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Over the weekend, Austrian mega-dealer Thaddaeus Ropac held the grand opening of his new gallery in Milan. More than a few in the art press have taken it as a signal that the city’s art scene is poised to explode, giddily calling it “the art market’s next great hope” or the “next art market hub.” Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
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There is reason to be optimistic about the art market in Italy. Long hamstrung by the highest art tax in the EU, the Italian government announced in June that it was cutting VAT on art from 22 percent to 5 percent. The country now boasts the Eurozone’s lowest rate. A study published in March by consulting and market intelligence company Nomisma estimated that the move could help galleries, antique dealers, and auction houses in Italy generate €1.5 billion in three years. It also predicted that the Italian economy could grow by €4.2 billion as a result.
And then there’s the expected influx of well-heeled Brits and other Europeans leaving the UK to escape the Labour government’s February decision to overhaul long-standing tax rules for non-domiciles—UK residents whose permanent home is outside the country for tax purposes. Italy, by comparison, has a flat tax rate for non-doms of just €200,000, making it an appealing landing spot for the ultra-wealthy.
Rich people like to collect art, which is good news for galleries in Italy, including Ropac and the smaller fish in the Milan pond like Cardi Gallery, Lia Rumma, and Robilant + Voena.
At the opening Saturday, just ahead of Milan Fashion Week, Ropac insisted that the decision to open the 3,000-square -foot Milan space—his seventh gallery—came “long before” the announcement of VAT cuts or the UK’s non-dom overhaul. “If I had wanted to follow the money, I would have gone to Dubai,” he told ARTnews. Still, he seemed pragmatic about the new venture.
“Milan has the potential to become an art center – it already has fantastic institutions, but of course it doesn’t yet have the same infrastructure as Paris or London, and there isn’t a major national museum dedicated to contemporary art,” he said. Ropac argued that the art scene in Paris, where he has two galleries, has seen so much growth because it has “a fleet of new museums” in the last decade, from the Fondation Louis Vuitton to the Bourse de Commerce.
“First the artists come, then the academies, then the institutions, then the market follows,” he said. “This is what makes an art center.”
Ropac should know the trajectory. In 2021, he was one of the first international dealers to open a space in Seoul, trailing only Perrotin, König, and Lehmann Maupin. Gladstone, White Cube, and Esther Schipper soon followed. He was in the middle of opening the Seoul space when Frieze announced that it would stage a new fair in the city.
“Almost exactly five years ago I opened the gallery in Korea, and I am now being asked the same question about Milan as I was about Seoul then: ‘Do you think the city will become a major art center?’” he said.
But Italy is not Korea. The country’s art scene has been here before, and it was a false dawn.
In 2007, art-world monolith Larry Gagosian set up shop in Rome, where he remains a kingpin in a relatively small market. Coincidently, it was also the seventh gallery he had opened; he now has well over a dozen. “The locals were ecstatic at the highly anticipated opening … which they see as a sign that the city has finally reemerged as a cosmopolitan cultural capital after a fifteen-hundred-year hiatus from being caput mundi,” journalist Cathyrn Drake wrote in Artforum at the time. “Considered in light of recent press focusing on the lagging Italian spirit and economy… [the opening] gave especially welcome recognition that… [Italy’s] art market is indeed up for playing on the international level.” Prominent Italian curator Achille Bonito Oliva wrote in La Repubblica that Gagosian’s landing was “a great coup” that would energize the Roman art scene.
Nearly 20 years later, however, the Italian capital’s art scene has not graduated to the big leagues, despite being host to some notable contemporary art museums—among them MAXXI and Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome—and respected dealers like Gavin Brown and Loran O’Neill. (The latter first opened a space in Rome in 2003 but launched his current larger gallery in 2014 in the former stables of a 17th-century palazzo in the city center).
Clare McAndrew, the author of the annual Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report, told ARTnews that her conservative estimate of the Italian art market last year was approximately $381 million to $425 million. For comparison, the US totaled $24.8 billion over the same period, while the UK and France generated $10.4 billion and $4.2 billion, respectively.
Not even Gagosian could turn around the Italian art market’s fortunes in 2007, when global art sales, swelling in a speculative bubble, hit a record $65.8 billion. (Commentators have suggested he moved to Italy in part to secure the estate of adopted Italian Cy Twombly, whose work Gagosian opened with in Rome.) A year later, dealers were hit hard when the international art market crashed; sales tanked 41 percent between 2007 and 2009 amid the global financial crisis, though the market recovered a couple years later.
Niccolò Fano, founder and director of Rome’s Matèria gallery, told ARTnews that Twombly was indeed a “significant factor” in Gagosian’s decision to open in Rome, but said the gallery has been more engaged with the local scene of late.
“These big corporations, more than galleries, are often so caught up in their own programs and they have such tight schedules that it makes it hard them to really interact with their surroundings,” he said, noting that Gagosian had joined the organizing committee for Rome Gallery Weekend in May. “It was a sign of true interest in the development of the city’s contemporary scene.”
Ropac, meanwhile, is arriving in Italy in tougher times than Gagosian. Global art sales for first half of 2025 were down 6 percent from last year, and 2024 sales had already fallen 12 percent compared to 2023. This summer also saw a spate of gallery closures, fair cancelations, and lawsuits that pointed toward a sluggish market.
Ropac opened the new gallery with a joint show by Georg Baselitz and Lucio Fontana titled “L’aurora viene.” The Milan-based Fondazione Lucio Fontana loaned four works for the exhibition.
A few days before the launch party, I called Italian dealer Massimo De Carlo, who helped shape Milan’s contemporary art scene after opening his first gallery there in 1987. (One of his former galleries occupied the same space as Ropac’s new operation just off Piazza Belgioioso).
“Nowadays, the art scene doesn’t tremble every time a new gallery opens,” he said. “Ropac is an important player and is welcome, but it won’t change the Milan context.”
De Carlo added that the challenges for the Italian market remain the same: too much bureaucracy, too many taxes, and too fragile a market. In his estimation, those factors mean that dealers spend as much time untangling red tape as they do supporting artists.
“We have great artists, but the system around them is often underfunded or overcomplicated,” he added. “The VAT cut is a good sign. Let’s see if it helps collectors feel a bit more adventurous”
Ropac Milan’s executive director, Elena Bonanno di Linguaglossa, formerly a senior director at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, told ARTnews that she expects the VAT reform to have a major effect on the local market.
“It’s going to radically change because we were penalized by the highest VAT [on art sales] in Europe, but now we have the lowest, at 5 percent,” she told me Saturday in the gallery’s courtyard next to Baselitz’s looming Cowboy sculpture. “France has 5.5 percent, but believe me, it makes a difference—a collector will want that at 0.5 percent.”
When I asked her about the challenges of selling art in Italy, she was defiant. “Why would it be a challenge? I don’t see any challenges,” she said. I’m sure I saw a wry smile.
Jessica Kreps, a partner at Lehmann Maupin—which ran a seasonal space in Milan in 2024 during the Venice Biennale—told ARTnews by email that while the VAT change was long overdue, Italy already had “advantageous tax laws … that make it a natural draw for luxury markets.” She added that the city has a strong existing collector base that is “relatively untapped.”
“Milan has a fast-growing economy—partially as a result of Brexit, among other factors—and we’ve seen that this growth extends to the arts sector,” she continued. “All of this makes Milan a very business-friendly environment, servicing the luxury sector in particular—so the potential there is enormous!”
Clearly, Ropac has intuition. Time will tell if Milan becomes the art world success story that he—and others—appear to be heralding.
