By LAURA M. HOLSON

Published: October 02, 2011

TO describe the retrospective of Richard Hambleton’s art that was recently held at the Phillips de Pury & Company galleries as a zoo doesn’t even take into account the woman who strapped a bug-eyed monkey puppet to her chest. About 2,000 partygoers were crowding two floors at the auction house on Park Avenue, including wealthy Upper East Siders and a parade of models from New York Fashion Week, many sipping from flutes of Champagne.

Theodora Richards, the daughter of Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, shimmied around the room in a second skin of stretchy black lace, while the billionaire Stephen A. Schwarzman grazed past Alexa Chung and Karolina Kurkova. Around 9:20 p.m., Mr. Hambleton, the famously reclusive graffiti artist who descended into obscurity after the 1980s art gold rush went bust, arrived with a bandage on his nose, seemingly dazed by the crowd.

The real draw that night, though, was Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld, 26, and his business partner, Andy Valmorbida, 31, the show’s young curators and art dealers, who are reviving interest in Mr. Hambleton’s paintings. Mr. Valmorbida, the Australian heir to a food and coffee fortune, bounced around the gallery, chatting with buyers. Mr. Restoin Roitfeld, the son of Carine Roitfeld, the former editor in chief of French Vogue, stayed mostly in place, his curious Kewpie-doll eyes scanning the crowd.

It was a different scene two evenings earlier on the Lower East Side, where art dealers were opening their galleries for the beginning of the fall art season. Young 20-somethings, not recognizably rich or famous, wandered past the small storefronts in fedoras and jeans. At the Rachel Uffner Gallery on Orchard Street, about 150 people packed into a space the size of a large one-bedroom apartment and drank from cans of Tsingtao beer. The artist Sara Greenberger Rafferty’s opening show included work made using photographs, Plexiglas and acetate. And she hugged well-wishers that night despite a faulty air-conditioner that left most sticky.

But Ms. Uffner, 33, has more in common with her uptown peers than appearances suggest. Though one gallery owner may show an artist whose work now sells for $25,000 or more and another may show unknown artists whose work still goes largely unnoticed by big-name collectors or established critics, both are part of a new generation of New York gallerists who are slowly transforming the city’s art scene.

“There are new galleries popping up all over,” Ms. Uffner said, taking a break from the evening’s festivities. “People are beginning to recognize we have legitimate places to show.”

When the stock market collapsed in fall 2008, many people feared the art market would be dragged down with it. But art auction houses, including Christie’s and Sotheby’s, are currently reporting healthy business. Individual prices are often strong: At Phillips de Pury in May, one of Warhol’s famous images of Elizabeth Taylor sold for $26.9 million: about $3 million more than a similar work at the height of the market at Christie’s in 2007. And while Larry Gagosian and other blue-chip dealers continue to dominate sales for the wealthiest collectors, gallery owners who have opened their doors in the past few years seem to be thriving despite the persistent recession.

The New Art Dealers Alliance, a national organization of art professionals or gallery owners in business less than 10 years, said that nearly one-third of its 300 members are based in New York City.

Choosing which up-and-coming gallerists to profile for this article involved considering art dealers who either opened New York galleries or began working together within the last three years. Then art critics, gallery owners and art collectors were interviewed to narrow the field of gallerists who represented promising artists or had an interesting take on contemporary art.

The final cut included Mr. Restoin Roitfeld, with that famous last name and the prized connections that come with it; two dealers positioning themselves as the angry young men of the art world; and a scrappy out-of-towner hoping to make it big in New York.

Despite their differences, all share the need to actually make a living at this. Owning an art gallery is an expensive proposition. That is why many new galleries are on the Lower East Side, where rent can range from $2,000 to $10,000 a month, compared with $25,000 or more for a gallery in Chelsea. (Ms. Uffner says she pays less than $4,000.) Many new gallerists, like Laurel Gitlen, find their art spaces after walking around the neighborhood. Some, like Mr. Valmorbida and Mr. Restoin Roitfeld, have forsaken the traditional gallery space, choosing instead to hold exhibitions when and where they choose. (Artists generally earn 50 percent of the sale price of their work at galleries, while the gallery owner might earn 30 percent to 50 percent of a sale, depending on discounts, or whether an art adviser of another dealer is involved.)

