I first met The White Whale in early 2017 in the company of Drew, a project-space-impresario-slash-art-advisor. Drew had somehow managed to secure a short-term lease on an enormous and crumbling hotel in west London, using it to stage a number of exhibitions over the period of a year or so; he included several of the artists we represented in these shows. His backer – the owner of the building – was a Chinese billionaire who was planning to flip the building, and the place was always a wasp’s nest of property developers looking to press Drew for info about the hotel’s mysterious owner.
The White Whale wasn’t really a property developer but, as he once told me, ‘all my fingers are pie-deep.’ He was a tall man in the thrusting prime of early middle age with a powder-pink pallor and a short white beard like the dusting of icing sugar on a cake. By way of introduction, Drew brought him to an exhibition at my gallery in Clerkenwell where The White Whale seemed uninterested in the works on display. We soon fell to talking about Gilbert & George, however, and he told me he was principally interested in their early works – market rarities, especially if you didn’t want to buy at auction, which he didn’t.
‘I’ve always wanted to own one of the Drinking Sculptures’, he told me. ‘I’ve spoken to White Cube and [Thaddeus] Ropac but they haven’t got what I want. Drew told me you did a show of their older works where you worked before?’
‘Yes, I worked on the show of the Bad Thoughts series. It’s a little later than the Drinking Sculptures though – late seventies. Putting together the show we spoke to a lot of early G&G collectors. I could ask around for you if you’re interested. For the right number people might be willing to sell … ’
‘Oh yeah?’ The White Whale said. ‘Sounds good to me.’
I had no idea where to start. I called my former employer but he couldn’t help either. ‘See if you can persuade him to buy a Bad Thoughts picture instead’, he said, ‘then we’d be in business.’ The White Whale was a potential new client so ideally I wanted to be able to offer him what he was looking for. I did some digging around and found a set of Drinking Sculptures through a Brazilian I’d met at a gallery dinner a few months before. She was glamorous to the point of fragility and was the only person I have ever seen wear a ruff in earnest.
The problem was that the work – a multi-panel piece comprising nine glazed black-and-white photographs in what might generously be termed ‘authentically original condition’ – was in Brazil. In order to bring the works over, we would have to bring them into the UK on temporary admission licence. This, plus the shipping, would come to almost £2,000, but that was only a fraction of the profit we stood to make if the deal came off.
When the work arrived, they were accompanied by a complicated hanging plan drawn up by the artists. As a huge admirer of Gilbert & George, the almost archeological act of unboxing this work (technically all the individual pieces together formed one artwork, just as Gilbert & George like to be referred to as one artist) was a quasi-ritualistic experience in its own right. I squeezed into latex gloves and set about hanging.
