Collector or Dealer? Lio Malca Built a Cultural Ecosystem by Refusing to Choose
Well before a new generation of collectors claimed a more fluid role in supporting artists’ careers, Colombian-born, New York-based entrepreneur Lio Malca unapologetically presented himself as a hybrid collector/dealer. While many consider him a multipurpose entrepreneur, Malca made most of his fortune in the art world, first by buying and trading prints and multiples by Pop artists before moving into original works by artists of his own generation—particularly Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and George Condo. “Today, I realize it was like winning the lottery four times in a row,” he joked when we caught up with him after his return from a few weeks in Ibiza.
Malca had one of the best mentors to guide him through his first steps into the art world. After attending high school in Miami and completing his studies at Northeastern University in Boston, he decided he did not want to return to Colombia and went to New York instead, where a relative on his mother’s side, longtime art dealer José Mugrabi, took him under his wing. At the time, Mugrabi was developing an Italian fast-food venture with Malca’s father, and Malca represented his father in the project for roughly a year and a half. He traveled extensively with Mugrabi, attending events and art fairs and visiting exhibitions along the way: “Wherever we were, I would go with him to art shows, in New York, Italy and elsewhere.”
By the time the restaurant project fell apart, his time with Mugrabi had convinced him he wanted to enter the art world. “My father told me, ‘Okay, now you’re coming back.’ But I said, ‘I don’t think so. I think I found what I want to do,’” Malca recalled. “Being next to José during that time made me realize that I really liked the art world and wanted to see if I could get involved.”
Originals were beyond his means, so he began by buying and selling prints and multiples by 1960s Pop artists. He soon realized, however, that he wanted to be involved with original art. “I looked at artists from my generation who were already here in New York and picked four of them, mostly because I liked them,” Malca said. He began buying small works; pieces by Haring and Basquiat were still relatively affordable at the time. “Works on paper by Haring were only a few thousand dollars, roughly equivalent to what prints by artists from the 1960s were worth. The first Basquiat drawings I bought were around $10,000, and they were really intricate and well worked. I became deeply interested in their work and wanted to know more about them.”
Malca began collecting works by Kenny Scharf and George Condo in the early 1990s as an early supporter and remains close to Scharf today: “It’s been a development in my life: I not only liked the works then, but I continue to like them and to look more deeply into the bodies of work and what the artists did—or are still doing, in Kenny’s and Condo’s cases.” With Basquiat and Haring, he said, he keeps finding new reasons to understand how deep their work can go. “I think they are still very current, both for the generations they were part of and for generations to come.”
Malca first opened a small, sixth-floor space at 580 Broadway to show works he had been collecting. He later moved to 526 West 26th Street in Chelsea as galleries migrated from SoHo. “We did occasional shows with artists I liked,” Malca said, clarifying that by then, his collection had expanded beyond the original four. “It was a huge gallery building with many galleries and artist studios. It was quite dynamic.”
Meanwhile, after years of visiting Ibiza primarily for leisure, Malca became interested in the island’s history beyond the party scene. In the 1960s and 1970s, the island had been more of a hippie destination, attracting many artists: “After a few years, some pillars of the island took me by the hand and showed it to me in a different way, and I started to fall in love with it. It became less about the parties and boating. I started discovering the island differently. At some point, I felt the island had given me so much—friendships and special moments. I asked myself what I could do as a gift or a thank-you note to the island.”
Rather than opening a restaurant or nightclub, Malca decided to build something around art: “I started looking for a space, and like everything I’ve done, these magical places seem to land in my lap as a gift from God, but with a very important mission.”
Malca eventually found a former salt warehouse, which he converted into the 8,000-square-foot exhibition space La Nave Salinas in 2015. For the past 11 summers, the foundation has presented annual exhibitions by recognizable international artists, drawing an increasing number of collectors, museum visitors and other international audiences to the island.
His initial approach was to draw people in with artists they already knew. The program began with a KAWS exhibition and went on to show Kenny Scharf, Keith Haring and video artist Marco Brambilla. Once audiences were familiar with the space, he started showing artists he personally wanted to champion—emerging figures or talents he believed deserved greater recognition. He cited Eva Beresin as a recent example, who, after showing at La Nave, later had an exhibition at Vienna’s Albertina Museum.
Malca wanted to keep the space admission free, and so accessible to everyone who wanted to engage with art. The space normally operates through the summer, but more recently the foundation has kept it open through October on the condition that local schools bring students once classes resume. (More than 1,000 children visited over roughly two and a half weeks last year.)
While technically a commercial gallery, La Nave Salinas operates more like a foundation. There is no price list or active sales effort, according to Malca. Anyone interested in a work is directed to his New York office; he says this soft strategy works. “Having the space in Ibiza is an eye-opener. Important collectors from around the world go to Ibiza, and we give them a little space during their summer to come and visit our show.”
The success of the space inspired him to open his space at 60 White Street in Tribeca in 2023. It operates as a hybrid, multidisciplinary exhibition venue: some shows feature works that are not for sale, while others are intended, in part, to place works in important collections. Designed by StudioMDA, the 5,000-square-foot gallery features a triple-height open area, 35-foot walls, exposed brick and natural light from rear skylights. Inaugurating it was a show of work by Spanish painter Rafa Macarrón, another young talent in Malca’s ecosystem.
