Longtime Chelsea gallery Garth Greenan will relocate downtown this fall

Initially, Garth Greenan did not realize that the lease on his current space on West 20th Street in Chelsea would be expiring on the eve of the 15th anniversary of his namesake gallery. But once he did, he saw it as a sign of a new chapter in the business.

In September, Garth Greenan Gallery will relocate to SoHo and open in two spaces across the street (10 Green Street and 25 Green Street). The gallery’s solo exhibition for Esteban Cabeza de Baca closed on February 27. This is the gallery’s last solo exhibition in Chelsea.

The interiors of the two upcoming galleries, both located in the landmark cast-iron building, will be transformed by Stuart Basseches Architects in collaboration with Konstantinos Spiropoulos. The two sites total 3,575 square feet, including viewing rooms and on-site storage, nearly tripling the gallery’s footprint.

“One day I was walking to work in Chelsea and I thought about how long I’d been working in this neighborhood,” Greenan told me art news In a phone interview. “I just realized that once my lease was up, I had the option of going[elsewhere]and that I didn’t have to be in Chelsea to be a successful art dealer. I used to think that one needed to do something very specific to be taken seriously in New York. That’s still true, but I think those rules have changed a lot.”

Over the past 15 years, Greenan has built a program focused on, in his words, “rescuing or reinventing historically significant artists.” Some of these artists had careers that had been ignored for decades, but have since become not only considered important, but have moved from the fringes of the art world to the center. They include Howardena Pindell, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Rosalyn Drexler, Gladys Nilsson and Emmi Whitehorse, the latter of whom announced a co-representation agreement with White Cube last week.

“I’ve been thinking about this move for 15 years in terms of historicizing the gallery. I never thought we were doing anything of that importance,” he said. “I just prepared these artists for the business world and I proved that this was a viable business model. Now everyone is imitating it.”

The new gallery space is located north of Canal Street, on the other side of Tribeca’s main thoroughfare, which over the past decade has once again become one of the city’s premier gallery districts. Greenan said he didn’t want to be directly in the middle of Tribeca, “but I would love to be adjacent to Tribeca,” he said.

This preference for being a destination of sorts—albeit ephemeral for those who might be traveling from gallery to gallery in the area—stems from the gallery’s roots, when it was originally located on the 10th floor of the Arts Building at 529 West 20th Street. “I think it’s a problem, and being on the first floor of 545 would really benefit us,” Greenan said, but “I’m ready to do our own thing, especially now that we have more resources.”

Two debut exhibitions this fall are solo shows by Rosalyn Drexler and Cannupa Hanska Luger. Greenan said he sees it as a way to show how extensive the gallery’s program is. “Having two spaces, I will be able to have artists in conversation with each other and be able to have larger, more ambitious exhibitions,” he said, adding that a future pairing might be Nicholas Krushenik and Melissa Cody, as a way of thinking about different histories of abstraction.

Greenan said the gallery’s move is a way of thinking about its future, at least for the next 15 years, especially as the art market begins to recover and stabilize. “I’m not saying the old model is old, because it’s bad. It just needs to be retooled, and I think smart gallerists are doing what they can to retool,” he said. “I think the most relevant thing we do is make it fun.”