Michele Maccarone, whose West Village gallery is well respected among the junior set, is worried that, as larger galleries continue to become more brand-conscious or the economy continues to slide, emerging gallerists might lose their nerve. “I opened 10 years ago, and it was down and dirty,” she said. “But even I’m playing it safe myself. That punkness and rawness, it really doesn’t exist anymore.” But at least, for now, she said, “people are trying to keep it real.”

Ramiken Crucible

If Marcel Duchamp had a mischievous little brother today, he would probably be a lot like Mike Egan. Last year, this art-handler-turned-dealer helped organize the Art Handling Olympics, a competition among Mr. Egan’s brawny peers, roughly 50 in all, who bubble-wrapped paintings and hung 60-pound blocks of lead in front of 200 spectators at his gallery. And in September, the same night other galleries around the Lower East Side celebrated the opening of the art season, showing work that included photographs of people dressed in tutus and a sculpture comprising trophies, Mr. Egan hosted a screening of the disturbing cult film “Trash Humpers.” (No metaphor there.)

Fed up with New York’s commercial gallery ethos, Mr. Egan, 29, and Blaize Lehane, 32, who both worked at the now closed Goff + Rosenthal in the mid-2000s, partnered in January in Ramiken Crucible, a gallery originally founded in 2009 by Mr. Egan in an illegal Lower East Side basement. Liv Tyler and the artist Terence Koh showed up once to hear the funereal songs of Salem, a Michigan band with a devoted downtown following. Now aboveground and next door to a liquor store on Chinatown’s fringe, Mr. Egan and Mr. Lehane seem to delight in thumbing their noses at the so-called art intelligentsia.

“As an art dealer, you should spit on history, wipe it away and find something new,” Mr. Egan said.

The duo’s taste tends toward the comically subversive. Ramiken Crucible’s new show, “Stud,” featuring the artist Gavin Kenyon, is composed of a large-scale cast-iron axe with a bulbous handle that resembles a fleshy limb. And this summer, they exhibited “Vandal Lust” by Andra Ursuta, a 10-foot catapult made of wood and cardboard flanked by a replica of the artist’s lifeless body after being hurled into a wall.

Mr. Egan began representing Ms. Ursuta, whom he is now dating, after she sent him an unsolicited e-mail asking him to check out her Web site. “Every artist is scraping by, trying to get some attention for their work,” he said.

Mr. Egan studied at New York’s School of Visual Arts; Mr. Lehane has a computer science degree from Boston University. Together, they project a kind of us-against-the-world image. “There is almost an energy, anger even, between us,” Mr. Lehane said.

Kate Werble Gallery

When Kate Werble opened a space to show art in West SoHo two weeks before the financial collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, she was given a sage piece of advice: “People said you have to put at least one artist up on your Web site,” she said. So she listed John Lehr, a photographer whose work has shown at the Museum of Modern Art, and whom she had met years earlier while organizing a group show for a friend. Months later, she got a second piece of advice: “People said you can’t really represent just one artist.”

Those were tough days. But Ms. Werble, 31, took her time picking artists and now represents a stable of nine, including Mr. Lehr, a move that seems to have paid off. In December, she was awarded a top prize for curatorial presentation at the New Art Dealers Alliance show in Miami.

“Werble’s display stood out for the caliber of its assortment of artwork playing on the tradition of Minimalist art,” the art Web site Artinfo said then.

Unlike some gallerists who demand that only represented artists be promoted in-house, Ms. Werble had a more relaxed approach. “I wanted to use the space in a way that artists came together,” she said. During the lean early years, she invited two artists each month to show their work, a savvy business move, as some of them, like the conceptual artist Luke Stettner, stayed on. He has a solo exhibition at Ms. Werble’s gallery this month.

Last February, Ms. Werble held a solo show for Anna Betbeze, who teaches at Yale and applies dye and watercolor to wool rugs that are ripped, burned or cut until they resemble psychedelic animal hides. In May, one of Ms. Betbeze’s pieces was included alongside works by Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg in a show organized by the Palazzo Grassi, the Venice museum run by the foundation of the French billionaire François Pinault.

Ms. Werble lives with Christopher Chiappa, another artist she represents. But she is quick to point out that she shows no favoritism. “I love all my artists,” she said with a giggle. “I’d sleep with them all.”

Andy Valmorbida and Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld

In a starry field, Mr. Valmorbida and Mr. Restoin Roitfeld are perhaps the most luminous. Mr. Restoin Roitfeld, who grew up in Paris, has a fan blog (I Want to Be a Roitfeld) that chronicles the goings-on of his high-profile family, including his sister, Julia. And Mr. Valmorbida has reportedly dated Lindsay Lohan and the supermodel Rachel Hunter.

