Dealer Matthew Brown is more than doubling his Los Angeles footprint with a move to a former warehouse at 1145 Seward Street in the Hollywood Media District. It’s just a mile or so from the two Hollywood spaces he has occupied since opening in 2019, at 712 N La Brea Avenue, but the design is worlds apart, he said in a phone conversation.
“It’s night and day,” said Brown. “It’s the details, it’s the lighting, it’s the placement of the skylights, the way offices are built out, the way the viewing rooms are built out. When we built the first gallery, I just didn’t have the experience I have now.”
The new facility is in the same neighborhood with a number of galleries, including Jeffrey Deitch, Karma, Lisson, Nonaka Hill, and Regen Projects.
Brown went with a builder he has worked with before, tapping architect Markus Dochantschi of StudioMDA, who designed Brown’s New York gallery, at 390 Broadway in Tribeca. Brown’s gallery will be the first in Los Angeles for the architect, who has numerous others to his credit, including, in New York alone, Marian Goodman Gallery, Karma Gallery, Harpers Gallery, and PPOW Gallery, as well as the HQ of Phillips auction house, among many others.
The 13,000-square-foot gallery includes 6,000 feet of exhibition space as well as offices, viewing rooms, and storage. Preserving some of the character of the former warehouse, it retains its wood bow truss beam ceilings and exposed brick, and it has plenty of natural light.
Matthew Brown Los Angeles.
“He’s the only architect I’ve worked with,” said Brown of Dochantschi, “but from my experience, he listens to everything you say and his work reflects that. He comes in with an open mind and is so easy to work with. New York is very specific and Los Angeles is very specific, obviously, so it was interesting to see him approach LA. I’m honored to be his first gallery here.”
Brown’s first show in the LA space, opening May 2, will be with San Francisco–born, Los Angeles–based Mimi Lauter, newly showing with Brown. It’s her first LA exhibition in eight years, since a 2018 outing at Blum and Poe. “I was blown away by that show, before I had a gallery,” Brown recalled. “It was such an ambitious show. I bought a small work out of it and have lived with it ever since, so she’s been on my mind. As soon as we started speaking, I knew I wanted her to be the first show.”
Brown was just 23 when he launched his gallery, after putting in time with dealers Larry Gagosian and Hannah Hoffman, and was profiled in Artnet News three years later as a “wunderkind” who was the talk of LA. He’s descended from respected collectors Jeanne and Michael L. Klein, “classic oil-money Texans,” as Artnet described them. His artists had already shown at places like the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Deitch Projects, and New York’s El Museo del Barrio.
The gallery’s roster includes artists such as Uri Aran, Kenturah Davis, Sasha Gordon, and Vincent Valdez, and in 2025 Brown secured representation of New York–based artist Carroll Dunham. He also shows daring artists like Darren Bader.
Speaking to ARTnews ahead of the recent edition of the Frieze Los Angeles fair, some insiders were concerned about the state of the city one year after devastating wildfires, with one lifelong Angeleno saying anonymously that “the town is kind of on its ass in many ways that worry even us locals.” Some galleries, including Sean Kelly and Tanya Bonakdar of New York, have closed their LA outposts or ceased mounting exhibitions there.
Brown isn’t concerned.
“For me, LA is home,” he said. “I think maybe for people that opened there as a second location, it’s a different viewpoint. None of that stuff really matters to me. It’s a long-term outlook. I love and really believe in LA.”
