Victoria Miro Gallery - Victoria Miro

Victoria Miro

When Victoria Miro was young, her father had a Covent Garden grocery stall. Her parents were keen on culture and saved, so the family could take holidays in Italy to see the art there. She studied art, then painted at home. She married a lawyer, and had a son and daughter in the 1970s, explaining, "my need to paint seemed to go away when I had children." She looked after the children, until 1985, when she started her Cork Street gallery.

Two of her baby-sitters at that time were a couple, who later became well-known artists, Jake Chapman, who showed at her gallery, and Sam Taylor-Wood, since married to Jay Jopling. Miro describes Chapman, now known, along with his brother Dinos, for art such as sculptures of distorted children with multiple misplaced genitalia, as an "adorable" baby sitter.

Arthur Goldberg, a noted collector and New York money manager, said of Miro, "She has an incredible eye". One of her sources for finding new artists is a liaison with the Royal College of Art, where Peter Doig taught, and through whom she learnt about Chris Ofili, Cecily Brown and Chantal Joffe. She discovered Thomas Demand at another London college, Goldsmiths.

Miro acts with great politeness. Gerard Goodrow said, "As a person, she's very reserved, but she takes contemporary art very seriously." She backs her artists with a passionate intensity, and was visibly condemnatory of both Mayor Giuliani and Philippe de Montebello, head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whom she felt had been unjust in a harsh New York Times opinion piece about Ofili and other artists during the Sensation controversy at the Brooklyn Museum.

She has a reputation for integrity amongst clients; one of them, Arthur Goldberg, said, "She's a real quality person. That goes somewhere in the art world, where not every dealer can be trusted." She is widely known within the art world (but less so outside it), where she is one of London's most influential cutting-edge contemporary art dealers, on a par with Jay Jopling, the proprietor of the White Cube gallery. In 2001, despite her success, she rejected identification with the art establishment: "The last thing a contemporary gallerist wants to be called is 'establishment'. I like to think I still take risks in the gallery with younger artists. To me, 'establishment' just means dull."