Mendes Wood DM Creates Success through Friendship, from São Paulo to Paris

To run any business requires structure and strategy. But in the art world, there isn’t an accepted playbook of how to build and run a gallery. That said, the founders of Mendes Wood DM, Pedro Mendes, Matthew Wood, and Felipe Dmab, never intended to open a gallery. The trio—who describe themselves respectively as “visionary,” “spiritual advisor,” and “mastermind”—met as idealistic young men, energized by the philosophy of art and the poetry of life. The basis for the gallery was really a friendship circle, or a “thread of affection,” as they call it. “We’ve done like a superhuman amount of hosting,” explained Wood.

In Paris during the early 2000s, Mendes and Wood were studying the philosophy of art and hanging around the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where the duo were inspired by relational aesthetics and the performance of life. When Mendes’s sister introduced them to the Brazilian artist Sônia Gomes, an idea sparked. “She said, ‘You live in Paris, you need to sell some of this,’” recalled Mendes of the artist’s fabric wearable sculptures. At the time, the Fondation Cartier was holding an exhibition, “The Brazil Popular-Brazil Neoconcrete.”

While Gomes’s work may not have been included in the exhibition, Mendes continued to wear or bring Gomes’s work to parties and people’s homes around the city, eventually beginning to sell pieces to top Parisian collectors. But it would still be a few years until the commercial operation became fully fledged.

Wood grew up in a commune in New Hampshire, but a peripatetic impulse led him to Europe well before he was awarded a high school diploma. Mendes, meanwhile, hails from Minas Gerais, Brazil’s agricultural and industrial county seat. After their studies in Paris, Mendes lured Wood back to Brazil where the two decided to open a residency in Belo Horizonte, in Minas Gerais. “It was on a dirt road, in the middle of nowhere,” explained Mendes. It also happened to be the location where most of the artists that the gallery works with today hail from.

Ja.Ca, as the artists’ residency is called (and still exists today, operated by Francisca Caporali), opened as a research center and haven for Brazilian conceptual artists in 2010, around the time that Bernardo Paz opened the iconic sculpture park Inhotim in Minas Gerais. Mendes fundraised from Brazilian industrial companies to distribute as grants, and the project pulled in Paolo Nazareth and Lucas Arruda, who, like Gomes, are the linchpins in the formation of the gallery and its continued success today. This is as true for the gallery’s staff as it is for the artists on its roster: Mage Abàtayguara-Örneberg, the gallery’s first employee, was hired as an intern in 2010 and is now a partner.

“There [are] three people that we started representing before we started having a gallery,” explained Wood, citing Gomes, Nazareth, and Arruda as the foundation of their gallery concept.

The gallery’s operation begins with its artists. It has come to shepherd the careers of names such as Rubem Valentim and Solange Pessoa, as well as playing a key role in introducing the art world to the likes of Alvaro Barrington, Vojtěch Kovařík, and Antonio Obá. “All of our artists come from us,” said Wood.

That materialized into the first gallery space—debuting with an Arruda solo show—in 2009 in São Paulo, which, as Mendes explained, served as “an Athenian square where people gathered, in the backyard of this house, where people just spent the day there, talking about things.” The gallery freewheeled through its first year or so, for as Mendes explained: “There was never a business plan. There was never any other plan than just to pay our rent. It was 100% intuitive, it was instinctual. In Portuguese, we say, ‘We sold our socks to buy our shoes.’”

This curatorial forum, lushly gardened by botanist Wood, also happened to be next-door to a fledgling gallery concept run by Felipe Dmab, and the fate of Mendes Wood changed. The trio had a natural rapport, and Dmab had more experience in the art world than simply knocking on doors. Thus an alliance was born, and the “master strategist,” as Wood says of Dmab, was folded into the gallery. “Immediately in a way that no one else has understood the vision and the scope of things, Pedro, Felipe, and I came into harmony, I think when we established that there was a real brotherhood between us,” said Wood.

That’s when the three knew that their operation was ready for the big leagues. For them, that meant applying and exhibiting in international fairs like Art Basel and Frieze. “In the beginning when we did a beastly amount of art fairs, it was really out of necessity, because there was no way to put Brazil out there. It’s far away,” said Wood.

Looking back at works sold during that period from 2009 to 2012, Wood said that, with Dmab and Mendes, the power of their relationships had a lasting impact: “Even then, when a work [by Gomes or Arruda] was like a $2,000 thing, you put it in a collection that still has it on the wall, and loans it out [to institutions] and hasn’t sold it.” Many of those $2,000 works are now worth six figures.

But there remained one small issue, as Mendes recalled: “We needed an embassy elsewhere. We had so many people and visitors who are outside of Brazil.” Part-joke, part-acknowledgment, Mendes Wood DM frames their own operation as a diplomatic enterprise: “Our first spaces were consulates and then they became embassies, and now they’re entities,” said Wood. The gallery has always been deeply Brazilian—convivial, fun, diverse—but what’s often glossed over in understanding a Brazilian context is its diverse, international DNA. Brazil, like the United States, is a melting pot of cultures—Indigenous, African, European, Middle Eastern, and Asian—where roots are strong both at home and abroad. More than 50% of Brazil is of African descent, and though never publicized, Mendes Wood DM was the first gallery to represent living Afro-Brazilian artists. (Similarly, the gallery’s appointment of Renato Silva to partner, himself Afro-Brazilian, was a first.)

In 2017, the gallery launched internationally by committing to a space in Brussels, a signal of “this desire to show Brazilian art in other places, bring them to these places, and bring international artists to Brazil,” Mendes explained. The gallery brought in Carolyn Drake Kandiyoti as the founding European partner to help anchor it in the region. In 2022, the gallery opened in Tribeca, New York, with a survey of Nazareth, and followed it with ambitious shows by the likes of Pessoa. New York is where the largest community of the gallery’s collectors reside.

Now, this fall, Mendes Wood DM reunited with the city of its youth with its first Parisian gallery, housed in a unique space on the 17th-century Place de Vosges. “Sometimes you complete a cycle where you began and the last note is the first note,” said Wood, who recounted recently speaking to his “kid” sister who spent time in Paris with Wood and Mendes in the early 2000s: “She was like, ‘When you were, like, 18, you always said you would have an art space in Paris. Remember?’ and I was like, ‘I don’t remember that?’”

Dmab added: “I feel that Paris is a melting pot for the exchange of ideas and a very inspiring ground for business.”