His father ran a carpet-fitting business, while his mother was a home-maker and what he calls a “hobby artist – I have this vision of her painting some kind of mural in the basement.” His interests at that point ran to setting a building on fire with a magnifying glass, and pasting his bedroom with images of lithe young bodies culled from magazines When he was 13, his mother died from a brain tumour “My dad was very harsh and controlling,” he recalls. “I would imagine I’m quite difficult to live with,” he concedes “I take everything personally. Outwardly I’m kind of smiling, inside I’m one great rash.”Schachter is offering this elucidation on the way to Coventry. He’s a nippy but careful driver, though the boy racer isn’t buried so deep; he’s just come back from racing cars across ice floes in Finland, and, he says, the first thing he looks at in a car is its horsepower “I hate inertia,” he says. But she reserves some of her most intense count-to-10 looks for Schachter. “I actually think he forgets it sometimes.”Schachter is married to the artist Ilona Malka, a dark, vibrant, stoical woman.

She’s the daughter of Marc Rich, the billionaire commodities trader who fled the US 20 years ago for Switzerland to avoid charges of tax evasion, and was controversially pardoned by Bill Clinton, in one of his last acts before leaving office. The couple have four sons under 10, and Malka’s face is an amalgam of all the joy and forbearance that this implies. But it also felt good.”A youthful 44, Schachter is tall, slim and dark, with cropped hair which still looks somehow unruly. The puckishness of his broad face is accentuated by a prominent scar in his upper lip.

His clothes often look as though they’re being pulled in several directions at once, perhaps in sympathy with his lateral thinking. He’s generally wired and fidgety, which, in his more expansive moments, he’ll put down to Attention Deficit Disorder. At illustrious art-world bashes, he’ll be the one doing the get-me-out-of-here semaphore. “He’s a big kid, really,” says friend and New York gallerist Tony Shafrazi, “so it’s hard to remember that he’s a husband and father himself.” He smiles. “The volts shot through my hand and I practically lifted off the ground,” he recalls “It felt mortifying. “I suppose you could say that I cultivate a kind of contrarian position,” he says merrily, and he likes to tell a story that underlines his self-image as an art world Buster Keaton. A few years ago, he exhibited a maze-sculpture made of live electric fencing material.

He was demonstrating it to a collector and absent-mindedly reached out and touched it. But I can’t change that world in a Sisyphean way, so why not join in? I play the game, but I try to be as much of a virus as a sponge.”He is even more merciless about himself. He offhandedly describes his ventures as “ridiculous” and delights in what he calls “self-sabotage”. When he was “bounced” from showing his wares at a bunch of art fairs last year, he wrote about his humiliation in Art Review for all his peers to read. The only discourse accompanying art is about money, and it’s the most disgusting, sad thing. I thought art had this exalted function, that it went from the realm of the mind through a studio and into a museum, ready for people to experience transcendence Now I believe it’s the opposite.

Despite the anarchic impression, he’s disciplined and tenacious.”"For a long time,” says Schachter, “I had no idea art and commerce were bedfellows. It’s no accident that the umbrella name for his organisation is Rove “Kenny makes things happen,” says the art PR Erica Bolton. “You’ll meet him at an opening and he’ll have this crazy-sounding idea – ‘I’m getting Zaha to do me a car’ – and, weeks later, there it is. He turns artists into architects (his New York and London galleries were designed by Vito Acconci, an Italian artist whose performances in the 1960s and 1970s were literally seminal – for Seed Bed, he lay under a temporary floor and masturbated while gallery-goers unwittingly walked over him), and turns architects into car designers Now Schachter himself is moving into property. Baghdad-born Hadid is designing a mixed residential/retail building for him in Hoxton Square, her first permanent building in the UK, though she has lived here for three decades and achieved worldwide acclaim.Schachter’s resistance to pigeon-holing diverts some as much as it mystifies or infuriates others.