(Courtesy Higher Pictures)

Crain's reports that RFR Realty's 980 Madison, home to Gagosian and a number of other galleries, is for sale.

Years ago RFR's founder Aby Rosen had planned to develop the space into a tower, though the neighborhood rejected that idea. The address was formerly the New York home of Sotheby's auction house.

Read more at Crain's.

Storefront space at 45 Canal. (Photo: Andrew Russeth)

The building at 45 Canal Street, the former home of Maccarone gallery and, more recently, Asia Song Society, will become a single-family residence.

According to Bowery Boogie:

Within the last couple of weeks, the requisite scaffolding and netting arrived at 45 Canal Street. Change is here. According to the DOB database, the new owner plans to convert the existing four-story commercial structure into a single-family residence with ground floor retail/offices.

The 2,800-square-foot building was listed for sale as early as 2010, but was not purchased until March of 2011. Last summer, while a James Franco exhibition was on view at Asia Song Society, which took up the ground floor and basement, the building suffered "significant structural damage" during a storm.

A Craigie Horsfield show. (Courtesy Marvelli Gallery)

Marvelli Gallery, which has made its home in Chelsea for 10 years on West 26th Street, has announced that it's moving. Where? It doesn't yet know.

In the meantime though, as it hunts for a new ground floor location, in another neighborhood, it will maintain a space on the 8th floor in its current building. Through the summer it will be open by appointment with works by Christer Stomholm, Craigie Horsfield and Larry Fink.

A photo of the site from June 2011. (Courtesy Google Maps)

Next spring, the Judd Foundation will open the doors to Donald Judd's former studio at 101 Spring Street, art blog Art Fag City reports today.

The space will not be a museum, Judd Foundation Program Officer Christopher Longfellow told the blog, though there will be tours and, one imagines, works by the artist on display. The space is currently under renovation and has been for some time, as you can see from the photo to the left.

The Judd Foundation was started by the artist to preserve his legacy after his death and is different from the Chinati Foundation, which is more closely tied to the museum by that name in Marfa, Texas.

. (Courtesy the artist)

The Associated Press reports today that the South Korean, New York-based photographer Ahae has purchased a $665,000 village in France some 280 miles southwest of Paris.

Ahae, who goes by one name, had a show at Grand Central last year and opens one at the Tuileries Garden, outside the Louvre, this summer.

According to the AP, "Ahea outbid two others – a Belgian and an Irishman hoping to use Courbefy for a reality TV show."

456-464 West 18th Street. (Courtesy Friedrich Petzel Gallery)

The Chelsea art gallery district continues to grow richer and denser along its edges. Friedrich Petzel Gallery announced today that it will open a 10,000-square-foot space in the fall, at 456-464 West 18th Street, just east of 10th Avenue, around the corner from Andrew Edlin and Alexander and Bonin galleries.

The new gallery, Mr. Petzel's third in the area, sports 25-foot-tall ceilings and some 6,000 square feet of showing space. (Can't wait to see what happens when artists like Dirk Skreber, Cosima von Bonin and Philippe Parreno let it rip under those well-lofted ceilings.) The release notes, "Adjacent to the main galleries, a three-story building will offer private showrooms and offices." Petzel also has spaces next door to each other at 535 and 537 West 22nd Street, and is a partner in the Capitain Petzel gallery in Berlin.

It really is getting hot down there on West 18th Street. Hauser & Wirth announced back in January that it will open a 23,000-square-foot branch at 511 West 18th Street, in the old Roxy roller skating rink and discotheque, in the fall.

On the north edge of Chelsea, Sean Kelly recently announced he's moving in the fall into Exit Art's space, at West 36th Street and 10th Avenue, which measures 22,000 square feet. With Balice Hertling & Lewis now set up in a Deco office building between West 44th and 45th Street on 9th, Manhattan has almost a full gallery corridor from Chelsea up to the 57th Street gallery neighborhood.

Is there an artist living here? (Photo by Dan A/Flickr)

Not surprisingly, many people living in Soho and Noho are not too happy about a real estate group's plan to survey loft residents in the neighborhood to ensure that at least one person in each loft is an artist, as city law requires. DNAinfo has been following this one closely and reports:

Community Board 2 chair Brad Hoylman said he was "shocked" by the plan to survey the area roughly bordered by Astor Place, the Bowery, Canal Street and West Broadway — and said the board planned to look into whether it was legal.

"I am very concerned that this survey could amount to landlord harassment," Hoylman said. "There are laws against this sort of incursion on tenants' rights to quiet enjoyment, and I hope that city officials take the appropriate action to protect them."

