T Magazine: When Your Living Room Is Also an Art Gallery
Tired of the featureless white cube, curators and dealers are staging shows in the most personal spaces of all: their homes.
by Genevieve Lutkin
Located on a quiet residential street in North London, the Victorian-era townhouse that was, until his death in 2012, the home and studio of the activist, writer and potter Emmanuel Cooper still bears the name of his business, Fonthill Pottery, above the first-floor windows. Over the course of its 153-year history, the building has also been a butcher’s shop and a supplier of valves and transistors. Now, it’s taking on a new identity: live-in art gallery. On a warm October night during the city’s Frieze Art Fair, the curator Rajan Bijlani, 40 — who has owned the property since 2014 — invited 150 guests to his home for the opening of an exhibition showcasing work from South Asian diaspora artists including Harminder Judge and Vipeksha Gupta alongside rare furniture pieces by Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier collected from Chandigarh, the modernist city in India conceived in 1947 by the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. “I wanted to share the house and honor the fact that it was an artist’s studio,” says Biljani of his motivation for turning his residence into a by-appointment gallery.
Since the early 20th century, coinciding with the rise of the abstract movement, the art world has adhered to the notion that works should be displayed in deliberately featureless, generally white-walled spaces, the better to elevate and isolate them from the context of daily life. Now, however, a growing number of gallerists and curators are, like Biljani, taking the opposite approach, exhibiting in the very places where daily life dominates: their own homes. In Manhattan’s Financial District, the dealer Michael Bargo, 41, sells rare furniture out of his one-bedroom apartment. In Los Angeles’s Frogtown, the collector Jonathan Pessin, 54, has converted his residence into a veritable bazaar of vintage design objects. And on New York’s Lower East Side, the pro skater turned artist and gallerist Tony Cox, 49, runs Club Rhubarb — a tiny, deliberately hard-to-find contemporary art gallery — out of his sixth-floor abode. There is some precedent for the idea: the Parisian antiques dealer Florence Lopez, for example, has used her Paris home — a former sculpture studio in the 6th Arrondissement — as a showroom for clients like Charlotte Gainsbourg since 1995. But now, whether driven by skyrocketing rents, a collective urge to experiment or a longing to encourage active participation with the art, the concept is taking hold.
Finances were one motivation for Welsh-born design dealer and curator Alex Tieghi-Walker, 37, to turn his fifth-floor loft in TriBeCa into Tiwa Select, an exhibition space where he’s mounted shows by the lighting designer Lindsey Adelman and the sculptor Vince Skelly, among others. But for Tieghi-Walker, running his business out of his home is also more comfortable. “I’ve always felt like an outsider in the gallery world,” he says. “For me, it makes sense putting [these works] in a domestic context.” The setup has allowed him to develop more meaningful relationships with clients, whom he often hosts for impromptu lunches or intimate dinner parties. “I get a lot of joy from having people come over, take books from shelves,” he says. “I love seeing how people interact with the art and the space in the course of a day.”
That sense of connection was what the Italian-born curator Emanuela Campoli, 51, was going for when, in December 2022, she decided to give the French artist Laëtitia Badaut-Haussmann license to reimagine her apartment in Milan’s Foro Bonaparte district and then open the space to the public for a six-month show. “I wanted something more personal to create closeness with my collectors,” says Campoli, who lived in the installation — a completely black-walled space filled with works by artists like Cinzia Ruggeri and Emily Sundblad — for the duration. “There was this feeling of being in a movie,” she says. “People didn’t know what was real and what was not. It created this strange sense of intimacy.”
That ability to world-build is also, of course, appealing to artists, some of whom are now circumventing the gallery route and choosing to interact directly with collectors at home. In NoHo, the designer and artist Danny Kaplan, 41, is gut-renovating a 3,600-square-foot spread on the fourth floor of a prewar cast iron building to create an apartment-cum-exhibition space for his work. Best known for his graceful, organic-shaped ceramics and lighting, he’s now branching out into larger-scale furniture, which inspired the project. “I had all these ideas of things I wanted to make in my head but there was no space for them,” says Kaplan, who will maintain his current production facility in Bushwick. At first, he was hesitant about being so enmeshed with his work, but, in the end, he decided that living among his pieces could only be a boon for his practice. “I think it’ll teach me a lot about designing for real living,” he says.
