David Lewis on His Decision to Close His Beloved New York Gallery

When David Lewis began planning the summer group exhibition at his eponymous Tribeca gallery, he did not imagine that the show would be his swan song.

But the gallerist announced in May that he would be shuttering his venue after 11 years in business. The decision came as a surprise to many, given the gallery’s loyal following and high standing.

A nuanced program with theory-driven experimentation and accessible figuration helped the outfit establish its brand among its peers; an intergenerational roster and welcoming brand attracted a returning clientele, an intrigued curator base, and a committed downtown audience. Packed openings and favorable reviews remained commonplace. Still, when the gallery’s summer group show, “Everyone Loves Picabia”—about the contemporary influence of the French Dadaist—wrapped on June 22nd, the beloved gallery closed its doors for good.

Tricky times downtown

Lewis’s unforeseen decision added his gallery to a slew of downtown New York galleries that have shuttered in recent months, often despite their celebrated profiles and critical attention. Some of the latest examples include other downtown staples Fortnight Institute, Foxy Productions, Helena Anrather, and Simone Subal Gallery in the last few months, as well as long-time Chelsea fixture Mitchell Innes & Nash.

A common thread among these recent closures is their mid-size scale and intention to foster emerging or overlooked artists without previous gallery representation.

“My motivation has always been to ask if an idea will matter in the long run or [if it] can change what we think of culture,” Lewis told Artsy at the back office of his Walker Street storefront. This philosophy is reflected in the broad range of artists on view at its current show. Works by roster artists including Trey Abdella, Claire Lehmann, Ravi Jackson, Barbara Bloom, and Lisa Jo are joined by works by blue-chip figures such as Rita Ackermann, John Cage, Martin Kippenberger, and Lisa Yuskavage. All reflect—intentionally or intuitively—Picabia’s libertine approach to art production.

The fittingly orchestrated presentation, in a way, crescendos Lewis’s unconventional journey through the art world. “I was planning to move my program towards historical material which would be a calling card,” he said. “But it turned out to be a circular return to where I started.” A PhD degree in art history with a thesis on Picabia and nihilism distinguished him early on and gave him an unconventional relationship with the commercial aspect of running a business: “I was never strongly correlated with the market—whenever people asked about it, my response was ‘I don’t know.’”

But Lewis stressed that “the market is not what closed the gallery.” In fact, he notes that sales this year have thus far been comparable to 2023.

The main impetus for closing, he said, is a “change in the scene’s energy.”

While the 48-year-old acknowledges that “there is a great amount of art in the system right now,” he thinks audiences are “having a hard time knowing how and what to engage with.”

He also observed a “shift in the conversation,” which he acknowledges as a natural process of the inherently fluid art world—but it is having an impact on his business model, adding that “the excitement” among the emerging galleries, like his own, “feels diminished.”

“It feels like there is now a ceiling on what is possible for a business at my scale,” he said, adding that “the current structure is not able to accommodate my generation of galleries.”

The main change in this structure, he opined, is the waning of “collaboration” within the art community: “There was both competition and collaboration, and a gallery was not just a business but a form itself, but this has really lessened over the years.”

The form of collaboration that originally inspired Lewis to step into dealing was the one between an artist and their gallery. But, from his perspective, those relationships are “quickly transforming.”

“The idea that an artist and a dealer work together a lifetime and bring an irreplaceable value to the system together is no longer the case,” he said.

An unconventional gallerist

Lewis arrived at the art business via art history books, and academia opened an alternative door into the art industry. As a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center, he made his way to Paris to delve deeper into Picabia and French intellectual history. “I was interested in writing about theoretic models of interpreting art but my advisor encouraged me for a more traditional art history focus,” he recalled. Picabia fascinated him for “not fitting into any of the models on purpose.”

Landing in Paris in 2007 coincided with a regular contributor gig at Artforum, and the small-but-mighty gallery scene—as it was at the time—became his playground for reviews in the magazine’s Critics’ Picks section. “I found myself going through an accelerated growth which would not be possible as a grad student in New York,” Lewis said about the period.

When his path crossed with Alexander Hertling and Daniele Balice of the Parisian gallery Balice Hertling, they invited Lewis to run their New York outpost. “I wanted to be in the gallery world but I didn’t have a background,” he said. Balice Hertling & Lewis opened in Hell’s Kitchen in the fall of 2011 with a line of solo shows with artists including Charles Mayton, Mary Beth Edelson, and Greg Parma Smith, all of whom Lewis, until today, has continued to represent.

The sudden shift from writing criticism to art dealing prompted the young scholar to “learn everything on the job.” When Lewis parted ways with his Parisian colleagues in 2013, he embarked on the idea of opening his own space with the initial plan of a nomadic concept. He called up Parma Smith and Mayton, as well as three more artists, Viola Yeşiltaç, Lucy Dodd, and Dawn Kasper, “to trust him” for the next phase. Lewis made an impact quickly after a one-off solo show of Dodd paintings at an Upper East Side townhouse in 2013 received a glowing review from the New York Times’s Roberta Smith. “The gallery was in a liminal space because the review called it the debut exhibition of David Lewis gallery but we didn’t have a permanent space yet,” Lewis remembered. “But there was enough energy to go forward.”

Becoming a Tribeca tastemaker

A friendship with the influential Lower East Side gallerist Miguel Abreu—forged through Lewis’s reviews of his shows to publications like Frieze—inspired the nascent gallerist to look into the burgeoning neighborhood for a space. The gallery’s debut on 88 Eldridge Street, a fifth-floor space that had a “pilgrimage route to find by design,” was the 10-artist group show “A Scanner Darkly” in October 2013. “Lower East Side had a cultural grammar with galleries which had already been there before mine,” he said.

In following years, Lewis grew interested in “more experienced and even historical artists” and went on to represent the conceptualists Barbara Bloom and Mary Beth Edelson in 2016, and, the following year, Thornton Dial. “There was a lot of story to be told and ideas to represent,” he said about his interest in working with established talents such as these. Collector interest in his particular vision was “sometimes more and sometimes less,” he noted: “The mood of the audience and the stories people are interested in are always changing.” Lewis grew his staff through intuition and self-judgment alongside his roster: “I was hiring personalities who I met and liked, and in a way, I was learning from the people who worked for me,” he said.

A post-pandemic move to Tribeca brought a “broader relation to the audience” and coincided with signing photo-collagist Todd Gray and ceramic sculptor Peter Schlesinger, two artists in their seventies “with unique stories” and instantly recognizable material-specific practices. Shows at Lewis’s West Village townhouse and summer pop-ups at his Hamptons residence expanded the gallery’s profile with vibrant extracurricular programming.