At Home in São Paulo, Gallerist Pedro Mendes Lives With the Art He Champions

Hanging on a wall in gallerist Pedro Mendes’s house, in São Paulo, is a sculpture made of cloth and wire by the Afro-Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes. “Sonia says that when she did this piece, it was out of necessity, to overcome suffering and trauma,” says Mendes. “She uses the word ‘survival’ a lot. She was a Black woman in a society that was prejudiced against Black people, and still is.”

Gomes entered Mendes’s life more than two decades ago, at a time when he was facing purpose-of-life questions, which were, as he puts it, “existential.” Eventually, Mendes, who is now 44, found his calling. In 2010, with Matthew Wood and Felipe Dmab, he cofounded Mendes Wood DM, a fast-growing, pace-setting international gallery that, in addition to São Paulo, has locations in New York, Paris, and Brussels. “The gallery was a bit of a breach in the lineage of status quo art, which was very conceptual and refined and Western,” he says. “Our artists were outcasts, so the discourse changed a lot after they joined us. We were lucky—in the right place at the right moment.”

The three partners complemented one another: Dmab had experience running an art gallery; Wood, an American raised in a New Hampshire commune, was a gifted landscape designer with a refined aesthetic sense; Mendes had his eye on the big picture. Together, they presented emerging artists to an audience that knew about certain Brazilian movements of the past—especially the midcentury Neo-Concrete school that was based in Rio de Janeiro and included Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark, and Hélio Oiticica—but very little of what was happening now. The team at Mendes Wood DM became emissaries and explicators of the new.

Afro-Brazilian art was particularly under-recognized. “The question of the African diaspora was not something galleries talked about,” Mendes says. “Artists of African descent were confined to Afro museums. We decided they needed to be in the canon.” Today the gallery represents such prominent Afro-Brazilian artists as Paulo Nazareth, Antonio Obá, and Gomes. “You can’t even approach contemporary Brazilian art without putting yourself under the spell of Mendes Wood,” says the Miami-based patron Mera Rubell. From 2016 to 2017, her Rubell Museum presented “New Shamans/Novos Xamãs: Brazilian Artists,” a showcase of works by 12 artists, more than half of them (Lucas Arruda, Thiago Martins de Melo, Paulo Nimer Pjota, Solange Pessoa, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Nazareth, and Gomes) acquired from the gallery. “They are the heart and soul of the place,” she adds. “It’s amazing to discover in one gallery so many amazing artists.”

Mendes, who has a mystical bent, feels his path may have been destined. In 2001, while he was studying philosophy of art in Paris, his mother, who was a passionate collector of textiles and antiques, died at the family home in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. His sister, now an architect, suggested that they donate their mother’s fabrics to Gomes, whom she had met in an art class and found remarkable. Some time later, Gomes presented them with a huge panel, almost nine feet wide, of stitched-together pieces of cloth. “It was the story of my mother,” says Mendes. “At that moment, I knew that something had to happen. Your mother is telling you, and the universe. You can’t escape it.”

What happened first was that he obtained artwork from Gomes that he tried, with scant success, to sell in Paris. There, he had met another Brazilian artist, Marina Perez Simão; moved by her practice, he realized that he wanted to build a life working with artists. Like his mother, he was a collector.“I would buy so many things I loved that I would have to sell things so I could buy more things I loved,” he says. “That’s when I knew that maybe I wouldn’t be a philosopher but a gallerist or art dealer.” In time, his artists soared alongside him, as many contemporary Brazilians achieved wide recognition, not least of all Gomes, who has ascended to great heights in the contemporary art world. Memory, the fabric piece she made to commemorate Mendes’s mother, was acquired in 2022 by the Museum of Modern Art.

Mendes is drawn to artists, from the ancient to the contemporary, who are tackling profound issues. “I’ve always been someone anachronic, who didn’t belong in my time,” he says. In the library of his modernist house, in the affluent Jardins district of São Paulo, he has installed what he calls a “mini temple to these old civilizations.” Side by side on a table are 19th-century Hopi kachina dolls from Arizona; a Gandhara-style stone head, about 2,000 years old, from the area that is now Pakistan and Afghanistan; and, most ancient of all, a ceramic figurine from the Valdivia culture that flourished around 4,000 BC along the coast of present-day Ecuador.

