Rooms to Grow: Meet the Gallerists Revitalizing New York’s Art Scene

On a September afternoon, the art dealer Felix Rödder is sitting in his gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a week before his first opening, naming some notable gallerists he admires. They include Heinz Berggruen, Pierre Matisse, and Yvon Lambert—people who had “these beautiful spaces that felt like you were really let in on a treat,” he says.

Rödder’s first treat of his own is a solo show by the midcareer artist Wyatt Kahn, whose alluring paintings suggest abstract stained-glass windows, though they’re built with translucent vinyl. The five on view take up most of the 450-square-foot exhibition space at Rodder (no umlaut), on the fifth floor of a stately townhouse. Downstairs is the Old Masters dealer Robert B. Simon, who acquired Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi at a New Orleans auction in 2005 for just $1,175. (Twelve years later, it went for $450.3 million at Christie’s in New York.)

A former lawyer, Rödder, 34, worked in Los Angeles for Zander Galerie (which is based in his native Cologne, Germany), and then in New York for David Zwirner, handling one of today’s greatest living painters, Gerhard Richter. He has a boyish enthusiasm and very clear ideas about how he plans to operate when representing artists, cutting resale deals, staging historical shows, and advising clients. He wants “a lean presence that really feels like you’re not having to sacrifice the quality of the exhibition experience because either you have to fill huge spaces or you have to do all these art fairs,” he says.

Rödder is the latest in a bounty of New York art types who have opened galleries in the city in recent years, even as the market for contemporary art has gone south and many once-thriving standbys have closed. Their origins differ, their ambitions vary, and each has a distinctive approach, but they are deliberate and they delight in collaboration, with no use for old rules about who or what to exhibit.

Some of these emergent dealers do not have a formal stable of artists. “There’s really no rush in that regard,” says Sam Marion Wilken, who runs Francis Irv with Shane Rossi. (Their third-floor gallery, on the border between TriBeCa and Chinatown, combines their middle names.) “Once you have a roster,” he says, “immediately there’s this debt you owe the artist and the artist owes you—not financial, but other forms of obligation.”

The two were fledgling artists when they met in 2018, with day jobs in studios. (Rossi still makes work: meaty abstractions.) They went into business in 2022, first in a small space in a mall under the Manhattan Bridge, then moving to their present home in 2023. They’ve done solo shows with young guns like Mexico City’s Karla Kaplun, but also a one-off with the revered German sculptor Reinhard Mucha, who is 75.

As a business, Francis Irv is something of a hybrid entity, like some of its peers. “Maybe 15 years ago, we would have been a proper project space,” says Marion Wilken, who’s also worked as a model. But operating in New York is expensive, “and to sell a few pieces, you have to wear a suit and tie once in a while.” They have done alternative-minded fairs, such as Paris Internationale and Basel Social Club, but “we chose to be on this street in New York,” Rossi says. That’s “the heart and soul of this, and not, you know, being traveling salesmen.”

“The tricky thing with fairs is, once you’re on the hamster wheel, it’s like: When do you get off?” says Polina Berlin, standing in her seventh-floor gallery in the Flower District. The sharp Los Angeles dealer Paul Soto is next door, and the stalwart Casey Kaplan is at street level. Berlin was born in Latvia, and did the Riga Contemporary fair this year. She’s also a regular at the New Art Dealers Alliance’s December fair in Miami, but “I’m very focused on my program right now,” she says. “I want my shows to be really good. I think fairs, at times, can cannibalize your shows.”

Berlin grew up in New York, fell in love with museums, became a Gagosian intern, and went on to work for Paul Kasmin (who passed away in 2020) and Paula Cooper, among others. Still, “I was ill-prepared,” she says of going independent in 2022, on the Upper East Side. “Now that I know what I know, I’m like, Oh my god, that was so ballsy of me to do that! I took a lot of risk.” Her lineup consists of five artists (four of them women), including Tamo Jugeli, a self-taught painter born in 1994, and Loretta Dunkelman, a New Yorker born in 1937, who makes serene abstractions.