After dabbling and dropping out of the movie business (Mr. Restoin Roitfeld) and finance (Mr. Valmorbida), each began consulting on and dealing in art. They joined forces in 2009 after the art dealer Rick Librizzi introduced them to the all-but-forgotten Mr. Hambleton, a contemporary, if not exactly a peer, of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Artists from the 1980s, the two surmised, were due for a comeback.

Mr. Hambleton “had refused to work with any dealer,” Mr. Restoin Roitfeld said, “so no one had done anything for him.”

They spent three months scouring galleries for his paintings, buying them at low prices that they hoped would rise once they began promoting Mr. Hambleton’s work.

Instead of starting their own gallery, though, the two decided to market the artist’s work with a series of glamorous global art parties in Milan, Moscow, London and Cannes, paid for by corporate sponsors and attended by many of their famous friends. Their two-year effort with Mr. Hambleton culminated in a Fashion Week soiree, sponsored by Giorgio Armani, and where they showed 55 of Mr. Hambleton’s paintings.

“Andy, come on, you have to go!” Mr. Restoin Roitfeld exclaimed impatiently that night to Mr. Valmorbida, as he dragged his colleague by the arm across the crowded gallery. A buyer was interested in “Horse & Rider, 2006,” which Mr. Valmorbida owned. For 10 minutes, the affable Mr. Valmorbida regaled the man with stories of the artist, waving his hands in the air, his body rocking with restless energy. Mr. Restoin Roitfeld watched with keen interest.

That night, collectors bought all 12 paintings that were for sale, with an average price of $75,000. “When we started, people laughed, saying, you need to start a gallery,” Mr. Valmorbida said. “But we never saw ourselves as part of the traditional art world.”

Laurel Gitlen

In 2005, Ms. Gitlen founded a contemporary art space in Portland, Ore., called Small A Projects, which had a loyal following. So when she moved to Manhattan three years later with her husband, Samuel Richardson, the head brewer at Greenpoint Beer Works in Brooklyn, many of the artists she had worked with in Portland agreed to join her at a new Broome Street gallery.

One of this ready group was Jessica Jackson Hutchins, who uses ceramic, old furniture and papier-mâché to create large-scale pieces, including “Couch for a Long Time,” which was included in the 2010 biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The two met when Ms. Hutchins called Ms. Gitlen and asked how to ship some sculpture. “Connections were easy to make in Portland,” Ms. Gitlen, 35, said. Later, she secured a studio visit after she ran into the artist at the grocery store. Ms. Hutchins’s work now sells for $7,000 to $50,000 and is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

Another artist, the Richmond, Va.-based sculptor and performer Corin Hewitt, recently had a solo exhibition at the Whitney. Ms. Gitlen worked with him in 2007 when she exhibited his piece “Weavings,” for which he built an enclosed space that viewers could look inside and see the artist making sculpture and taking pictures. Ms. Gitlen introduced him to curators at the Seattle Art Museum, which in 2009 displayed the artist’s photographs from the performance.

A student of art history, Ms. Gitlen seeks strong relationships with museum curators. “I come from a curatorial background, so I am looking for artists who will have a place in the historical conversation,” she said.

But she prefers to remain mostly quiet, unlike in the 1980s when art dealers like Mary Boone were often more controversial than the artists they represented. “These days, I don’t know if you want to have a personality or you want the gallery to have it,” Ms. Gitlen said.

Rachel Uffner Gallery

Rachel Uffner, 33, has hit most of the art world’s marks. After graduating from Washington University in St. Louis in 2000 with a bachelor’s degree in art history and painting, she earned a coveted job at Christie’s. After that she worked for a private collector and, in 2003, joined the D’Amelio Terras gallery in Chelsea, where she tended the front-desk phones. By the mid-2000s, she had worked her way up to become gallery director. Ms. Uffner even wanted to be an artist at one point. “But I never had the rigor of spending the day in the studio by myself,” she said. “I liked being out with other people.”

So she started her own gallery, with pieces that cost mostly $3,000 to $10,000. “I do like being the conduit between two worlds,” she said.

