A gestural and hard-edged Jacqueline Humphries littered with sporadic silver and black strips, gargantuan in size, is reflected in a black Perspex diamond on the facing wall of Stuart Shave’s whitewashed office. The diamond, by Eva Rothschild, an artist Stuart has worked with since she graduated from Goldsmiths, sold this very morning. As did her multi-coloured ring by the glass sliding door that announces the office entrance.  

“She works a lot with displaced geometry. Eva’s work feels like a drawing within space,” Stuart says in admiration of the view in his West London Modern Art office, noting the shape of the diamond, quite particular in Eva’s work. He re-arranges himself for the appraisal, re-configures the open denim shirt - a moss green cardigan and relaxed fit blazer layered duly over the top. In the process his legs often entwine beneath the single-helixed office chair – he is not used to being the centre of attention – and his voice is tidied, neat, that of someone in polite conversation, not the bombastic daffy-duck yuk-yuk-yuk of a keynote speaker or lecturer – as is often the case with a gallerist, traditionally someone who thrives on attention [“I’m shy,” he’ll later aside, well, shyly]. 

“I think her paintings are on fire,” Stuart notes, turning to the Jacqueline Humphries, fitting a mouth around the countrified vowels and consonants that note an out-of-city upbringing.  “This huge mark-making is epic, and then there’s almost this spatial interference created through taping; she has taped layers and revealed layers, there’s an incredible contradiction in these paintings,” he beams, shuffling a sit, rushing the words. You get the feeling Stuart likes to surround himself with beautiful things; even the plain white floor-to-ceiling bookshelf against the far wall is somewhat neat and sorted, books collected in rows pertaining to size and shape. “Speaking about my artists’ work isn’t always the easiest thing to do. It’s when it becomes difficult to articulate the meaning of a work that it becomes interesting, not a sum of parts. I love that sense of open-endedness in my artists,” he says, visably enjoying the opportunity to articulate his love of art, a handsome smile across an already handsome face. “It’s here because it’s for sale,” he’ll say of the art, fingers to his mouth as though they are microphones. His office certainly looks like an extension of his 6,500 square metre gallery space currently exhibiting the latest acrylic and oil pastels on canvas by Katy Moran, an artist Stuart discovered, like many of his other artists, whilst still at college [Many other galleries tried for Katy too, but after a year of to-and-fro she opted for Stuart. He’s worked with her for four years now]. I mention the salesmanship of propping art that is for sale in an office where he no doubt brings investors, those powerful and rich enough to be swayed by a beautiful painting during a meeting. To this Stuart almost guffaws, “such cynicism” I can see him thinking, raising curtains on his eyes. 

There are so many other things that go on in the gallery other than selling the work that’s on the walls, Stuart assures. “We’re representing artists,” he says, which means selling their work as and when they make it - “the role is as an art dealer, yes” – but the role also requires Stuart to act like an agent - “so much of what we do is about production and management of the artists”. At any point, one of Stuart’s artists generally has an opening somewhere in the world in some museum or other gallery. Eva Rothschild is a good example. Right now she has a 200-foot long sculpture at Tate Britain – Cold Corners, the latest in the Duveens Commission series - a sequential line of twenty-six connected triangles. Eva, and duly Stuart’s office, has been working on the installation for a year. “All of those things have a whole kind of operational aspect to them,” says Stuart. “People think that galleries are here to just sell work, but it would be more apt to call us managers or producers.” 

“Relationships are the primary objective,” Stuart agrees when I put it to him that his role as manager is probably a factor in why Modern Art has such long-lasting relationships with the artists on its books. Put it to him that another factor in the long-lasting relationships appears to be that Stuart seems to understand and evaluate the art, as opposed to appraising it on the value, his choices seemingly based on the concept, the theory and his gut feeling rather than the potential profit or where it fits in the market, and he will say, “I think that’s also true.” “In terms of how you run a gallery, selection is everything,” he asserts. “In order to create something that’s long-term and meaningful, these artists have to mean something to me.” The gut instinct factor? “Yeah” So he never thinks of the money aspect? “I certainly am an art dealer,” Stuart la-la’s in laughter, “as an art dealer I have to think about the market and market worth, it would be irresponsible if I didn’t. But that’s certainly not how I select artists.” Modern Art is, after all, a commercial gallery. 

