In a statement, Gouzer said that he would spend “the next few months concentrating on conservation and climate issues before coming back to the art world with a new project.”
The announcement marks the second major departure from the auction house; Francis Outred, Christie’s head of postwar and contemporary art in Europe, resigned last month. Gouzer’s exit leaves in charge his co-chairman, Alex Rotter, who came to Christie’s from Sotheby’s last year.
Guillaume Cerutti, Christie’s chief executive, said in the statement: “I wish Loic the very best with his future ventures.”
Over the last four years Gouzer championed separate curated sales at Christie’s, creating a series of stand-alone auctions whose art he often hand-picked to appeal to a younger generation of collectors. They included “If I Live…,” “Bound to Fail,” and “Looking Forward to the Past,” which achieved price highs for Pablo Picasso’s “Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’)” and Alberto Giacometti’s “Pointing Man.”
In 2017, he conceived and shepherded the sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” for $450.3 million in partnership with Christie’s Old Masters department. This fall, he oversaw the sale of David Hockney’s “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures),” which brought $90.3 million, an auction high for a living artist.
A vocal environmentalist, Gouzer in 2013 collaborated with the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation to present “The 11th Hour,” a charity auction that raised $38.8 million for wildlife conservation.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.