The Leila Heller Gallery Opens a New Space on 57th Street
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| One of the rooms in Leila Heller's new 16,000-square-foot, six-floor art gallery. Photo by Keith Bedford, courtesy The Wall Street Journal. |
For almost 30 years,
Leila Heller
ran her gallery from the Upper East Side, making a name for
herself as an art dealer and for her support of emerging and midcareer
Middle Eastern artists, before setting up shop in 2010 on a
gallery-lined stretch of West 25th Street.
Now,
Ms. Heller is returning uptown with a 16,000-square-foot, six-floor
space in Midtown Manhattan that she will operate in addition to the
Chelsea location. The new gallery will open on Tuesday, with an
inaugural exhibition on portraiture that will run through August.
"It's been my whole life," said Ms. Heller of being uptown. "I always knew I was going to go back."
The new location on West 57th Street will be headed up by
Thomas Arnold,
who spent 14 years as director of
Mary Boone
Gallery's locations in Chelsea and Midtown before leaving in 2012 to set up his own consulting firm.
The exhibition, titled "Look at Me …
Portraits:
Manet
to the Present" is organized by Ms. Heller as well as
Paul Morris,
the founding director of the Armory Show, and
Beth Rudin DeWoody,
a curator and collector who has worked with the gallery in the
past. It will include works by more than 170 artists, including Edgar
Degas,
Henri Matisse,
Pablo Picasso,
Andy Warhol,
Jean-
Michel Basquiat
and
Shoja Azari,
an Iranian-born filmmaker and artist whose work featured in Ms.
Heller's Chelsea gallery last year.
Ms.
DeWoody said Ms. Heller is up to the hurdles of the new space. "A space
that size gives you great opportunities, but you also want to make sure
that everything is top-quality, and you don't just fill it with stuff to
fill the space," Ms. De Woody said. "If anyone has the energy, it's got
to be Leila."
"I think the challenge
is not different from what you have in any gallery space," said Mr.
Arnold, "which is really just doing interesting shows and engaging the
people who come to the gallery. It's just on a larger scale."
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| Paul Morris, Leila Heller and Thomas Arnold. Photo by Ramsay de Give, courtesy The Wall Street Journal. |
The
gallery space will be spread across six floors overlooking bustling
57th Street, including a top floor made bright and airy by glass
skylights. Four floors will be devoted to exhibition space, private
viewing areas and offices, while one floor, with plywood ceilings and
walls, will be available as an experimental space for artists, and
another houses a 60-seat screening room and adjacent conference room.
Mr.
Morris believes the gallery's ability to host a wide range of
exhibitions will give it a competitive edge. "Artists love the idea of
doing a show in not just a white box," he said. "If you want artists to
come see your space, you want artists to do things with your space."
The gallery is "really in the same spirit of
what I've always wanted to do—have salons, to bring different groups of
curators, collectors, writers together," Ms. Heller said.
Screenings,
panel discussions and educational programs have often accompanied the
shows she has put together with curators in the past.
In
planning the expansion, Ms. Heller, who is originally from Iran and has
master's degrees from George Washington University and the Sotheby's
Institute of Art in London, said she also got an injection of energy
from her 22-year-old son, Alexander Heller, who will assist in the
uptown location while finishing his master's degree in art history.
"He sort of reinvigorated us," said Ms. Heller.
She
spent two years looking for an uptown space and almost picked a
location on the Upper East Side before finding the 57th Street location.
She describes Midtown, already home to Mary Boone,
Marian Goodman
and Pace galleries, as "the middle of everything" and convenient
for her clients, many of whom live in the area or stay in hotels while
visiting.
"In way, the uptown space is
going to be a bringing together [of] a gallery from the Lower East Side,
together with a gallery from Chelsea with a gallery from the Upper East
Side," said Ms. Heller. "It's sort of like a meeting point."
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| The facade of Leila Heller's new 16,000-square-foot, six-floor art gallery. Photo by Keith Bedford, courtesy The Wall Street Journal. |
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