Aphrodite Gallery

A New York auction house formed in March 2015 by Jad Rifai, who according to the gallery's LiveAuctioneers profile had trained for about seven years beforehand. It is affiliated with Aphrodite Ancient Art, a gallery on Manhattan's Museum Mile, and the profile lists membership of the Appraisers Association, CINOA and the Art and Antiques Dealers League of America¹. The firm says the parent business has been online since 2007 and in a Manhattan gallery since 2012¹.

Between 2015 and 2019 the gallery put 11 catalogues on LiveAuctioneers, covering Egyptian, Roman, Greek and Near Eastern art, the last on 16 April 2019¹. It opened its own shop website in 2017, describing itself as a subsidiary of Aphrodite Ancient Art offering Greek, Roman, Near Eastern and Egyptian antiquities with an unconditional guarantee⁵. By July 2019 the site called the gallery a spin-off of the longer established firm, with high-end pieces at limited-time auction prices and a shop of fixed-price objects⁶.

The September 2016 Antiquities Selection (27 September 2016) included lot 134, a large Cypriot bichrome krater of c. 750-600 BC, which sold for USD 3,500 against an estimate of USD 6,000-9,000⁴, and lot 167, a footed dish of c. 1000-900 BC, which did not sell³. In Highly Coveted Antiquities, Spring 2018 (29 May 2018), lots 5, 6, 8 and 9 were Middle Cypriot red-ware jugs dated 2000-1650 BC, all sold, with a stated provenance of early Swiss collections formed in the 1970s and later New York private holdings².