Currently on view is a museum-level Haring exhibition, “Keith Haring: A World in Motion,” co-curated by Carlo Mccormick and featuring a combination of seminal works from Malca’s own collection alongside selected loans. The show brings together monumental paintings and sculptures as well as works that glow under blacklight, many of which have rarely been seen in public before. Spread across two floors, the exhibition traces the international reach of Haring’s prolific creative expression, including works he made in Pisa, the Sister Cities project between New York and Tokyo, a Paris Metro drawing at the Alma-Marceau station (1984) and a five-panel mural created in San Francisco (1986). An entire room is also dedicated to a recreation of the DV8 nightclub, capturing the convergence of art, music, performance and nightlife that shaped Haring’s imaginative world.
“Keith Haring’s work is rooted in New York, but it belongs to the world,” Malca says in the statement accompanying the exhibition. The show demonstrates Haring’s extraordinary ability to connect people through a shared visual language that remains as immediate and powerful today as it was in the 1980s. It succeeds in showing how, through human encounters and close observation, Haring developed a uniquely multicultural symbolic lexicon—almost a personal mythology—capable of transcending cultural barriers and communicating with remarkable universality. Some of the most powerful works featured in the exhibition suggest how he anticipated the fears and anxieties that continue to define our age, from the threat of nuclear war to the growing power of machines and the overwhelming feelings of dissociation and alienation within an increasingly fragmented society.
Malca continues to move fluidly between collecting and selling. He never really distinguished between the two, even in the past when that hybrid approach carried more of a stigma in the art world. “I’ve always been completely transparent. I say I’m an art dealer, have a gallery, but I am also a collector. When I say I’m a collector, it’s because I still have pieces I bought 30 years ago hanging in my home,” Malca said. “If I can sell one piece for an amount that allows me to invest in other artists’ careers, help them and show them. I think that’s a fantastic way to progress in the art world.”
Over the years, Malca has helped advance the careers of many of the artists in his orbit. He could easily have sat on some of the works he already owned and simply enjoyed them, but his curiosity keeps him moving forward. “It’s probably the biggest asset I have. It brought me to incredible places, and that’s how I found those guys in the 1980s,” Malca reflected. Today, his nephew, Isaac, has become an important member of his team, helping him identify emerging talent. “He’s much younger than I am, so he has the ability to go and look for young new artists in a way I don’t always have time to do,” he explains, noting how operating in both the secondary and primary markets can be very complicated.
Malca was quick to point out that supporting an artist begins with the work but also depends on a personal connection: “When I like an artist, I first want to meet them and see whether there is some chemistry in the personality, whether we can relate across different worlds or subjects. If that happens, then I show more interest. It’s a perfect combination: you can work with somebody whose work you like and whom you like as a person.” From there, they can explore how the organization might expand the artist’s reach and connect them with audiences or institutions they have not yet been able to access.
Over the years, Malca has been building a community—or, better, as he prefers to describe it, an ecosystem: “I prefer to call it an ecosystem because we want to have them in Ibiza, have them in New York, have them come and paint in Tulum at the residency.” Casa Malca in Tulum, which opened as a hotel in 2014, developed organically into a proper luxury resort, with artworks from his collection installed throughout the property and an artist residency completing the ecosystem.
Malca recalled visiting Tulum in 2012 for the last day of the Mayan calendar and becoming fascinated by the place. He found a property with eight rooms and initially imagined it simply as somewhere to host friends and visitors. Demand grew, however, and the property gradually became a hotel. “I realized more people wanted to come and stay, and I didn’t have the rooms. Suddenly, I thought, ‘Okay, maybe it’s not a bad idea to have a hotel.’ It grew. Now we have 71 rooms, three restaurants and a spa.”
With this “ecosystem,” he arguably anticipated a model that is becoming increasingly common—especially among young collectors. “The model the art world had for a long time, of representing artists exclusively, is very old, and I don’t think it fits the formula today,” Malca said. He considers long-term exclusive representation outdated and prefers project-based relationships: an artist and the gallery undertake one project together, evaluate the experience and continue only if both sides want to. “The only obligation I feel I have, and that the artist has, is to perform and do the best we can for whatever project comes next. If that project goes well, then we move on to the next. I think artists, dealers and galleries could perform better if they had a more open relationship. If they find something better, they move. If they like what they’re doing, they stay.”
Malca sees this growing tendency among collectors to share their holdings publicly as entirely positive. To him, collectors are not merely owners but caretakers, and art should be seen by as many people as possible rather than remaining locked in warehouses or private homes. “When works are locked in a warehouse or locked in a home and only seen by a few, I don’t think that’s right,” he said. “I like that collectors are opening foundations and spaces. The dynamics are changing, and I’m all for it.”
Asked about his future ambitions, Malca reduces the idea to one recurring need: more art and more wall space. “My plan is to continue doing what I’ve been doing. I hope I don’t lose my curiosity,” he states. “I want to continue being exposed, going around, seeing shows, seeing artists and finding those who have something to say. And perhaps finding spaces, too, to show them.”
Asked whether he has any regrets—any work he failed to buy in time and can no longer access—Malca bluntly replied that he does not, because he has always gone as far as his resources allowed. If he missed a work, he says, it was because buying it was impossible at the time, not because he chose not to.
As for his holy grails, he recalled how, about 25 years ago, he told himself that one day he would be able to trade a Basquiat for a Picasso. It eventually happened. His dream room, however, would bring together a Giacometti sculpture, a Rothko and a Yves Klein monochrome. Beyond that, Malca added, he would always want another room devoted to the four artists who first opened the art world for him: Basquiat, Haring, Scharf and Condo. “For me, the best thing that ever happened was encountering the art world. I say it lightly, but I think it has been a blessing. It’s a fantastic world to be part of.”
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