In 2007, she saw the plaster and paper works of the little-known Hilary Harnischfeger in a contemporary art journal and tracked her down. Ms. Uffner courted her after leaving D’Amelio Terras and signed her the summer before she started her gallery, where Ms. Harnischfeger has already had two solo shows. Ms. Uffner’s first exhibition, in 2008, featured Roger White, the painter, writer and co-founder of the journal Paper Monument, and was scheduled within days of the Lehman Brothers collapse. “People were comfortable spending in the hundreds of dollars, not thousands,” she said. “I thought I would go back to school and become a dentist.”

She scheduled a second show for Mr. White last year, and his works sold out. Ms. Uffner also represents the conceptual artist Sara Greenberger Rafferty, whose work is now in the permanent collections of MoMA and the Whitney.

“Artists and their art dealers are a lot like kids and parents who have weird dynamics,” Ms. Greenberger Rafferty said at the September opening of her new show. “But we are the same generation. I never feel sheepish about saying what I think. At a more established gallery, you are lower on the totem pole.”

New York, September 9, 2011 - Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld and Andy Valmorbida are proud to announce Richard Hambleton: A Retrospective, a survey of selected historical works from the legendary painter.

Presented in collaboration with Giorgio Armani, the exhibition will be on show at Phillips de Pury & Company, located at 450 West 15th Street, New York City. The opening reception will take place on Friday, September 9, 2011, from 6 PM to 9 PM.

This exhibition will be the final installment of an international series curated by Roitfeld and Valmorbida in collaboration with Giorgio Armani, which has included solo shows in New York, Milan, Cannes, Moscow, and London. Richard Hambleton: A Retrospective will highlight 50 of Hambleton’s most influential works spanning from 1982 to the present, as well as twenty iconic images of the artist’s work chronicled by photographer Hank O’Neal. A new catalogue will accompany the exhibition, featuring an essay by Christian Viveros-Faune.

From his “Mass Murder” installations of the late 1970s, in which he secretly placed blood-splattered, chalkbody outlines throughout 15 cities, to his “Shadowman” series of the 1980s, where ominous, shadowy figures were painted in unexpected corners, alleys, and side streets, Richard Hambleton has permeated our collective consciousness with unforgettable images for over three decades. One of the only surviving members of a peer group that included Warhol, Basquiat, and Haring, Hambleton has been living a reclusive life in his Lower East Side studio for the past twenty years.

Despite a low public profile, Hambleton has continued to create and his works can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, The Houston Museum of Fine Art, The Check Point Charlie Museum and The Zellermeyer in Berlin, the Andy Warhol Museum, the Austin Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Queens Museum, and Harvard University. He was chosen for the Venice Biennale in 1984.

Feedback Ltd., Operated by art dealer and curator Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld, Feedback Ltd. is a private art dealership based in Manhattan. Restoin Roitfeld currently represents the artists Richard Hambleton and RETNA (aka Marquis Lewis), in association with Andy Valmorbida, as well as the French painter Nicolas Pol. Restoin Roitfeld has pioneered the method of “pop-up” galleries, installing museum-style exhibitions in industrial spaces in New York, London, Paris, and Milan. He has collaborated on exhibitions with the State Museum of Modern art in Moscow.

Valmorbida & Co. Founded by Andy Valmorbida in 2006, Valmorbida & Co. is a creative art consultancy built to adapt to today’s rapidly-changing art world landscape. Through pop-up galleries, strategic collaborations and unique event concepts, Valmorbida breaks down geographic barriers to showcase top artists on an international platform. In collaboration with Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld and Giorgio Armani, Valmorbida & Co. has launched a series of exhibitions and events around the work of 80s street art pioneer Richard Hambleton in New York, London, Moscow, Milan and Cannes. In 2011, Andy Valmorbida & Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld (in collaboration with VistaJet & Bombardier Aerospace) presented The Hallelujah World Tour, a series that will included the first New York and London solo exhibitions of L.A.-based graffiti artist RETNA.

Phillips de Pury & Company Founded in London in 1796, Phillips de Pury & Company is an international art company that conducts auctions of Contemporary Art, Design, Photographs, Editions and Jewelry, as well as private sales and selling exhibitions. As the only international auction house to concentrate on contemporary culture, Phillips de Pury & Company has established a position within the art world as the contemporary tastemaker conducting sales and exhibitions in New York and London.