In September, the start of the art season, violent, sexy works on paper by Ed Bereal, another artist born in 1937, were on view at Gratin, which was founded in 2022 by the Beirut-born Talal Abillama. Abillama is a tall, charismatic dealer from an art-collecting Lebanese family, and he’s “always trying to find under-recognized artists,” he says in the second-floor Chinatown space that used to be the tastemaking 47 Canal gallery.

At 18, Abillama moved to London for school, was kicked out (an attendance issue), and then went to Northeastern University, in Boston, but he was selling art before he was 20. His international band includes the German painter Christoph Matthes and the Korean artist Seung Ah Paik. “Most gallerists think the artists are working for you,” he says, “and from very early on, I understood that the gallery is working for the artist.” Will he expand? “If we want to keep on building these careers…” he says, then stops himself. “Artists—they want more, they want bigger spaces.”

The Amanita gallery has been very quick to scale up. After mounting exhibitions in a temporary space in Florence, Italy, and a pop-up in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood in 2021, it moved in 2022 to a capacious place on the Bowery that was once the storied music venue CBGB. In January, Amanita added a spot a couple blocks away; and in October, it christened a third branch, in Rome. It also collaborates on an artists residency about an hour north of the Italian capital, at the Fondazione Iris, formerly a studio for Cy Twombly. (Caio Twombly, a grandson of the legend, is a gallery partner. The others are Tommaso Rositani Suckert, Jacob Hyman, and Garrett Goldsmith.)

“We work with various Italian artists, and having a base on their home turf feels important for both the ambitions and identity of the gallery,” Twombly says of the decision to open in Rome. “There is also less opportunity for international artists to exhibit there, and we think that many would like to.”

Amanita, which is named for the red-capped hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria, has also done one-off shows in far-flung locales—including Miami; Los Angeles; and Saint Moritz, Switzerland—during fairs and other events, with the aim of drawing attention to its artists, often from different eras. Solo exhibitions this year have gone to the revered painter Bill Jensen, 80, and Nicholas Campbell, 30.

This is a moment when some longtime dealers are worrying about costs, but these newcomers share a certain clear-eyed optimism—a helpful attitude when entering such a cutthroat field. Abillama, of Gratin, seems especially bullish, at least in the long term. “Young gallerists like me, I’m sure we’ll see the crazy market come back,” he says.

Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle, 32, thinks that “people are sort of misinterpreting the slowdown and considering it as people backing out of the market,” she says. In her view, it signals “a need for a new perspective and a new context in which art is being exhibited.” She aims to deliver that via Gladwell Projects, an itinerant model currently staging exhibitions in domestic settings. “I wanted to have some form of a footprint, but not hold myself down and be rooted somewhere,” says Boyle, who’s worked at Lehmann Maupin, Canada, and Pace galleries. (Like Berlin, she started out as a Gagosian intern.)

In October, Boyle took over all four floors of a Harlem brownstone to stage a group show about the multivalent nature of color, with 22 artists ranging from canonical figures like Agnes Martin to Haejin Park, a recent Yale MFA grad. In one sense, it’s a radical approach, but it has historical precedents, she says: The famed New York dealer Leo Castelli converted the living room of his uptown apartment into his legendary gallery. Gladwell is “a remix of a model that’s tried and true.”

On that note: Slip House opened in May in a slim three-story former carriage house from the 1880s, on East 5th Street. It’s headed by Ingrid Lundgren, who co-ran a scrappy gallery on Martha’s Vineyard for five years. There’s a kitchen on the second floor and a bedroom where a resident artist will live next summer.

Lundgren, 31, a Gavin Brown’s Enterprise vet, is interested in “how to experience and be challenged by contemporary art without it feeling inaccessible,” she says. An example: One July evening, Slip House hosted an interactive event called “Summer Dinner,” which served up a chilled cucumber soup, the result of the artist Alison Knowles’s 1964 piece Make a Soup. There were also 250 servings of spaghetti sitting on a table above a theremin attached to a synthesizer—a 1972 work by Liz Phillips that burbled as people grabbed their portions and disturbed the theremin’s antennae. Right now, Slip House is pairing the Chicago artist Noelia Towers, who makes toothsome, erotically tinged paintings, with the late Austrian polymath Birgit Jürgenssen.

