Art House, a new hybrid art exhibition space is set to open in New York this November. The new venture will be located in the former Barneys flagship store on Madison Avenue. Designed by wHY architecture’s creative director Kulapat Yantrasast, Art House, which aims to bring a flexible solution to gallery space, will offer an exhibition space in New York city for galleries based in other cities and countries around the world. Barneys closed the doors to its New York store in February after filing for bankruptcy last year and liquidating its leftover merchandise during the holiday season.
The venture is founded by the team behind TEFAF New York— Michael Plummer and Jeff Rabin of New York advisory firm Artvest and Geoff Fox, the principal of consulting firm Touchstone Event Management. It follows the launch of a similar space in London.
On November 4, Art House says it will host 60 exhibitors (vendors have not been announced) in the five-floor venue with showcases organized around a common theme. The space will also have offices and salon-style viewing rooms, allowing dealers to host year-round programming in an “à la carte” fashion, said Rabin. The founders reportedly plan to host another multi-gallery event in May 2022. The schedules mimic the pre-pandemic Fall and Spring seasons of Tefaf New York and the marquee auctions between November and May. The venue has a goal to encompass all corners of the art market, from small to mega dealers, to top auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s—while targeting buyers across all art categories from antiquities to the ultra-contemporary.
“Dealers need a new toolkit to reach clients,” Rabin said in an interview referring to the needs of dealers, which were only exacerbated by the spread of the pandemic last year. “The online activity was not sufficient to make up for lost art fair and in-person activity at galleries.”
The pandemic has left major art fairs across the globe in crisis. For example, Art Basel and Frieze are unable to reconvene for large-scale events, while restrictions on international travel continue to limit the circulation of dealers and collectors. Some fairs, like TEFAF Maastricht, were forced to cancel their live editions scheduled for the Fall after multiple postponements. Frieze New York’s most recent edition in July at The Shed only hosted around 60 exhibitors.
“The community is now more interested in highly curated, more selective fair or exhibition venues,” said Plummer. “The 200-plus dealer events, even before Covid, were getting to be overwhelming.”
The cofounders say the space will provide much of what an art fair does, public programming and a luxury space to entertain top clients supported by an online platform. The site will include a members club housed in the former Barneys restaurant, Fred’s. The space is also designed to have the feel of an upscale atmosphere of an art fair VIP lounge and will host pop-up showcases that adhere to collectors’ travel patterns.
Art House will charge galleries a leasing fee to exhibit and rent office space, which will be in line with what major art fairs charge vendors to showcase their works. The founders say that London’s newly minted Cromwell Place— a membership-based gallery hub in South Kensington where dealers and collectors run their operations that opened in August 2020— is a close comparable to Art House.
Plummer and Rabin considered recent trends and shifts in the art market when conceiving Art House. Younger gallerists and specialist niche dealers are vital players in the market, the two stressed. That demographic, said Plummer, tends to get lost in an art fair economy that is heavily focused on vendors of blue-chip 20th-21st century art. “The model caters to a broader range of the market,” said Rabin. “It’s really meant as a rejuvenation of the city’s art footprint.”