The Richard Hambleton Exhibition is open to the public September 10 – September 13, 2011 10am to 6pm Phillips de Pury & Company 450 West 15th Street New York, 10011 http://phillipsdepury.com/

For more information on Richard Hambleton contact For information on Giorgio Armani contact

Adam Abdalla | Public Relations Nadine Johnson & Associates | adam@nadinejohnson.com | Phone: +1 212 228 5555

Jenia Molnar Vice President, Arts + Culture Vice President | Giorgio Armani Corporation |  jmolnar@giorgioarmani.com | Phone: + 1 212 209 3554

For information on Phillips de Pury & Company contact London

Giulia Costantini | Head of Communications & Marketing | gcostantini@phillipsdepury.com | + 44 20 7318 4010

“It’s sort of becoming Cirque du Soleil,” said Andy Valmorbida, who, with business partner Vladimir Restoin-Roitfeld, organized RETNA’s show. “When we come into town now, people will come.”

Mr. Valmorbida and Mr. Restoin-Roitfeld, who have been working together since 2009, are part of a new breed of art dealers. They don’t have a permanent gallery space, they work only with a small roster of artists and they put together exhibitions across the world, on their own time, but they are hardly outsiders. Mr. Restoin-Roitfeld’s mother is the former editor of French Vogue. Mr. Valmorbida and his brother PC, who runs the three-floor Prism gallery in Los Angeles, are heirs to an Australian food-importing fortune. Andy Valmorbida’s first show was at a party held in his apartment in 2006, shortly after he’d left a lucrative career in investment banking. The exhibition included 35 works by photographer Raphael Mazzucco, and nearly sold out by the end of the night. If the party atmosphere hasn’t changed—Mr. Valmorbida and Mr. Restoin-Roitfeld’s current shows resemble “raves,” as one curator put it—neither has their flair for the deal: by the end of the opening night of the RETNA show, they said 90 percent of the work, or “product” as they call it, had been sold.

“I was wondering why we couldn’t have a bigger production and make it a little more fun than it is usually,” said Mr. Restoin-Roitfeld. “No one can contradict what I’m going to say: we’ve put on the most beautiful productions anyone has done in many years.”

So-called pop-up galleries have been ubiquitous in Europe for decades, especially in Berlin, where they’ve formed an essential part of the gallery scene since the wall came down. And in a way there has been a tradition of pop ups in New York, too, starting with the street art-heavy Times Square Show and the vagabondish Real Estate in a 1916 factory showroom in the ’80s, and continuing through the “roving” efforts of Kenny Schachter, who now has a gallery in London but did a series of pop ups in New York in the ’90s. The current crop of pop-up shows began as a function of the most recent recession and the sudden pervasiveness of empty storefronts. But even as we slide out of a slow market (ever so slowly), rogue exhibitions remain popular. Artists want a new context for their work. Curatorially minded dealers want to experiment with ideas without having to worry about daunting overhead costs. Without these costs, the work can be priced lower, which is enticing to young collectors looking for an easier way into the art market than what the gallery district offers.

Some of these art-world nomads call themselves “agents,” others “independent curators,” though many insist on “dealers.” They work both with and outside the established gallery system, partly because they can. More and more, galleries are showing young artists without representing them. There is a sense that the old way of doing things is being subverted. Still, at the suggestion that he was working outside the art world, Mr. Valmorbida seemed to bristle.
“What’s the art world?” he said, his voice growing louder. “My brother has a great program, but I’m not the type of person who wants to do what everyone else does.” He paused and said evenly: “I’ve changed the way art has been sold around the world. With the level of exposure we’re getting now, I don’t know why I would fall back on a traditional gallery model.”

He’s not alone. Clayton Press, an art consultant who has been collecting for 30 years, runs a kind of artists’ agency in New York with his partner, Greg Linn, called Agency, PLC. They place young artists in group shows and salvage midcareer artists from languishing in obscurity. Mr. Press had the idea for many years of helping artists organize inventory, run websites and curate shows at various galleries, before he finally decided to pursue it in 2009 as an extension of his advisory service, Linn Press. He thought galleries might feel threatened. Like Mr. Valmorbida and Mr. Restoin-Roitfeld, he has a small roster, all the better to manage their careers.

“The art market is really crowded,” Mr. Press said. “It’s crowded with artists. It’s crowded with galleries. There has to be an alternative model for artists who are either not represented or under represented.”

He said he has no problem with traditional galleries, but he wondered how they were earning their 50 percent commission. Most of them in New York are small, with a staff of three to six people at most. For that reason, they can’t concentrate on many artists’ (often considerable) needs, according to Mr. Press. Without having a brick and mortar space, Mr. Press and Mr. Linn don’t have to deal with the typical costs of running a business and are able to focus their time on their artists.

