Less than two years after joining forces to compete with New York’s mega-galleries amid a Covid-19 slump in the market, LGDR will split after co-founder Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn announced she will leave the consortium to reopen her previous gallery.
This autumn, Greenberg Rohatyn will resume operations at Salon 94, the gallery she founded in 2003 and closed in 2021 in order to join LGDR. In a statement from the consortium, she said she will focus on putting on exhibitions at the gallery's townhouse on East 89th Street.
“I am very excited to start fresh,” Greenberg Rohatyn told Artnet News. “I really wanted to continue the kind of work I’ve always done … all this is much harder to do when you have four people and you don’t have enough months in the year to do all the projects I am interested in doing.”
The other three LGDR co-founders, Dominique Lévy, Brett Gorvy and Amalia Dayan, will continue operating together under the new name Lévy Gorvy Dayan, the gallery said.
LGDR—an acronym from the four dealers’ last names—announced in August 2021 they would consolidate their independent operations to join as one entity. At the time, art sales had dropped significantly and several galleries across the city had shuttered amid the Covid-19 pandemic. The group told The New York Times they hoped to operate beyond the practices of a traditional gallery and act as a one-stop shop for dealing, advising and consigning to auction houses.
Since the dealers consolidated, LGDR's founders appear to have shifted gears on some of their original plans. LGDR was originally meant to move into Greenberg Rohatyn’s townhouse, but the gallery later opened its flagship in a building on East 64th Street that was once home to the Wildenstein Gallery. The partners told the New York Times they would only take part in art fairs in Asia, but later participated in Tefaf in New York and Art Basel in Basel.
LGDR also suffered the loss of key artists brought on by Greenberg Rohatyn from Salon 94, including sculptor Huma Bhabha, who joined David Zwirner in 2021, and Derrick Adams, who was poached by Gagosian earlier this year.
“This was a brave experiment,” Greenberg Rohatyn told Artnet News. “It was a post-Covid moment of trying something new in the art world. It was embraced by the collector community. The artist community didn’t love it.”
Salon 94 will kick off exhibitions in October with a solo exhibition of new work by American sculptor Karon Davis. LGDR will stage a show of late French painter Pierre Soulages’s work in September.