“The interesting thing about commercial galleries in this time that we’re in,” Stuart notes, “is that each gallery is about the definition of personal style or taste. This is what I’m thinking when I’m bringing in artists.” Then what does the most recent recruit - Richard Tuttle, a 68-year-old American postminimalist coveted by many leading London dealers – say about Modern Art’s style, taste? “It certainly speaks about quality. Someone recently said to me that you shouldn’t meet your own heroes, but working with Richard has been an incredible experience, and our recent show was a benchmark for me in my own work.” 

Stuart has just returned from a successful sitting at Frieze. Journalists bellowed from the rafters how a handful of investors and galleries dropping out in the recession signalled the death knell for modern art. In actuality Stuart, whose haul was very successful, did the most part of his business in the opening few hours of the fair, shifting major works to some great collections, including Sammlung Goetz in Munich, one of Germany's most impressive private museums and, Stuart assures, one of his favourite collections of contemporary art. “I think it’s important to say the art market has not crashed,” Stuart notes, marking lazy journalism as just that. [One week after our meeting, the New York Times will agree with Stuart and print an article against sensationalist journalism re the art market, noting that art prices have soared back to pre-crash levels, with Sotheby’s sales of modern art exceeding pre-recession prices. Andy Warhol's 200 One Dollar Bills, for example, sold for $43.7 million. The 1962 piece was last sold by Sotheby's over 20 years ago for $300,000.]  “What’s really happened from the recession is this: there’s been this kind of new understanding and perspective, and the capacity to see intention more clearly. I think the recession has been really good for the art world, it’s given a shakeup and got rid of spectacle and the people that were engaging in the market and business irresponsibly or irrationally.”

Serious about his art, Stuart collects himself. He has pieces by Nigel Cooke, Eva Rothschild, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Jonathan Meese, Collier Schorr, Katy Moran, Wolfgang Tillmans, Caragh Thuring, John Stezaker, Rebecca Warren, and, his prize possession, an incredibly simple and small elegant W, made simply from cardboard, by Richard Tuttle from the late eighties. His appreciation came from studying Fine Art in Nottingham. “I was an artist,” he laments, not an Art History major, an artist. Shouldn’t he be in the gallery, not running it? “I didn’t go down the artist route in the end because I spent a lot of time at college writing and ended up changing my degree towards critical theory , theory of art rather than practice. I just felt that my interest in contemporary art was more as an observer,” he says. 

With a dad who worked in an office and a housewife mother, it wasn’t until a school trip to the Tate as a teenager that Stuart had even visited his first gallery. He still remembers seeing an Andy Warhol original. “As a 12-year-old, it really makes a compelling impression.” Growing up in a village in Suffolk, just off Ipswich, modern art wasn’t something that was readily available.  Which is probably what gave him such assertion that it was a city life he wanted. It also probably influenced his artistic leanings. “I really come from Constable Country,” Stuart says, talking of the cottages, rolling fields, verdant farmlands, “It’s where John Constable painted, and I was really never interested in that. It was the shock and originality of what constituted being modern art that interested me, just as much as the music I was listening to at that time. When I saw my first modern art show, that’s when I became interested in art. It was like nothing I’d seen. I feel as strongly about that as I do the first time I saw the Pixies play in concert.”

Last year Stuart opened his West London Modern Art space with a show by Nigel Cooke, an artist Stuart has worked with since “the very, very beginning”. They even went to school together. The gallery had six major paintings, almost all of which sold to museums. “It’s really rewarding,” Stuart says of the success of the opening. “It’s about the public consciousness. At this point in my work, nothing feels more gratifying than selling work to Museums.” And what has been the greatest achievement since? “The biggest achievement in the gallery by far is the artists that we represent,” he says, and then “the positions of these artists is the greatest achievement.” 