Less than a year in, Slip House did its first art fair, in October in Paris, during Art Basel. Called 7 Rue Froissart, it was a laid-back event with just 11 galleries, created by the dealer Brigitte Mulholland, an expat New Yorker, and Sara Maria Salamone, of the Queens gallery Mrs. “I really like these alternative solutions,” Lundgren says. These days, “participating in traditional fairs is just so much more expensive.”

At Dashwood Projects, affordability is definitely a consideration. “We don’t want to price things above $2,000,” says its director, the stylist Anne Christensen. She’s standing in the gallery’s tiny space, an offshoot of Dashwood Books, the redoubtable NoHo photo bookseller and publisher, which just turned 20. It’s a place for “everyday people” who like photography and “have a little extra cash.”

Dashwood’s founder is Christensen’s husband, David Strettell. He says that the new venture, “in one way or another, is always going to be a reflection of what we do in publishing.” The couple is hands-on with some shows, but they also turn things over to friends and collaborators. Ari Marcopoulos presented his photos of sumo wrestlers and judo students; Justine Kurland offered collages she made from William Eggleston images.

In a similarly compact storefront on the Lower East Side, an artist is completely in charge. Jack Pierson, who has appeared in three Whitney Biennials, long had “middling fantasies” about opening some kind of shop, he says. When the artist Leo Fitzpatrick decided to close his Public Access gallery in 2023, Pierson took over the lease, even though Fitzpatrick listed reasons “why not to do this thing,” Pierson says.

He frosted the front windows and had a name applied to the door and windows: Elliott Templeton Fine Arts. It’s a character from W. Somerset Maugham’s 1944 novel The Razor’s Edge, who’s “very grand and very socially ambitious in Europe and wants to know the counts and countesses,” Pierson says. In the 1946 film adaptation, Templeton is played by Clifton Webb, “one of the great old gays of Hollywood.”

The aesthetic is “aging homosexual,” says Pierson, who is 65. “But, I mean, I would have said that when I was 25 too.” That theme has translated to a show of paintings by the New York Dolls singer David Johansen, who manned the gallery on Sundays before passing away earlier this year, and nude “posture studies” of young students photographed at elite universities decades ago. Books, more art, and curios are available in the back room.

Pierson’s own work keeps him busy—he has a show up at the Bass Museum of Art, in Miami Beach, through August 16, 2026. Nonetheless, he just renewed the lease. “There’s still stuff to do,” he says. “It doesn’t feel like a drag to me, and I get a kick out of every show.” His Chihuahua, Chico, scampers by his feet. “We’re not selling a lot, but I’m paying the rent for the space.” In any case, money is not his goal. “It brings people pleasure,” he says.

Rödder: Grooming by Adrian Alvarado for Dior Beauty at See Management. Rossi and Marion Wilken: Hair by Anton Alexander for Bumble & Bumble; Skin by Mark de los Reyes for Shiseido at Paradis; Fashion Assistants: Kayla Perno, Dylan Gue. Berlin: Hair and makeup by Shaina Ehrlich for 111 Skin at Born Artists; Fashion Assistants: Kayla Perno, Madison Collins; Production Assistant: Brian Gomez. Boyle: Hair by Anton Alexander for Bumble & Bumble; Skin by Mark de los Reyes for Shiseido at Paradis; Fashion Assistants: Kayla Perno, Dylan Gue. Lundgren: Hair and makeup by Shaina Ehrlich for 111 Skin at Born Artists; Fashion Assistant: Kayla Perno. Pierson, Christensen, and Strettell: Hair and makeup by Shaina Ehrlich for 111 Skin at Born Artists; Fashion Assistants: Kayla Perno, Madison Collins; Production Assistant: Brian Gomez.