
A Secondary Eye
Seeking bang for your artwork bucks? A new private gallery in Sydney is here to help investors.
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When the Art Basel fair opens in Switzerland this month, it will do so with a certain swagger. Art currently tops Knight Frank’s Luxury Investment Index, with prices rising by 11 percent in 2023; by comparison, the values of rare whisky, classic cars, handbags and furniture fell. Transaction volumes are also on an upward trajectory; 39.4 million buys were logged globally last year, with figures more pronounced at the “affordable” end of the scale.
That doesn’t mean the action has stalled at the pinnacle of the market—far from it. In May at Christie’s in New York, Andy Warhol’s Flowers (1964), a huge 208 cm by 208 cm fluorescent silkscreen, fetched US$30.5 million (around $46 million), while Georgia O’Keeffe’s close-up oil painting Red Poppy (1928) secured US$14 million (around $21 million). Spring auction sales across the metropolis approached US$1.4 billion (around $2.1 billion), confirming the Big Apple’s reputation as the city whose art market never sleeps.
In this context, the importance of how to invest wisely and ensure the sound provenance of your purchase comes into even sharper focus. Enter Jesse-Jack De Deyne and Boris Cornelissen, whose A Secondary Eye gallery functions are both a private space with rotating exhibitions, and somewhere serious investors can buy and sell with confidence.

“We offer access to some of the finest works entering the secondary market in Australia and operate with a stringent provenance framework in place,” says De Deyne from the company’s top-floor space overlooking leafy Queen Street in Sydney’s Woollahra.
The gallery launched in May with a presentation of rare works by Rover Thomas, the late East Kimberley artist who represented Australia at the 1990 Venice Biennale—which will not come as a surprise to those in-the-know, as De Deyne specialises in Australian Indigenous art and comes to Sydney with a background as a director at Maningrida Arts & Culture in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory. Cornelissen, meanwhile, is a former contemporary art specialist from Sotheby’s in London and Hong Kong.

“We are most effective when a prospective client comes to us with a specific artwork in mind,” explains De Deyne. “They may have recently been to Canberra to visit the highly regarded exhibition of Emily Kame Kngwarreye at the National Gallery of Australia and there is a specific period of the artist that they are drawn to. Through our contacts, we may be able to help source available related works that would not necessarily appear at auction.”
Though A Secondary Eye was founded in 2020 in Brisbane, De Denye says the larger pool of collectors in Sydney drew him and his partner south. The new gallery’s private aspect seems to be a key selling point for the duo, who prize discretion above all else.
“Whereas auctions are publicly advertised, a private dealer can offer a work discreetly to a handful of clients without over-exposing it,” says De Denye. “And we can also present works in a more considered way through curated, high-quality exhibitions that tell the story of each work.”
Follow A Secondary Eye here for future exhibitions.
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