Phoenix Ancient Art

Phoenix Ancient Art traces itself to Aboutaam Antiquities, founded, according to the gallery, in Beirut in 1968 by Sleiman Aboutaam¹. The firm says it opened in Germany in 1970, the United Kingdom in 1980 and Switzerland and the United States in 1984, and that Phoenix Ancient Art SA was incorporated in Geneva in 1995. A New York gallery followed in 1999, the Electrum gallery in 2002 and a Young Collectors gallery in Geneva in 2014¹. Wikipedia reports that the brothers Hicham Aboutaam and Ali Aboutaam have run the business since 1998, and that a Brussels gallery opened in 2019⁷.

Hicham Aboutaam is named as president and co-founder. The gallery lists C. Michael Hedqvist as managing director from 2000, Brenno Bottini as chief curator from 1995 and Virginie Selitrenny as curator from 2012, with Alexander Gherardi as director and Alexander V. Kruglov as chief curator in New York¹. Two affiliated sales platforms are e-Tiquities.com, launched in 2009 for works under $50,000, and the Young Collectors gallery¹. The firm shows at BRAFA in Brussels (its 14th consecutive year in 2018), at TEFAF New York in 2017 and 2018, at La Biennale Paris in 2019, at Salon Art + Design in New York and at the San Francisco Fall Show^5,8,9.

Cypriot material is a small part of the stock. The gallery's online archive of works shows three pieces, all priced on request⁶. They are a terracotta standing goddess holding a child, dated c. 1450-1200 BC and 18.5 cm high, with a provenance of the art market before 1899 and the Louis-Gabriel Bellon collection²; a picrolite idol 5.3 cm high, ex Sotheby's London, 9-10 December 1984 (lot 135) and listed as on loan to the Metropolitan Museum from 1993 to 2022³; and a limestone male head in a conical helmet, about 30 cm high, from the collection of Admiral Charles Jaures⁴. Institutional buyers of its works are named as the Metropolitan Museum, the Louvre, Cleveland, Princeton, Yale and the Louvre Abu Dhabi⁷.