Is That Art, or Is It Just Their Shoes?

2010-01-06 (수) 12:00:00

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By PENELOPE GREEN

An empty pizza box was propped against a black fiberglass urn in the hallway outside Three’s Company, a gallery that is also the living room of Alex Gartenfeld and Piper Marshall, roommates in a tiny walkup apartment in New York’s Chinatown.

“That’s what can happen to the art after a show,” said Mr. Gartenfeld, indicating the urn, which he explained had been part of an installation last spring by AIDS-3D, a Berlin-based duo . That the urn was still there was a source of annoyance , he said. “We just don’t have the room.”

Mr. Gartenfeld and Ms. Marshall are part of a new wave of gallerists who for a variety of reasons - economic, philosophical and purely pragmatic - are turning their homes into art galleries. Some are creating roving galleries, or one-night events in other people’s homes, like the Apartment Show or Parlour, which are put together by artists or curators .

Even at the high end, established dealers like the Palm Beach, Florida, gallerist Sarah Gavlak are opening their homes: through December 19, Ms. Gavlak’s apartment, on 57th Street in Manhattan, was given over to the paintings of Christopher Milne,who creates stylized images inspired by women’s magazines of the early 1960s.

Like 17th-century salonistes, home gallerists use the intimacy of the home to incite discussion and forge a deeper connection to the art.

“You can get comfortable in someone’s home,” said Leslie Rosa-Stumpf, an independent curator who is half of Parlour, a nomadic gallery that appeared recently in a town house in Bushwick, Brooklyn. “It’s not a white room with no furniture. People sit on the couch, have a drink, stay for hours and really take it all in.”

Bernard Leibov wanted a life change when he was downsized as managing director of a design studio last January. A few years earlier, Mr. Leibov, an investment banker turned brand strategist who is now 46, began curating shows featuring artists from his native South Africa. He also made a pilgrimage to Joshua Tree, the art world’s alternative universe in the California desert, which inspired him to make his own work.

Back in New York, “my relationship with my apartment had grown stale,” he said of the loft he has lived in for 12 years. “I had fallen out of love with it, it didn’t inspire me anymore.”

The day he was laid off, he said, he felt a kind of release. “I was like, O.K., now I know what I’m doing,” which was to bring a larger audience to the Joshua Tree community he’d become a part of.

In March, he had his first home show, of the work of the Joshua Tree artist John Luckett, who makes abstract mixed-media pieces.

Mr. Leibov’s relationship with his apartment has been rejuvenated. “I’d been looking for ways to pep it up,” he said. “I had felt a lack of energy when I came home. Now, it’s fantastic. I get to live like a big-time collector.”

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