This week, we are highlighting O. Ascanio Gallery, which is a leading art gallery in Miami, Florida, focusing on contemporary Latin American and European Art. This gallery has become one of Wynwood’s artistic gems.

The Gallery was founded first in Caracas, Venezuela in 1984 under the name Galería Oscar Ascanio. Then, O. Ascanio Gallery was relocated to Miami, Florida in 2010, a pioneer in the then-developing neighborhood of Wynwood Art District.

The gallery represents artists across a mid-price market. Its primary artists are: hester, Jorge Blanco, Nanin (Jose Armando García), Carlos Cabeza, and Kate Matthews. The gallery considers its artworks fruitful financial investments of sensible and cultured taste within the history of art.

Owner and director Oscar Ascanio was a leader of the Venezuelan vanguard during the 1970s. He represented his close friends Jesús Soto and Alejandro Otero, the two most renown artists to have emerged from the country. As the single representative of Jesús Soto in Venezuela under the company they founded together, Estudio Uno, Soto and Ascanio organized exhibitions worldwide on Soto’s work, from New York to Tokyo.

Millennial Magazine - O.-Ascanio-Gallery-Spotlight

Oscar Ascanio was a pupil of Venezuelan magnate and prolific art historian, Alfredo Boulton. With Boulton as a mentor, Ascanio learned from pre-Colombian art to the latest art tendency at the moment, kinetic art. When kinetic art first became popular in Paris, particularly through Galerie Denise Renée,  Ascanio worked with kinetic artists popular in France and also in Venezuela to show this new tendency in South America and also around the world, especially through Soto’s work, but also through the art of other very successful artists such as Alejandro Otero, Carlos Cruz-Diez, and Francisco Salazar, whose work extends beyond the rubric of kinetic art.

Ascanio first graduated from Economics in Caracas, and later completed his studies in art history and literature at Université La Sorbonne-Paris. He also took lessons at Museé du Louvre and later in Florence, where he enriched his knowledge on European masters. Over his long and prosperous career Ascanio has been acknowledged a leading expert in the art market.

His directorship is focused in core values, specifically, he bases his business enterprise on the understanding that prices of artworks are not invented, they are determined by art collectors, global consumers’ behaviors, and innovative tendencies that either renovate artwork from the past, or make way for fresher visions.

If you ever plan to visit Miami, you definitely have to put O. Ascanio Gallery on your radar.