Why This Storied London Gallery Is Planning Its Future In Paris Artsy

A family gallery with roots in 1958 is preparing to widen its reach again, this time with a new address in Paris and a formal handoff to the next generation. Waddington Custot, the London dealer on Cork Street, will open a space on Rue de Seine opposite La Palette with an inaugural exhibition titled“The Nabi Shock,” while Victor Custot steps more fully into the business his father, Stéphane Custot, has helped shape.

The move adds another layer to a gallery already defined by continuity. The original Waddington Galleries was founded in 1958 by Victor Waddington and his son Leslie, giving the business a lineage that remains unusually intact in London's commercial gallery scene. In 2010, Stéphane joined forces with Leslie to form Waddington Custot, bringing his own background as a dealer and founder of the PAD design art fairs into the partnership. After Leslie's death in 2015, Stéphane took full ownership and continued to steer the gallery's mix of modern and contemporary art.

Victor, 32, joined the family business in 2023 after earning an MA in art business at Sotheby's. Before that, he was working as a tech entrepreneur in Canada. His first memorable art-world sale came years earlier, during a visit to Art Basel Miami Beach, when he struck up a conversation with an American collector about a Barry Flanagan sculpture on the stand. Stéphane later recalled that the collector kept talking to Victor and, by the end of the exchange, bought the large Flanagan work.

That instinctive beginning now sits alongside a more deliberate apprenticeship. Victor has said his role is to learn as much as possible, and Stéphane has emphasized humility and breadth as essential qualities. The younger Custot has also spoken of wanting to attract a younger audience through events and workshops, suggesting that the gallery's next phase will be shaped not only by inheritance, but by audience-building.

“The Nabi Shock” signals how Waddington Custot intends to frame that future. The exhibition will bring together works by Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, Édouard Vuillard, Etel Adnan, Ian Davenport, Marcel Dzama, and Fabienne Verdier, linking modernist and contemporary practices in a way that reflects the gallery's long-running curatorial logic. With locations already in London and Dubai, the Paris opening extends a network that has been built carefully, and over decades, rather than in a rush.

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