Lévy. (Courtesy Patrick McMullan Company)
The Upper East Side continues to sprout new galleries. This spring, Dominique Lévy, formerly a partner in the gallery L&M Arts on East 78th Street, will open a new, three-floor gallery, called Dominique Lévy, at 909 Madison Avenue, on the southeast corner of East 73rd Street. Joining her in the 9,000-square-foot former bank building will be the Paris-based dealer Emmanuel Perrotin, who is opening a New York branch.
When she was looking for a space for her new gallery a few months ago, Ms. Lévy told The Observer in a telephone interview, she happened to be buying a pair of jeans at Rag & Bone, which has a pop-up shop in 909 Madison, and learned that its lease ended in December. She began negotiations with the Friedland family (Friedland Properties) which owns the building (as well as many others along Madison Avenue) and invited her friend, Mr. Perrotin, the Paris dealer, to join her there.
The architect designing her space is Belgian-born, New York-based Francis D'Haene, founder of D'Apostrophe Design, who has also done spaces for the dealer Per Skarstedt and the Calder Foundation. Construction is to begin in January, and if it proceeds on schedule, Ms. Lévy plans to open in late spring.
For the past seven years, Ms. Lévy, a former international head of private sales for Christie's, has run a gallery, L&M Arts, in partnership with Robert Mnuchin. In September the two dealers announced that they would split, with Mr. Mnuchin keeping the present gallery space on East 78th Street. (In January it will become the Mnuchin Gallery.)
Ms. Lévy's gallery, which will specialize in post-war and contemporary art on both the primary and secondary markets, will be located on the building's second, third and fourth floors. Mr. Perrotin, who runs several spaces in Paris and opened a gallery in Hong Kong in May, and works with artists like Takashi Murakami, Maurizio Cattelan, Paola Pivi, Xavier Veilhan and Elmgreen & Dragset, will occupy the ground floor, as well as a floor below street level.
Ms. Lévy says she will focus on exhibitions that pair living artists with historical art, as she did at L&M with exhibitions like "The Complexity of the Simple," which paired artists like Mark Rothko with contemporary artists Liza Lou and Anselm Reyle. "My passion—and hopefully how I set myself apart in this business—has been to put living artists in context of classic post-war work," she said. She will also continue working as a dealer and art advisor and will continue working with estates, such as that of Yves Klein.