Inspiration is the most valuable commodity for an artist; it is for me anyway. I can't move forward in any way if I don't feel a strong spark of excitement or creativity.
Mark Ryden
Reflecting on nearly 20 years of LA’s Thinkspace Projects, Andrew Hosner spoke with Fine Art Specialist Leon Benrimon about the history of the gallery, the collection he built with his wife Shawn Hosner, the evolution of LA's art scene, and more. This is an excerpt of our full Q & A, which can be viewed here.
Leon Benrimon: I’ve read that you and Shawn really considered yourselves art collectors first and gallery owners second. Could you describe how you began collecting?
Andrew Hosner: When I first came out to Los Angeles to be with Shawn, we knew that we wanted to have a couple hobbies and we were always both kind of into antiques due to our parents, especially the mothers on both sides. We had started going to flea markets pretty early on, Rose Bowl being a favorite, and were collecting the old early acrylic radios from the fifties and sixties, just because we felt it was a connection to both of us being in the music industry. From there, that led us into slowly starting to go out to gallery openings. Shawn was already a regular of Merry Karnowsky and a few other galleries back then, like Corpo Gallery and some others. We eventually bought our first print together and then not too long after that, we bought our first little original from BLK/MRKT Gallery, which was Dave Kinsey's gallery who had started Studio No. 1 with Shepard Fairey back in the day, and we had been going to his gallery. So when he opened BLK/MRKT we were excited to go check that out and support it. And it was the second solo show from Jeff Soto after he had had his big first solo with Marsea over at New Image Art. That was the first little original we had bought, I think it was a little 6-by-9 for $300. I’ve actually held on to that one, couldn’t let that one go.
LB: Do you remember what your first print purchase was?
AH: I know Shawn’s first print purchase of any significance was Mark Ryden, Balloon Boy. A friend of hers encouraged her to get it on a credit card and that still hangs in the house, too. I think our first print that we bought together, I want to say was a Joe Sorren. But there’s a part of me that thinks that might have been Ryden, too. Actually no, it was Camille Rose Garcia, it just popped into my head. It was a big print that’s in the auction actually, hand-embellished with lots of glitter and things of that. That was the first piece where we found out that some dealers are Satan and will actually let you pay on payments, which we do now too. You always see the look in the person’s face, like, I thought I talked to myself out of buying it, damn it. But then they’re like, you’re gonna let me pay for it over the next six months?
That’s really what opened up the world of art to us—knowing that you didn’t have to be rich.
That’s really what opened up the world of art to us—knowing that you didn’t have to be rich. That you could get by putting three or four hundred down a month over the course of six, seven, eight months and get a little $2,000 or $3,000 piece—which for the first many years we collected, I don’t think we ever went too north of $2,000 or $3,000, just because that was our comfort zone.
LB: What draws you in or appeals to you when you’re looking at artworks?
AH: The first rule of buying for us, and myself moving forward, will always be you have to like it. We’ve never really tried to buy simply because of a name. When you’re just buying because of name, it seems like you're almost collecting bugs or something. Like, you don't care what the art is, you just want to have that person in your specimen realm. And I get that, and a lot of that’s driven by different facets of the art world and such like that. But we’ve always had to make sure that we really wanted to live with it for the rest of our lives, if we could.
LB: How would you describe the aesthetic that draws you in?
AH: I've been asked that question a lot over the years and we've always just said we show and buy what we like, and then when people try to drill into it, I would say that there's stuff that I’ve bought in the last few years that I don't think I would’ve ever bought 20 years ago and vice versa. So I think, as with everything in life, tastes change and you also just grow when you get exposed to more travels and exposed to more people and exposed to more, I guess just outlets of creativity. By and large, if it's got a cat in it, that's always going to win, just because we're cat folks.
Past that, we’ve purchased everything from abstract to super-realism to all manner of sculpture. I think the only thing we never really delved too far down was video art, even though we do have one little piece. There's no real way to pigeonhole it. We definitely like things that capture a time, but we're also not looking to be too time-specific. I mean, definitely figurative always wins, I guess. That might be the best way to put it, we're definitely more figurative, and I myself as a curator have always geared our vision a bit more towards the figurative-driven than the abstract.
