespatti’s own background points to a collector shaped as much by study as by acquisition.
A former equities sales professional who returned to London after time in Madrid, Nespatti later pursued two degrees at the Courtauld Institute for Art, including an MA focused on revolutionary art from Latin America and Eastern Europe in the postwar period. She has said that studying the region’s 20th-century art history helped clarify the political realities of her childhood in South America, where her family moved through Brazil and Venezuela without speaking openly about the dictatorships around them.
That intellectual and personal history has already translated into support for Latin American art in the UK. Nespatti has backed the Barbican’s survey of Beatriz González and exhibitions at Nottingham Contemporary, including a 2025 project by Brazilian artist Alan Weber that engaged with Nottingham’s Brazilian delivery drivers.
Future plans for Antesala include an archives-focused exhibition developed with the Il Posto foundation in Chile. In a city where new spaces often arrive with short horizons, Antesala is positioning itself as something more durable: a place for sales, yes, but also for scholarship, conversation, and a longer view of Latin American art in London.
