The veteran dealer Jeffrey Deitch will reopen his Lower Manhattan gallery at 18 Wooster Street in SoHo, the space he ran from 1996 to 2010, with a series of performances this autumn by Eddie Peake (8-10 September). The new works are inspired by the UK artist's prior piece shown in the space during Performa 2013. After that, the venue will host a New York iteration of the 2014 Walter Robinson retrospective at Illinois State University, curated by Barry Blinderman (17 September-22 October).
In 2010, Deitch left New York for the West Coast, when he was appointed director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; his tenure was short, however, as he stepped down in 2013. Since 2011, the Wooster Street space has been home to the Swiss Institute, which will now relocate to another New York location.
“This was always anticipated,” Deitch told us. “I rented the Wooster Street gallery to the Swiss Institute for five years, and figured that would cover my journey to Los Angeles. I always intended to come back.”
Deitch emphasised that he was not re-opening Deitch Projects, his former gallery, and will not represent artists (he estimated that a third of the shows he did at Deitch Projects were non-commercial). In 2015, he also began hosting shows at nearby 76 Grand Street, another of his former gallery spaces.
“The model is to present the same kind of exhibitions that I might do if it was an institute of contemporary art, or a smaller museum, but to support it through the commercial system, through sales,” Deitch says. Robinson himself owns a number of works in the retrospective, for example, and those will be for sale.