“It takes a lot of the burden off the gallery,” he said, “to have someone who knows the career history, who knows the inventory, who knows where it’s been placed. Some artists are good at knowing the details and others need help.”

IT IS NOT JUST up-and-comers who work with this new kind of dealer. Vito Schnabel, the 24-year-old son of painter and filmmaker Julian, has developed strong working relationships with Ron Gorchov, Dustin Yellin and Terence Koh. At this year’s Venice Biennale, Mr. Schnabel took over Sestiere di Castello, a palazzo where Mr. Koh staged his performance Telling It Like It Is. Mr. Koh lay on a white board, the edge of which rested on a deep well. His head hung off the board so that he stared into an abyss. This went on for 10 hours. Elsewhere in the palazzo, Bruce High Quality Foundation, a group of anonymous insurgents whom Mr. Schnabel has helped turn into the most unlikely of art stars, had installed giant inflatable rats, the kind that appear at union protests in the city. What could have been an insubordinate gimmick was taken seriously as powerhouses like MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach and Serpentine gallery curator Hans Ulrich Obrist dutifully watched from the palazzo’s perimeter.

This kind of acceptance of dealers working outside the system may be happening because people are starting to see that the old traditions need changing. Again and again collectors and dealers on the fringes of the elite talk about how intimidating it is to stumble into a gallery cold and how stale going to and from the same spaces can become. Why is the front desk always so high above the ground? Why do all the buildings in Chelsea look the same? Mr. Valmorbida recalled going into a gallery—he wouldn’t say which one—dressed casually in tennis shoes. He began inquiring about a work he was interested in purchasing and was given the cold shoulder.

“Who are these people?” he asked himself. “If you want to ask questions, the sales crew doesn’t have a fucking clue. You go into a gallery in flannel and sneakers and they turn their head away from you.”

AMY SMITH-STEWART closed her eponymous, two-year-old Lower East Side gallery in 2009 to start a roving exhibition business, throwing shows everywhere from a Harlem building that wasn’t up to code to the Wooly, the basement lounge of the Woolworth building.

“There are a lot of restrictions when you run a traditional gallery,” Ms. Smith-Stewart said. “It’s very expensive, there’s overhead, there are shows that are maybe critically successful, but maybe don’t have as much market support or vice versa. Or you might have shows you want to do but don’t necessarily know how a collector base is going to respond. I want to do the shows that I want to do and I don’t want to have to worry about those things!”

Ms. Smith-Stewart was speaking in the gallery Invisible-Exports on Orchard Street, where her exhibition “Lost” opened last week. It’s a decidedly postapocalyptic show. Hanging on the wall was a melted skateboard; a scale model of a wood-covered bridge was burnt a charred black; on the floor in an adjacent room was the decapitated head of the Star Wars robot character C-3PO, warped beyond recognition.

“The demands on the artists and all the different people they’re interacting with are getting more and more complex,” Ms. Smith-Stewart said. “Roles are being redefined.”

So much so that traditional galleries are more willing to experiment with new talent. Birte Kleemann, a curator at Veneklasen Werner, a venture she refers to as New York gallery Michael Werner’s “younger sister” in Berlin, worked with Mr. Valmorbida and his brother PC on a show when she was a director at The Pace Gallery. She calls Berlin the “mother of the subculture pop-up spaces” but believes the trend is catching on in the States. It helps that traditional galleries are taking risks and want to work in less conventional forms. She said the exhibition she is installing right now at Veneklasen Werner is made up of three artists; the gallery does not represent any of them.

“Artists tend to move on from galleries much more than what we’ve known before,” Ms. Kleemann said. “It’s quite a new phenomenon. I think dealers are more interested in showing artists without representing them.”

Perhaps the clearest sign that the old gallery system is changing is that Mr. Valmorbida and Mr. Restoin-Roitfeld will host one of their shows, an exhibition of street artist Richard Hambleton’s work, at the downtown branch of the auction house Phillips de Pury in September. Michaela de Pury, a senior director at Phillips, said she gave the two “carte blanche” to put it together.

“The content of art is constantly crossing borders,” said Ms. De Pury, “So why not the way it’s sold? The art crowd is a different one from earlier on. It was more homogenous.”