The group, billing itself as the SoHo/NoHo Action Committee, wants to prove that artists no longer reside in many of the artist-zoned lofts, and aims to have the rule stricken. Some potential loft buyers who are not artists have reportedly balked at pulling the trigger on such homes, fearing their lack of certified artistic talent would result in them getting the boot if the city decided to enforce the law.

(Courtesy the Garage)

The Garage Center for Contemporary Art, the museum started by Dasha Zhukova in a former bus depot, announced that it has plans for a new home that will be designed by Rem Koolhaus's firm Offices for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Gorky Park, a Soviet-era recreation ground.

Ever since its lease ran out in 2011 at the depot, the Garage Center has set up a temporary home—a launch pad of sorts—to "develop and regenerate a number of temporary and permanent spaces," according to a statement it issued.

One of these off-shoot projects is the Rem Koolhaus temporary space that is being developed on the site of Gorky Park’s renowned '60s Vremena Goda (Four Seasons) restaurant, which has been abandoned for more than two decades. The rehabilitated historic spot is scheduled to open in late 2012. It combines a "double height entrance space, two levels of unobstructed exhibition galleries, creative center for children, roof terrace, shop, cafe, learning facilities and offices."

The new design will incorporate Soviet-era design elements like tiles, mosaic and brick, keeping the new space aesthetically linked to the roots of the historic park, a 300-acre terrain along the Moskva River designed in the 1920s by avant-garde Constructivist architect Konstantin Melnikov who is also responsible for Garage’s current space. The Russian design firm Form Bureau, headed by architect Olga Trevias, is working with Koolhaus's OMA to bring the plan to completion.

The new space will embrace the Garage Center's mission, which, since it first opened in 2008, is to explore and develop contemporary culture while also being a community center and catalyst for the emerging arts scene in Moscow. Some of its notable shows are Christian Marclay's The Clock, the first solo exhibition in Russia of James Turrell and the group show "New York Minute."

Soho, once known as Hell's Hundred Acres. (Photo by Dan A/Flickr)

If you reside in a SoHo or NoHo loft, some people may soon be knocking on your door hoping to ask some questions about your occupation. Various real-estate types have established a group called the SoHo/NoHo Action Committee aimed at determining whether the lofts in those neighborhoods, which are legally mandated to house an artist, do, in fact, comply with that rule, DNAinfo reports. The organization plans to hire surveyors (it's aiming to raise $25,000) to determine that. Door-to-door knocking is one of the tactics on the table.

The group's goal is to prove that artists no longer reside in many of the lofts and have the artist-in-residence regulations stricken from the books. Right now, it seems, many potential buyers are hesitant to pull the trigger on artist-zoned lofts in the area, since they're afraid someone from the city government will enforce the regulations, giving them the boot. (That said, quite a few people are believed to be skirting the rule.) CurbedNY reports that about 200 lofts are covered by the current rules. Here's DNAinfo:

Prudential Douglas Elliman luxury real estate agent Leonard Steinberg, a supporter of Baisley's committee, said he recently had a non-artist client pass on buying a $15 million home in SoHo rather than try to buy illegally.

The city needs to change with the times, Steinberg said.

"These rules are government stupidity," he said. "I'd say 80 percent of people who live in SoHo now are not artists, but the government has a problem redefining the neighborhood."

The artist-in-residence guidelines were established in the 1970s to encourage artists to live and work in the area, which was far less tony at the time. (Oddly, "interpretive" artists like dancers, musicians and actors do not fit the bill.) One broker said that the law now hurts artists:

Real estate broker and certified artist Susan Meisel said the artist-in-residence rules now hurt the very people they were designed to protect. Aging artists sometimes have trouble selling their properties, she said.

(Courtesy Eleven Rivington)

Art in America reports today that Lower East Side gallery Eleven Rivington will take over some extra space at 195 Chrystie Street at the end of the month, just around the corner from its current location. The new space measures 1,200 square feet and put the gallery just next door to Lehmann Maupin's L.E.S. space.

From AiA:

"We already had storage space in the building," director and partner Augusto Arbizo told A.i.A. Friday afternoon while viewing the new space. The dealer had just returned from a preview of the Dallas Art Fair, and would soon be on his way to Art Brussels. "And when the storefront became available, the landlord walked in our door and asked if we wanted to expand."

Michael DeLucia will have a show that stretches across both space from April 29 to June 2.

Eleven Rivington, the Lower East Side space operated by Midtown's Greenberg Van Doren gallery, opened at its 650-square-foot space in 2007.