It’s a long way from Modern Art’s first incarnation, when it opened November 1998 as a shop-front space that was actually part of Stuart’s apartment on Redchurch Street, Shoreditch. The offices of the gallery were in Stuart’s kitchen, with works hanging in the bedroom. “I basically lived in the middle of the gallery, and hence in an intensely social atmosphere,” he recalls. He remembers a fashion show with Noki organised by the gallery that took place on the street, a concert with his neighbour and regular at Modern Art openings ‘Selfish Cunt’, a gig with ‘No Bra’. “It felt very engaged, but also completely free.” A distant look suggests he hadn’t considered the vast change the gallery has undertaken over the last ten or so years. “But it was a different time then.” It certainly was, back then it was all artist-run spaces like the non-profit five-artist cooperative City Racing – an early influence in Stuarts decision to open an art gallery.  When Stuart first started, it was more about operating outside the art market. “Well there just wasn’t one,” he says, simply.  

“Back then I had no idea or ambition that I would even actually sell any art at all really,” Stuart says, when I talk about the worries of commercialisation in this day and age, investment culture somewhat usurping the larger shows of late. “On the one hand I feel a bit like I’ve fallen into that, moving into this space in the West End – though I promise I didn’t really ever think about the West End like that, I really did just see it as moving on, in that way that people move on. It wasn’t a statement of intent, and I may in 5 years time decide to move back. Right up to the last minute we were looking at spaces both East and West. It’s no big deal, was just about what felt right at the time.” 

The overriding factor that made the West End move a must was the space downstairs [Stuart will later show me the basement, all hanging light fixtures and an exposed metal elevator shaft, an area with boxes and crates of un-exhibited work, “the most expensive storage area in London,” he likes to call it in jest]. “I felt like this was a space we could grow into, what we’re going to do is build a third gallery space out of the downstairs,” he says. “The move just happened at a time when we had to think about what could have been introduced to make the gallery take another step.” He stops; thinks again back to the original space designed by friend David Adjaye as a favour (himself only just embarking on what was to become a lucrative career). “Whilst the gallery has gone on a certain level of renumeration, I would hope my reasons for doing this are still connected to the sense of risk taking and experimentation I founded the gallery upon. Right now we are in a position where my exhibition program is already in place for the next twelve months, building a third space downstairs is a chance to enjoy a bit more spontaneity, and to continue to feel like we can work with new artists, or even show historical works that feel relevant somehow.”

So will Modern Art continue to evolve, to mature? Will the Modern Art of 2019 resemble this streamlined white-white-white expression of minimalism that we sit in now, or grow to become something bigger, more audacious? “I have no desire to be an ambitious gallery and don’t feel the need to constantly grow,” Stuart says, instantly, instinctively. “Modesty is really important.” This is a sentiment that rings true: modesty. It is a trait Stuart employs in all aspects of his life, noticeable in his distinct lack of press. Bar this interview, the only thing Stuart has done in the public eye that could even slightly be construed as self-promotion is a couple of diary entries for The Guardian’s coverage of Frieze. “For the past 5 years all I’ve heard about is the glamour and excess and parties and hyper investment in the market, and I’m just not interested in any of that.”  Ah yes, the genteel smack of air-kissing, champagne corks popping, commercial galleries flashing their star turns in an endless stream of shows by established artists, all heralded by star-studded opening nights; seas of caviar-shaded heels, knuckle dusters of jewels, fists of pearls, paparazzi flashbulbs, ice-white teeth in full smile for the cameras. “Thankfully I don’t work with any artists who want to be celebrities either. I work with artists who can hardly bare to have their pictures taken. Whether you’re a gardener, a designer, lawyer, it’s all about the content, do something with meaning. I find it embarrassing, I think the art world is becoming embarrassing, the spectacle it has become; the celebrity, the gauche, people come to the art world now because it is an extension of the fashion world. I don’t want to be part of any of that. It’s a sickness. I think the really compelling and interesting aspects of the art world are not reported.” And then the laughter, a rolling tongue clacking, the release of his summery laugh, and then a smile. That handsome smile. That handsome smile across a slightly-tanned face, already handsome. “Maybe it’s up to me and you to report it…”