Anthony d'Offay

Georges Anthony d'Offay (born January 1940) is a British art dealer, collector and curator.

Georges Anthony d'Offay was born in January 1940 in Sheffield to a French father.

He began dealing in art in the late 1960s. With the closure of the Robert Fraser and John Kasmin galleries he became one of the pre-eminent art dealers in the world operating from premises in Dering Street off the top of New Bond Street in London. He closed the gallery in 2001 and founded ARTIST ROOMS in 2008. He has been the recipient of the UK Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award (2009), The Prince of Wales Medal for Arts Philanthropy (2011) and the Paolozzi Medal (2011). He has been awarded Honorary Doctorates by The University of Edinburgh, De Montfort University, Leicester and Sheffield Hallam University.

In 1965, at the age of 25, he opened his first gallery in London and for 15 years organised mostly historical exhibitions of early 20th century British art including Abstract Art in England 1913-1915 (1969) which critically reassessed the importance of the Vorticist movement in the UK. In the 1970s, he started to show contemporary art, exhibiting Lucian Freud, Michael Andrews, Eduardo Paolozzi, Frank Auerbach and William Coldstream.

In 1980 he opened an exhibition space for contemporary art on the first floor at 23 Dering Street, a uniquely large space for London at that time. The gallery was run by Anthony d'Offay with Anne Seymour, formerly a curator at Tate and curator of the important exhibition The New Art at the Hayward Gallery (1972), and Marie-Louise Laband who masterminded every aspect of the gallery including the exhibition programme. Together they inaugurated a programme of international contemporary art, starting with an exhibition by Joseph Beuys in August of that year. Beuys' large installation from that show Stripes from the House of the Shaman was sold to the National Museum of Australia, Canberra.

The gallery in London made many distinguished exhibitions by some of the greatest artists of our time including Willem de Kooning, Carl Andre, Maurizio Cattelan, Lawrence Weiner, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Gerhard Richter, Jannis Kounellis, Anselm Kiefer, Richard Long, Bruce Nauman, Gilbert & George, Richard Hamilton, Brice Marden, James Turrell, Rachel Whiteread, Sigmar Polke, Cy Twombly, Ron Mueck and Andy Warhol, who he commissioned to make the celebrated 'Fright Wig' Self Portraits.

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