Based on Bruton Street, Olyvia Kwok's latest venture is neither a gallery nor an art dealership. Instead, the entrepreneur and industry veteran is building a business to help investors navigate almost every aspect of the art market

Words: Will Moffitt

“Personalised,” Olyvia Kwok says, pausing for a few seconds to let the word breathe. “I would like my business to be just that.” The London-based art entrepreneur, who has sold masterworks around the world, is telling me about her latest venture at The Rex Deli on Bruton Place. Sipping on a ginger beer- Kwok has had “far too many coffees already” – she is explaining what Bruton + Co really is. Given its multifaceted modus operandi, this is not as straightforward as you might expect.

Based out of a roomy second floor premises on Bruton Street, the venture is not a gallery – exhibitions and events will happen there, but Kwok and her company will not represent the artists. Nor is it a dealership or an art advisory firm in the traditional sense. Kwok does not have an issue with how the art market operates. It's just that years of working within it – she is very open about her successes and failures along the way – mean that she understands the rules of the game. Take galleries for instance:”Because they're salespeople, they'll sell you what they have,” she explains. With dealers or advisers, traditionally, you're looking for something.

For example, you say: “I want to buy a Picasso for ÂŁ5 million or a Banksy for ÂŁ2 million? Whatever you're looking for, they search for it and tell you why you should buy the one that they have found.” On the other side of the fence are your investment managers, stockbrokers or private equity houses, who know the FTSE inside out but are not art specialists per se.”Art, especially in lots of developing countries, is not very well positioned,” Kwok tells me. “There's no one who's acting as an independent who can be objective [when it comes to] buying art for investment.” Bruton + Co then is a Swiss army knife of sorts, offering a partnership relationship with collectors and investors as well as management services to up-and-coming artists with strong commercial prospects.

On the art investment side its services include estate planning, portfolio management, auction structuring and even advice on using art to hedge currency. It offers access to distressed situations through strong relationships with lawyers and receivers, allowing its clients to potentially buy rare works not found elsewhere. It will also help artists navigate the frequently slippery and murky parameters of the commercial art world, offering advice, extensive contacts and showroom exposure. Vertical Times, Bruton + Co's inaugural exhibition – running throughout July and August – celebrates a coterie of abstract 20th-century art pioneers including Robert Motherwell and Joan Mitchell. Works by nascent contemporary artists will be exhibited in a separate room, with creative director Alfie Carter overseeing a specialised residency programme for talented, less established creatives.

Kwok's passion for art is palpable, but one thing that bugs her is a predilection to buy art for art's sake. At a certain price point she finds the concept illogical to the point of insanity. “Anything under ÂŁ50,000 you can call it a day, good, bad or indifferent. You like it, [that's] fine, but anything above that… wouldn't it be nice to feel a bit more secure in the sense there's going to be a big audience who wants it, or the chances of growth are really high?” One thing that has been a constant throughout Kwok's career ever since she founded her first gallery on Ryder Street, St James's, is an ability to foresee lucrative opportunities. From catching the Asian contemporary trend in the early noughties to building an art fund for emerging markets, moving into pop art just before it popped and selling impressionist paintings to Asian museums back in the mid-2010s, Kwok seems to have a read on the next big thing.

“I'm a little bit ahead of people I guess,” she says matter of factly. “I don't do BS. I'm quite straightforward and honest. I make mistakes but I admit when I make them.” Another constant has been an appreciation for international art markets and other cultures. Kwok was born in Beijing, raised in Hong Kong and schooled in the UK. Too often Brits play it safe, she says. “The risk appetite is almost none with the English. They're not risk takers and they don't necessarily like to try new things.”

So after living in New York and Miami, and acquiring first-hand knowledge of markets in Europe, Asia and the US, Kwok has come back home to help investors try something new. “It's almost a process of finding myself; a homecoming thing,” she says. “Not only do I know how the game was played, but I f**king set the rules back in the day.”

Bruton + Co at Frieze 2025

Bruton + Co’s exhibition to coincide with Frieze, “ZERO and Beyond,” opened at its Mayfair showroom on October 9 and brought together such artists as ZERO movement founders Heins Mack and GĂźnther Uecker, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Paolo Scheggi, Cy Twombly, and Christopher Wool. Whitewall writer Laurent MoĂŻsi described the exhibition as “a luminous meditation on the paradox of white”, which “explores the tension between absence and excess, silence and vibration, purity and defiance… The atmosphere is contemplative, almost liturgical, yet never static. The works seem to breathe their surfaces capturing and releasing light as though time itself were passing across them. Here, white is no longer an end but a continuum, a spectrum of possibilities that stretches into the future.”

According to the Financial Times, “the verdict from October’s energetic fortnight of fairs and auctions in London and Paris is that the art market is finally coming alive again”, while Bruton + Co’s exhibition during Frieze attracted a steady flow of visitors, including several major collectors. Kwok believes this “reflects strong sentiment that ‘safe’ works with historical significance and enduring value are currently dominating the art market”. The Bruton + Co showroom is not a gallery, she emphasises, but it “allows wealth managers and family office managers to look at such works of art in a showroom with natural light, away from the austere surroundings of storage facilities”.