Nor here, Nor there: Michele di Robilant Debuts his first show as gallery director

EVENTS | HAPPENINGS | WORLD OF CABANA

Sophie Goodwin talks to bright young gallerist Michele di Robilant on the eve of the opening of his breakthrough exhibition: Nor here, Nor there, featuring five international artists: Yoan Capote, Isaac Chong Wai, Hung Fai, Raya Kassisieh, and Vittorio Marella.

BY SOPHIE GOODWIN | HAPPENINGS | 29 MAY 2026

The name carries serious art-world authority behind it: Edmondo di Robilant spent over four decades as one of Europe’s foremost Old Master dealers, most recently as co-founder of Robilant+Voena, the partnership he built (with Marco Voena from 2004) into one of the most respected dealerships on the circuit, distinguished for Old Master paintings and 20th-century Italian art, with spaces in London, Milan, Paris and New York, and sales to the Frick, the Metropolitan, the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the National Gallery. 

Earlier this year, after 22 years in partnership, the two founders parted ways to launch independent family firms, with Edmondo taking the Robilant name and bringing in his son Michele as gallery director. The contemporary programme is now Michele’s domain, and Nor here, Nor there is his impressive opening statement.

Michele, 30, had been the public face of Robilant+Voena’s opening nights around the world long before the formal handover. On his new venture, he speaks of admiring galleries that “do something really strong from one place”. The ambition is clear: not to replicate the sprawling multi-city model of the previous generation, but to distil: with his unfailing charm and expertise. “I kept thinking of the uncoupling of memory and experience – how we’re so overwhelmed with imagery that it becomes hard to distinguish what we recognise from what we’ve lived. I wanted to bring together younger artists that saw the potential to play with recognition in their practices, and who already received some institutional recognition."

The five artists assembled – Yoan Capote, Isaac Chong Wai, Hung Fai, Raya Kassisieh, and Vittorio Marella – are an international cast, and their works reward careful attention. Capote’s Isla (Empatía) stopped guests mid-conversation: a roiling sea rendered entirely in the artist’s signature fishhooks, the horizon perpetually, agonisingly out of reach. Alongside two smaller mirror-scratched seascapes from his Retrato de Familia series, the grouping had the quality of a half-remembered photograph, something seen before, long ago. Vittorio Marella walked guests through his paintings with a shyness that suited the work; Raya Kassisieh drew people close around Tender Stems and talked about the copper as though it were alive.

Isaac Chong Wai’s Rehearsed, Mirrored works, comprising glass etchings layered onto mirror, were drawn from rehearsal footage for his performance Falling Reversely at the Venice Biennale. Hung Fai’s two landscapes from The Six Principles of Chinese Painting — Transmission were perhaps the most conceptually layered works in the show. The artist’s father, the painter Hung Hoi, makes the original image in red cinnabar and Hung Fai then traces it in black ink through folded, water-soaked paper. A father and son, tradition and its undoing, present in the same brushstroke.

Raya Kassisieh’s Tender Stems, a copper wreath of stems, leaves, and buds spiralling from a single root first commissioned for the Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah, was the evening’s most materially tender object, caught between growth and decay in a way that felt, under the gallery lights, rather alive. Vittorio Marella’s coastal paintings, spare, suspended, populated by figures who seem to be waiting for something they cannot name, brought the show to a close that felt both resolved and entirely open.

The room filled quickly with an energetic crowd, including Edie Jones, director at Saatchi Yates and co-founder of Armature Artist Residency, Gina Levett, Elena Geuna, Lady Maiko Rothermere and Tancredi Di Carcaci. "I think the art world has become so much about experience," says Michele. "To draw in younger people who are just beginning to understand and know art, it’s important to foster a contemporary discourse around your space. I was glad to bring so many people to our opening, and I think that’s another advantage of investing time, energy and money into one city: you really get to build a community around your programme."

The guests moved a short walk down Albemarle Street to Brown’s, London’s first hotel, where vodka martinis greeted guests in The Donovan Bar before dinner. Adam Byatt’s Michelin-starred kitchen served classic British dishes with a modern twist: endive salad with candied walnuts and Roquefort, steamed seabass with a lime and seaweed hollandaise, finished with a lemon tart and crème fraiche. Four tables were festooned with blousy red blooms: expertly arranged peonies and sweet-peas by Lil Caldwell from Grandiosa.

Rob Storey played classic jazz on the grand piano, while Edmondo made a heartwarming speech, about his son and the memorable evening. The theme of inheritance was threaded through the whole evening: in Hung Fai’s father-and-son landscapes, in Kassisieh’s work on grief and continuity, in the Robilant name itself passing from one generation to the next. Michele di Robilant understands that a name this weighted travels furthest when it moves in a new direction.

Nor here, Nor there runs until 7 August.