She added matter-of-factly: “Times have moved on.”

mmiller@observer.com

Published: April 24, 2011

LOS ANGELES

NECK FACE banged a metal pipe on the side of a blacked-out doorway, jumping out at unsuspecting passers-by to shout, “Aaarrgh!” Banksy floated anonymously (or so went the rumor) around the perimeter of a room dominated by a huge cathedral window the graffiti artist had scrawled with spray paint. Skateboarders skidded off geometric ramps designed by Lance Mountain and Geoff McFetridge just inside the entrance of the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA as an art mob filed in from a brisk evening and up a ramp into the enveloping graffiti world of “Art in the Streets,” the first major American museum exhibition devoted to street art, and a first for an occasionally controversial museum director making a debut.It is just over a year since Jeffrey Deitch, a longtime New York gallery owner, was named director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and charged with rescuing an institution whose attendance had dwindled by 2009 to a paltry 148,616, as its endowment shrank to the lowest level since the museum’s founding nearly three decades ago.

“We wanted someone who was, call it what you want, a game-changer,” Mr. Broad said by phone before the opening of “Art in the Streets,” Mr. Deitch’s first full-scale show. What the board sought during a worldwide search, added Mr. Broad, was someone who was, frankly, “an impresario.” What it got in Mr. Deitch was an unorthodox choice and yet a canny one, an owlish 58-year-old with a Harvard M.B.A., a background in finance, a former corporate art adviser and a person who, after shifting careers from finance and consulting to become a full-time art dealer, mounted shows like “Session the Bowl,” devoted to the culture of skateboarding, and installations like “Black Acid Co-op,” which recreated a burned-out methamphetamine laboratory, or “Nest,” in which two artists moved into his Grand Street gallery, first filling it with the shredded remains of numberless telephone books.

Mr. Deitch – trim, mild-mannered, a distance runner who favors custom-made suits from Caraceni and buffalo-horn eyeglasses he designed himself – gives little appearance of being the sort of person who might stage a dinner to celebrate the publication of a photographer’s new book and then invite the members of an all-male artist collective to entertain the 250 seated guests by clambering (wearing tuxedo jackets, stilettos and fishnets) across a wooden structure vaulting dinner table set with fine napery and silver candelabras and, once installed there, to urinate into one another’s bucket hats. Yet he is.

“It was spectacular, perverse, uplifting, beautifully horrifying and deeply transgressive,” Mr. Deitch said of that particular evening, in a New Yorker profile. It was also, like many of Mr. Deitch’s seeming transgressions, professionally well judged.

Among the unlikely-seeming reasons that the Museum of Contemporary Arts board bypassed more-conventionally-trained museum professionals for a man sometimes termed an heir to P. T. Barnum, Mr. Broad suggested, was his involvement in the Art Parade, an annual procession through downtown Manhattan in which the Dazzle Dancers and motley locals disport themselves in mainly Spandex and glitter.

If, as Andy Warhol used to say, business art is the best art, the best business art in a town like this one may be the show business kind. Mr. Deitch is an avowed Warholian who considers obscure performance artists like the intellectual transvestite Vaginal Davis a celebrity, and celebrities like Kim Kardashian artists manqués.

From the pool terrace of the 8,000-square-foot house that Mr. Deitch currently rents in the hills near Griffith Park (and that Cary Grant is said to have shared with Randolph Scott), a postcard panorama takes in his new city: terraced movie-star gardens, downtown skyscrapers, the far-off Pacific wreathed in haze. Above Mr. Deitch’s bed hangs an abstract Aaron Young painting that, when stared at, produces an after-image of Christ; in a nearby hall is a preparatory sketch for Warhol’s painting “Before and After.”

“This is such an important, early, seminal work,” Mr. Deitch told a visitor one recent morning, referring to Warhol’s celebrated image, taken from an newspaper advertisement, depicting a woman before and after a nose job. It makes sense that, among the artworks Mr. Deitch has acquired, those he chose to show a guest depict a messianic prophet and radical metamorphosis.

“We want to set the agenda” for the coming decade, Mr. Johnson, the museum co-chairman, had said, referring to the museum.

That agenda became more plausible with the appointment last year of Mr. Deitch, following that of Michael Govan, the former director of the DIA Foundation, to head the Los Angeles County Museum; and of Ann Philbin, the well-regarded director of the Drawing Center, to run the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The arrival of this troika, a seemingly unbeatable combination, and the decision of prominent New York galleries like Gagosian and Matthew Marks to establish outposts in Los Angeles (Mr. Marks’s gallery will open next winter), did much to bolster Mr. Broad’s grand assertion that “Los Angeles could become the contemporary art capital of the world.”

