Art dealers in L.A. are getting domestic, staging shows in architecturally significant homes
In the sweep of art history, the white cube gallery is a relatively recent construct—one that the New York artist and dealer Betty Parsons pioneered in the 1950s. It’s also one that artists, curators, dealers, and critics have been trying to dismantle for decades.
Fortunately, in Los Angeles, there’s always been room to experiment. Whether it was William N. Copley (later known as the artist CPLY) taking over a Beverly Hills bungalow in 1948 to show the likes of Joseph Cornell, René Magritte, and Man Ray at the short-lived Copley Galleries or Danny Bowman opening his buzzy BOZOMAG in the converted garage of his Highland Park home, the lure of intimate—and sometimes quirky—domestic spaces has always appealed to Angelenos. And in recent years, more gallerists—like Sara Lee Hantman whose Sea View gallery was featured in the February issue for carving out a space in Jorge Pardo’s old Mount Washington studio—have been opting for rooms with a view.
“The commercial retail market in L.A. is so strange; it’s too dispersed—everything is a destination—and you don’t leave your house for toothpaste or coffee without it being an event,” says David Alhadeff, who had this in mind seven years ago when he went searching for a location for the Casa Perfect concept of his design gallery, the Future Perfect. “Real estate agents would take me to Robertson, La Cienega, Highland, and all the buildings were pretty ugly. What’s incredible in L.A. is the residential architecture.
"L.A. gallerists have been opting for rooms with a view."
Alhadeff settled, for awhile, on a low-slung modernist house designed by Korean American architect David Hyun in 1957. After cycling through two more architecturally significant perches over five years—one of which included the midcentury Trousdale Estates pad Elvis Presley shared with Priscilla and Lisa Marie—Alhadeff and his husband purchased the 1916 Hollywood mansion that Arthur S. Heineman built for Samuel Goldwyn at the base of Runyon Canyon. Since last August, he’s relandscaped the property, put in a sculpture garden, and staged acclaimed solo shows for the legendary Italian architect and designer Gaetano Pesce and the polemical New York painter Peter McGough amid rooms full of collectible design objects.
“As an experience, this is unduplicable in a commercial space,” he says, “but I also think you can’t just take any house and make this concept work.”
Just west of the Marmont Lane outpost of the New York gallery Friedman Benda, designer Una Malan launched Una Casa Privada, a by-appointment outgrowth of her L.A. and San Francisco showrooms in a 1937 Hollywood Regency-style villa seated above Sunset Plaza, which opened during the La Cienega Design Quarter’s annual LEGENDS week. Farther into the hills, Twentieth, which operated for more than two decades on Beverly Boulevard, moved into an airy, 5,000-square-foot glass, beam, and plaster Zen retreat (on an acre of eucalyptus- and Japanese maple-dotted hillside) designed by Jeff Mills.
“I just don’t want to do storefront anymore with all the parking hassles,” says Stefan Lawrence, who opened a show during Los Angeles Art Week by pairing rugs and art by Nan Goldin and Kim Gordon in rooms filled with design from local artists such as Vincent Pocsik and Mattia Biagi. “This is a really special, quiet section of L.A., and I’m just in heaven with all these trees. I’m out here all the time with my trimmers.”
Farther east, not far from Parker Gallery—the live-work space where Sam Parker shows underrepresented and multigenerational artists in his 1924 Tudor-style house in Los Feliz—New York gallerist Bill Powers has relocated to a 3,600-square-foot Greek Revival-style mansion, built three years before Griffith Observatory was erected.
“Look at this, how would you live like this in New York? It’s crazy,” says Powers, standing in a double-height living room with views from the observatory to downtown. In addition to showing artists from his roster at Half Gallery—think: Se Oh, Maud Madsen, and Andie Dinkin—Powers throws parties where he’ll have a piano player on his Steinway, light up the fireplace, and invite guests to take a kumquat from the terraced gardens that were designed by Florence Yoch, the legendary landscape architect behind the gardens for Gone with the Wind and the estate of Jack Warner.
When asked why he didn’t join the crowded field of new galleries taking over Western Avenue, which he can see from his front window, he says, “ I know I’m never going to be Hauser & Wirth, so as a medium-sized gallery, I thought, ‘How can you fight unconventionally in a very crowded field?’ There’s just more nooks and crannies in L.A., and we’ve got big walls, great views, outdoor sculpture, and I’m in town about half the time, so this is like the White House. I live upstairs, and business is down here.”