Courtesy Ana Tzarev Gallery, New York

A billboard promoting the opening of the nearby Ana Tzarev Gallery. The ad campaign was dreamed up by LaPlaca Cohen, a popular museum-branding agency.

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In addition to talent and timing, making a name for oneself as an artist used to require the blessing of a recognized dealer. In our entrepreneurial age, however, a gallerist’s support may no longer be indispensable. Last summer, backed by her billionaire son, the 72-year-old painter Ana Tzarev took out a 10-year lease on a ground-level space to house her namesake gallery. Located at 24 West 57th Street—home to such familiar figures in the trade as Marian Goodman, Jane Kallir (the director of Galerie St. Etienne), and Michael Rosenfeld—the 14,000-square-foot showroom has a reported annual rent of $2 million. The inaugural exhibition, opening this month, displays Tzarev’s colorful landscapes and portraits—“postcards,” as she refers to them, from her trips to Africa, Japan and Thailand. Prices for the canvases start at $20,000 and go as high as $500,000. For a self-taught artist whose work has yet to be critically appraised, these are ambitious sums.

Tzarev, a native of Croatia, took up painting in 1986, shortly after selling Chandler House—the New Zealand–based department-store chain she founded with her husband, Robert Chandler—for $10 million. In addition to her travels, she credits as inspiration artists ranging from Leonardo and Michelangelo to Francis Bacon and Takashi Murakami. Matisse and van Gogh also make her list and are perhaps the most obvious stylistic influences, as seen in her works’ bright hues, thickly applied paint and decorative nature.

Tzarev’s son Richard Chandler, whose fortune Forbes magazine estimates to be $1.7 billion, is contributing the start-up capital for the gallery through his Singapore-based investment firm Orient Global. (Tzarev distributed the proceeds from the sale of Chandler House to her two sons, who used the money to jump-start their careers in finance; Christopher Chandler, the younger one, runs Legatum, an investment group headquartered in Dubai.) Orient Global has also lent Tzarev confidence: “A large number of visitors who have seen my art hanging in the offices of my family’s international corporations have expressed interest,” she says.

Tzarev’s executive business director, Reed McMillan—whose past jobs have included a stint as director of shows for the American Craft Council and director of leasing for Merchandise Mart Properties, in Chicago—hopes to settle the gallery’s debt to Richard within five years. Considering that the renovations alone cost a reported $4 million, this would be no small accomplishment. Tzarev maintains a more relaxed outlook: “This is a true endeavor in art, and whenever it turns a profit, I will be delighted.”

Despite her apparent nonchalance about the bottom line, Tzarev’s business decisions have been entirely strategic. Last year she hired Geri Thomas, the president of the New York arts consulting and staffing firm Thomas & Associates. Although Thomas’s arts background is largely managerial, she curated the gallery’s inaugural show. It was she who introduced Tzarev to Sara Fitzmaurice, the president of Fitz & Co., an influential public-relations firm in art circles, which now counts the gallery among its roster of international clients. And it was Fitzmaurice who recommended the project’s architect, James Harb.

Another key player in the launch is LaPlaca Cohen, the museum-world branding agency, which devised an outdoor advertising campaign featuring six billboards with reproductions of Tzarev’s works in high-traffic locations throughout Manhattan— one can be found on the side of a building on Lexington Avenue, near the Bloomingdale’s department store—as well as posters on city buses.

So far the gallery community, which typically steers clear of such populist gestures, has met Tzarev with measured skepticism. “I understand that some historically established dealers may be wary of a vanity gallery trying to buy its way into favor, but I think we need to wait and see what the art actually looks like before passing judgment,” says Kallir, who, along with Rosenfeld, first voiced apprehensions publicly to Bloomberg News in August. In an e-mail to Art+Auction, Goodman writes: “I have four words to say: It’s hard to believe.”