'Does it still smell like lobster?" asks Manny Neubacher at the door of the gallery he runs with his mother, Gerda.
Guys with dollies are carting away the remains of a dinner party held amid Gallery Neubacher's paintings the night before. More dolly guys will return tomorrow to stock the DayGlo-green bar for the Sept. 11 opening of Mixed Media, featuring four young Canadian abstract painters. As Mr. Neubacher describes it -- in artspeak, the world's most entertainingly obtuse tongue -- the new show "questions postmodern notions as to the direction and evolution of painting."
No longer is the art fête a wine-and-cheese afterthought. Not since the 1980s have artists here and internationally been so entwined with fashion, music and design. People are again using the term "happening" without irony. Artists are painting on handbags, galleries are exhibiting dresses and openings have become paparazzi bait.
And Gallery Neubacher has positioned itself at the centre of the action. Mr. Neubacher (both he and his mother are artists in their own right) has made his place a home to parties and salons where new artists meet more established talents and where both down smart cocktails alongside what his mother calls "the next generation of buyers.
"These are the future private sector, the people who will be chairing committees," she explains.
Mr. Neubacher's girlfriend, Deborah Lewis, who works in art fundraising at the public-relations firm Arts and Communication, adds, "It's a blast. Not corporate at all. I'd say the scene is hippies in Prada."
Gallery Neubacher itself is imbued with quite the hippie vibe. Eighty-one St. Nicholas Street began life as an RCMP stable in the 1830s, but is best remembered as one of the early incarnations of A Space, an artists' collective/community in the 1960s.
The 58-year-old Ms. Neubacher, who is tiny and pretty and intense, has great flower-child credentials. She and her then-husband Fred arrived in Canada from Austria in the mid-1960s. Both artists, they moved to Eden Mills, "you know, 50 acres and a log cabin." Her early photorealistic work gave way to a couple of decades of experimentation in abstraction, and she is currently working on a portrait series of Toronto women.
Her son, 32, who is articulate and warm when not in manifesto mode, was working on large-scale sculpture commissions with walls of water at the esteemed Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo when he and his mother decided to open the Toronto gallery a year and a half ago.
Since then, the gallery's reputation has grown through a series of shows featuring new and established artists -- with an emphasis on emerging Canadian talent. The social list has expaned through both mother and son's personal and professional contacts. And the buzz reached a critical mass last March, when a capacity-plus crowd that included everyone from models to traders spilled into the street for the show aptly called Social Life. The art scene had officially crossed over into the mainstream.
Mr. Neubacher works in four-month stretches as director for the gallery, then for two months on his own art. He has recently collaborated with hairstylist ("God of hair," as goes his bio) Jie Matar, to facilitate a "happening" last year when he asked 100 Torontonians from various fields to photograph themselves in his bathroom. The subsequent show was called Flushing Success. The folks in the toilet shots (CITY-TV's Glen Baxter, Dawn Thorpe of Hugo Boss and artist Flavio Belli) represent the same eclectic blend that makes up their opening night crowds: "A mix of film and fashion people, writers, photographers, furniture designers," Mr. Neubacher says. "Contemporary art and contemporary style are both reflections of the self."
The Neubachers have also used the gallery for fashion events for Ian Hylton, designer for Pink Tartan, and for Jennifer Dares, designer of Layers. All the parties are about drawing in those who wouldn't normally go to an opening. People "are becoming aware of art, starting to invest," Ms. Lewis says.
"It's not like that cutthroat '80s, New York scene," Mr. Neubacher says. "It's non-competitive, groovy."
The idea of creating a scene comes naturally to him. His mother holds a series of women-only salons, with 80 to 90 people, drinks, music and poetry readings, about three times a year in the space.
"I will see, say, a high-powered lawyer talking to socialite Catherine Nugent about her cats. Everybody leaves their careers at the office. It feels fresh, because you mix with people you don't know," Ms. Neubacher says.
Among the "mentors" on the salon team are Trudy Eagan, former executive at Sun Media, filmmaker Gail Singer, artist Joanne Tod, art critic Betty Ann Jordan, social divas Catherine Nugent and Catherine Bratty, CITY-TV vice-president of communications Mary Powers and author and journalist Sylvia Fraser. The youth players, those whom Ms. Neubacher calls "future mentors," include artists Jermaine Koh, Emily Vey Duke and Zoe Stonyk, television producers Donna Thompson and Beth Shuman, singer Ciara Adams, Nesbitt Burns VP Serina Cheng and curator Si Si Penaloza.
As part of their go-Canada attitude, the new show at the gallery, curated by Olivier Fuller, features Canadian artists David Urban, Michael Adamson, Jinny M.J. Yu and Christian Giroux.
Located a block away from both Yorkville, home to the art establishment, and the Puppetry of the Penis marquee on Yonge Street, Gallery Neubacher occupies a unique geographical place in the city's art scene.
Mother and son remain split on what the proximity to Yorkville means. Ms. Neubacher is clearly pleased to be "on the outskirts of Yorkville," while Mr. Neubacher's press kit touts the fact that the gallery is within a "stone's throw" of the district.
He is attracted to what he calls "the organic process" that took place on Queen Street west of Bellwoods Avenue. "The artists in warehouses on King at Spadina were driven out by the spiralling rents. Queen started to vibrate a half-dozen years ago. Then came the bars and restaurants. And through it all there have been the condo developments. Everyone follows the artists."
The other new gallery zone, the Gooderham Worts Distillery district, is important, Mr. Neubacher says, because it serves to draw people who are not comfortable with smaller galleries or glittering parties. "It's commercial," he says, but not like that's a dirty word.
The premiere show at his gallery was, after all, called Absolut Neubacher. You do need a good friend in the spirits business to keep things well lubricated at all those parties.