It is an eclectic home. Built in 1958 by Rodolpho Ortenblad, the house doesn’t conform to the brutalist-inflected, concrete-heavy Paulista School (most famously practiced by Paulo Mendes da Rocha) for which the city is known. Instead, the two-story structure projects a Southern Californian aesthetic in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra. The exterior, with luxuriant gardens in the front and back that feature a towering, flamboyant tree, is what initially attracted Mendes. In restoring the plantings, he did botanical research to determine which ferns, begonias, and fruit trees were popular when the house was built. “They’re some very endearing plants that are not very grandiose,” Mendes says. “This is a modernist house but very shy, not a big megalith with big walls. I wanted to keep the whole thing kind and not very aggressive.”

The renovation was overseen by Fernando Pinheiro Guimarães, an architect who cofounded Studio Grapa, a firm that has restored other modernist structures in the city. For this project, he opened the upper floor with skylights; reversed the floor plans so that the bedrooms would look out on the rear garden rather than on the street; and demolished the outbuildings behind the house, originally staff quarters and a laundry room, replacing them with a swimming pool. “We tried to keep the spirit of the house, but it was almost falling apart,” he says. “We had to change all the windows, but using the same materials and the same design.” To display art properly, Mendes brought in a professor of lighting design from the University of São Paulo, who drilled tiny perforations in the concrete ceilings to install a complex lighting system.

The biggest change was the swimming pool, which Pinheiro Guimarães surrounded with a deck paved with irregular slabs of pink sandstone, typical of the period. The front door is framed by two walls that were painted to mimic green stone; the floors of the entrance hall and the kitchen are terrazzo, made from shells rather than the customary stone; and the blue and green tiles in the kitchen are custom. The furniture is a mix of Brazilian modernist designs that Mendes has collected and the older baroque style from Minas Gerais, the state where he grew up, which became a center of the Portuguese colony in the early 18th century after the discovery of gold.

Mendes—accompanied by Wood, who had been a fellow student at the École des Beaux-Arts—returned to Minas Gerais from Paris in 2007 to open Ja.Ca, an artists residency. It was located on the outskirts of Belo Horizonte, about an hour’s drive from the outdoor art museum Inhotim, which was inaugurated in 2006. “That was really fun for a year and a half,” he says. “But what we did had to be more dynamic.” In 2009, he and Wood opened an informal art gallery in São Paulo, presenting Arruda for their first show— a prescient choice, given that Arruda, who is now also represented by David Zwirner, has become one of the most highly regarded contemporary Brazilian artists. As luck would have it, Dmab, who had more experience selling art, was operating a start-up nearby. The three joined forces in 2010 to form Mendes Wood DM.

“The art world is always seeking brilliant new voices,” says Simon Watson, an American curator who lives in São Paulo and New York City. “They were the great ambassadors of a new generation, open to unrecognized visions.” In selecting emerging artists to represent, Mendes says, the gallery looked for those with an “irrevocable commitment to their truth and their personal stories—it only mattered that you were real.”

At first, they were compelled to focus their energies on art fairs, transporting Brazilian works to European and American collectors. “The world is vast, and Brazil was exotic and far away,” Mendes says. “The gallery was founded on the idea of cross-pollination and international exchange.” They opened their first space outside Brazil in 2017, in Brussels. “It was an easy city, very connected, and the prices were less than in London or Paris,” he says. Six months later, they leased a small gallery on New York’s Upper East Side, which they replaced in 2022 with more expansive digs in TriBeCa. The following year, they moved into a 17th-century building on the Place des Vosges, in the Marais district of Paris. “We felt our artists were having an international existence and needed embassies so collectors could come to our homes,” he says.

But, in large part thanks to Mendes Wood DM, Brazil no longer seems so distant. For the opening of this year’s São Paulo Biennial, in September, which Mendes says attracted more than 30 museum-sponsored groups from around the world, he hosted a party at home. With architecture that blends the Brazilian and the Californian, and furnishings that combine the modern and the Portuguese colonial, the house was an ideal setting for this diverse gathering. “It could have been in any international city,” Mendes says. “The São Paulo Biennial is the second most important biennial in the world. It has put Brazil on the map.” What he’s too modest to say is that, for any cartographer charting the art world, his gallery is positioned smack-dab at the center of that map.

Grooming by Laura La Laina. Photo assistant: Victor Frezza; retouching: Rodolfo Mello.