Michael Goedhuis x Tomasso

A collaboration between Michael Goedhuis and Dino Tomasso presenting an exhibition of 12th to 19th century JapaneseBronze Flower Vessels illustrating their impact on European modernism.

Michael Goedhuis, trained as an economist with degrees at the Courtauld Institute in art history and with an MBA from INSEAD in Fontainebleau, started his career in investment banking in New York and London. He then joined Jacob Rothschild (now Lord Rothschild)’s Colnaghi specialising in Persian, Mughal and Islamic art. Major collections were curated and sold by him to numerous institutions including The Rothschild Collection to the Shahbanu of Iran and the Vever Collection to the Smithsonian Institution. He subsequently expanded his dealing activities to India, Japan and China, concentrating on important antiquities which he continues to deal in. During much of this time, he was writing for The Economist on art and the art market as well as for numerous art publications.

In the early 1990s he began to concentrate on Chinese modern and contemporary art and was the first dealer in the West to enter this field with a series of important exhibitions including the pioneering exhibition at Sotheby’s, New York, in 2001 China Without Borders: Chinese Contemporary Art. In 2008 he assembled and curated the major contemporary Chinese art collection, the Estella collection, which was exhibited at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

Most of his activity since then has been directed at describing both the resurgence of cultural activity in the China of today and the key relevance of Chinese Ink art to contemporary aesthetics. In addition to representing the best contemporary Chinese artists, his activities now include exhibiting work by the best of the new generation of Western artists, both painters and sculptors.

Tomasso was founded in Leeds, Yorkshire, in 1993, by brothers Dino and Raffaello Tomasso. Today, they head the gallery alongside the next generation of the Tomasso family. They specialise in European Sculpture, Master Paintings and Ancient Art, and are recognised internationally for their particular expertise in European Renaissance bronzes.

Dino and Raffaello have promoted and supported, through loans and exhibitions, major international institutions and significant sales have been made to some of the world’s most prestigious museums, including the Bode Museum, Berlin; The Liechtenstein Collection, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Yale Center for British Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Their first London gallery opened in 2010. Today, they operate from Bardon Hall in Leeds and from Marquis House, on London’s Jermyn Street, located at the heart of St James’s, for centuries the home of some of the world’s leading art galleries. 

In over 25 years, Dino and Raffaello have made major rediscoveries in the fields of European Sculpture, Master Paintings, and Ancient Greek and Roman Sculpture, collected in Tomasso Brothers’ anniversary publication XXV.