Since 2001, when Galeria Fortes Vilaça was founded in São Paulo, its co-owners, Alessandra d’Aloia and Marcia Fortes, both 40, have been the face of Brazilian art abroad. In Venice and New York, Miami and London (where Fortes was a member of the Frieze fair’s selection committee this year), the pair has managed the careers of long-established contemporary Brazilian artists such as Vik Muniz and Ernesto Neto while nurturing newer art stars like José Damasceno and Beatriz Milhazes. Rising prices are a sign of a gallery’s success, and earlier this year Milhazes set a sales record for a living Brazilian artist when her 2001 painting O mágico (“The Magician”) sold at Sotheby’s New York for more than $1 million.

Fortes and d’Aloia’s power is even greater inside Brazil, with its rapidly growing art market. Although Fortes admits that the current global economic crisis has left “everyone paralyzed for the moment,” the long-term trends are positive. “When the gallery began, 70 percent of our sales went abroad,” she reports. “Now almost two-thirds go to Brazil. Every year at SParte [the four-year-old São Paulo art fair], there are new local collectors, all very plugged in to what’s happening internationally.”

This March the partners inaugurated a space in a 16,000-square-foot warehouse in the industrial São Paulo neighborhood of Barra Funda, long a preferred haunt of artists, with its hangar-size factory buildings and cheap rents, but not a center of the art market—until now. The size of the new location is unprecedented among Brazilian galleries, and its raw aesthetic is a challenge to the country’s often buttoned-up art world. The walls are movable; exhibition and storage areas mingle; and the 25-foot-high brick ceiling is barely changed from the building’s industrial days. “We want to offer an opportunity to experience art in a radical context, where artists can play as they please and where the dusty backstage of the business— crates and forklifts and the like—counteracts the white cube,” Fortes says. With its older space, in the more refined Vila Madalena neighborhood, still active, Fortes Vilaça now opens an average of three shows a month.

If they’ve helped bring Brazilian art to the world, Fortes and d’Aloia have also helped bring the world to Brazil. For the warehouse’s launch, for instance, they hired the P.S. 1 curatorial adviser Neville Wakefield to organize “God Is Design,” featuring 11 foreign artists, including Adel Abdessemed, John McCracken and Rudolf Stingel. The gallery also represents Robert Mapplethorpe’s estate in Latin America. And it gave Germany’s Franz Ackermann, Portugal’s Julião Sarmento and Japan’s Nobuyoshi Araki their first shows in Brazil as well as introducing big names from other parts of Latin America, such as Cuba’s artist collective Los Carpinteros and Mexico’s Damián Ortega.

Such a program is unrivaled in Brazil, and perhaps in South America. As Celso Fioravanti, a São Paulo art critic, sums it up: “Since its founding, the gallery has had the most responsibility for the development and professionalization of Brazil’s art world.” If Fortes Vilaça’s recent massive expansion is any indication, that world still has room to grow.

"Marcia Fortes+Alessandra d’Aloia" originally appeared in the December 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's December 2008 Table of Contents.