By Rachel Corbett 8/20/12 12:22am

galleries

supersizechelsea

Supersize Chelsea!: In New York’s Main Art District, It’s Go Big or Go Home

“Be careful where you step,” shouted Maureen Bray over a percussion of power tools as she maneuvered past the electricians, sheetrockers and HVAC crew members who have two months to transform a 22,000-square-foot construction zone into the new home of Sean Kelly Gallery, which is about to triple in size. “Obviously this giant hole won’t be here,” said Ms. Bray, a director at the gallery, pointing to what will become a stairwell leading to a black-box theater—just one of three exhibition spaces, alongside expanded offices, a “canyon”-sized library and two private viewing rooms (“back where those toilets are now”).

In the early 1990s, most real-estate-seeking New Yorkers overlooked the gray smudge on Manhattan’s West Side known as Chelsea, then still a wasteland of deserted freight tracks, turpentine fumes and auto-body garages. But for the throngs of art galleries being swiftly priced out of Soho by fashion boutiques and Dean & Delucas, it offered cavernous, column-free architecture at bargain-basement prices.

Matthew Marks pioneered the migration on an abandoned stretch of West 22nd Street. Soon after, Barbara Gladstone, Metro Pictures, Sean Kelly and hundreds of other galleries followed, and a “new Soho” was born in Chelsea.

Twenty years, two Gagosian Galleries and a Comme des Garçons later, Chelsea art dealers are fretting that the legacy of Soho has come back to haunt them. About a third of the neighborhood’s galleries have been shuttered in the last five years as High Line-inflated real estate prices and an influx of deep-pocketed fashion and design firms have forced out many of the smaller dealers. At its height, Chelsea was home to more than 350 galleries; today only 204 remain, according to Rice & Associates real estate adviser Earl Bateman.

But it would be premature to pronounce the world’s premier gallery district dead. Read More

By Sarah Douglas 6:16pm

galleristny in cologne

9 Photos

The entrance to NADA Cologne. Art Cologne used to do a section here called "Open Space"

Manhattan on the Rhine: New York Art Dealers Braved Cologne

When Frieze plunks down on Randall’s Island next week, it won’t be the only new art fair in town. The New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA), a group founded back in 2002 by a handful of intrepid young New York art dealers, is launching its own 67-exhibitor New York event, in the former Dia Art Foundation building on West 22nd Street.

You might say NADA, an organization that now boasts some 300 members and has run an annual fair in Miami since 2003, is in expansion mode. Last summer it inaugurated a modest fair in Hudson, N.Y. And earlier this month Gallerist visited, for the purposes of leading a panel discussion, the first installment of Nada Cologne, a 33-exhibitor event that took place inside the vast, 186-exhibitor Art Cologne, which, now in its 46th edition, is the world’s oldest art fair. Read More

By Will Heinrich 11/01/11 4:00pm

Review

WillRogan_Collapse_1

Avoiding the Subject: ‘Scruffy’ at KS Art and ‘Walking Forward-Running Past’ at Art in General

At the small, surprisingly harmonious group show currently hanging at KS Art on Leonard Street, the elephant in the room is the figurative image. But actually, it’s a mammoth—not only because the show is called “Scruffy,” or because the image began as a cave painting, but because it functions here like an exhumed fossil, reconceived in a world it never imagined. Read More