Contemporary Conversations: Becoming Andy Warhol

Alex Branczik joined Sotheby’s in 2004 and became Head of Contemporary Art for Europe in 2016. Alex has played a pivotal role in shaping the global sales strategy for the company’s market-leading department, while driving countless high-profile consignments. Beyond spearheading major sales by Western artists, Alex has been crucial in introducing Contemporary Asian art to international audiences, projecting their works onto the global stage and achieving multiple auction records for artists such as Liu Ye, Liu Xiaodong, Zhang Xiaogang and Liu Wei.

In his new role as Chairman, Alex Branczik will act as the strategic lead for Modern and Contemporary Art in Asia, driving Sotheby’s expansion of this critical field in a key growth region for the company. Modern and Contemporary Art sales in Hong Kong have seen exponential growth in recent years. Alex will build on this momentum to develop this market even further, bringing to bear his deep expertise, team-leadership, and long-established relationships with collectors in Asia. In his new role, he will partner both with the Sotheby’s Global Fine Art Leadership Team, and with the Senior Leadership Team of Sotheby’s Asia.

Patrick Moore is a museum leader focused on inclusion, digital sophistication and relevancy for The Warhol and for the field. Patrick joined The Warhol in 2011 as Director of Development before becoming Deputy Director and Managing Director. His trajectory at The Warhol has included a focus on developing new partnerships for the museum, both curatorial and revenue-based, with a special focus on the museum’s moving image collection.

Earlier in his career, Patrick worked as a digital producer for Yahoo!. He was also the Founding Director of The Estate Project for Artists with AIDS (a project of The Alliance for the Arts, New York). Patrick has produced editions and special projects with a range of important contemporary artists including Ed Ruscha, Catherine Opie, Cindy Sherman, David Hockney, and others. Patrick is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University with degrees in theater direction and English literature. As a writer, Patrick has published books with Beacon Press and Kensington. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Times, Newsday and The Advocate.

Since coming to UCCA in 2011, Philip Tinari has led its transformation from a founder-owned private museum into an accredited museum across multiple locations, a public foundation, and a family of art-driven enterprises. During his tenure, UCCA has mounted more than seventy exhibitions and thousands of public programs, bringing artistic voices established and emerging, Chinese and international, to an audience of over a million visitors each year. From 2009 to 2012 he founded and edited LEAP, the first internationally distributed, bilingual magazine of contemporary art in China. He is a contributing editor of Artforum, and launched the magazine’s Chinese edition in 2008. Having written extensively on contemporary art in China, he was co-curator of the 2017 exhibition Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Based in Beijing since 2001 and fluent in Mandarin, Tinari is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and a fellow of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on US-China Relations. He holds degrees from Duke and Harvard.

Shahidha Bari is an academic, critic and broadcaster. She is a Professor at the University of the Arts London, a presenter of BBC Radio 3's nightly Free Thinking programme, also known as the Arts and Ideas podcast, and the occasional host of BBC Radio 4's Front Row. She’s the author of Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes (2019), the winner of The Observer Anthony Burgess Arts Journalism Prize 2016 and has been a judge for the Forward Poetry Prizes and the Baillie Gifford Non-Fiction Prize. She writes for The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement and Frieze magazine.