If Mr. Deitch shares Mr. Broad’s ambitions, it’s in a played-down manner that can seem oddly like an asset in a town where hyperbole is the norm and personalities are often as bloated as floats in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. (See: Weintraub, Jerry.)

“We’re acculturated to the fusion of media now,” and equally to the decades-old institutionalization of high/low aesthetics, Mr. Deitch said one day last week over lunch at the down-home Urth Caffe, his hangout, where patrons bus their own trays. “Art, film, fashion, music are all going on and interacting simultaneously,” he added. “And L.A. is very receptive to that fusion.”

Critics of Mr. Deitch, and there are many, hold their noses at his apparent indifference to art-world hierarchies, equating his appointment with the death of civilization.

“The supreme opportunist,” Jed Perl, art critic for The New Republic, wrote of him in a critique that stopped just short of accusing Mr. Deitch of running a shop for art-trend knickknacks.

Some, like the blogger who attributed a series of moronic remarks to Mr. Deitch on Twitter, under the handle @FakeDeitch, see him as a carpetbagger. Some, on the evidence of stealth videos that made the rounds for a time, view him as an art-world Führer, a heavy-handed censor who, shortly before “Art in the Streets” was set to open, ordered a graffiti mural by the Italian artist Blu painted over because its content, rows of coffins draped in dollar bills, was too political.

“That killed me,” said Mr. Deitch of the controversy surrounding his decision to blot out Blu’s mural, a move he explained was made necessary by the mural’s position facing a memorial commemorating Japanese-American soldiers who fell during World War II.

None of this mattered to the crowds lined up outside the Geffen Center in Little Tokyo last Saturday, not the censorship or the future of museums or the tendency among many in the art world to scour each minor occurrence for meaning, the way ancient divines did the entrails of birds.

They had come to see Neck Face, the graffiti artist whose installation – a menacing alley replete with flashing lights and the artist as a filth-covered hobo – was inspired, he explained, not by such obvious forerunners as the artist Mike Kelley but by his family’s unofficial trade constructing haunted houses. They’d come for the gloomy, wall-covering murals of inverted dead mammals by the Belgian graffiti artist ROA and the candy-colored cartoon ones by graffiti elders like Kenny Scharf and Futura 2000, né Leonard McGurr.

They’d come for the gorgeously calligraphic markings by Retna; the demented funhouse installations by the Brazilian twins Os Gêmeos; the wall of faux naïve placards by the late Margaret Kilgallen; the “period” spaces recreated or taken intact from such shrines to the graffiti movement as the Fun Gallery or the black-lighted TriBeCa loft long inhabited by the graffiti legend Rammellzee.

This list barely begins to cover the extent of an outlaw artistic movement in “Art in the Streets,” which tracks the great graffiti dispersion from styles first created in New York by Lee Quinones, Dondi, Futura 2000 and others and that soon enough made it to Philadelphia, Chicago, the West Coast and the world.

The Los Angeles Times termed “Art in the Streets” a “bombastic, near-overwhelming cavalcade of eye-candy,” a crowd-teasing pull-quote if ever there was one. And while it’s too early to know how the exhibition will fare with critics, there is little reason to doubt Mr. Broad’s assertion that it will likely pull the crowds in and engage a new public, most particularly “audiences that would not otherwise go to museums.”

But the greater challenge faced by Mr. Deitch and others in the field is not luring new audiences accustomed to consuming media in blended form as much as it is attracting those who consume most media on hand-held tablets back into a brick-and-mortar temples to art. Will he be able to draw Angelenos off the freeways and the often gritty streets with even grittier and dystopic-Disney versions of American lives as conjured in a raunchy, immersive installation titled “Street”?

Will the decision to make his directorial mark with an ephemeral and often outlaw art form pay off for Mr. Deitch and the museum? Is “Art in the Streets” his signature gesture, his tag?

“We have to be very careful here to keep things rigorous and not pollute” the underlying mission of institutions like MOCA to uphold the highest standards of culture, Mr. Deitch said. “But at the same time, the art world has a tendency to academicism and aridity. I’m very interested in seeing that art remains connected to emotion. I’m a very optimistic person and it’s important to me that the museum conveys that optimism to people, that the art we show stays connected to life.”

Even the number of museum trustees had diminished when its board surprised the art world with what even David Johnson, a chairman of the museum’s board noted last week, was a risky choice to head the museum. “Jeffrey was way, way, way out there as a candidate,” he said.

The risk in hiring an established risk-taker was a calculated one, said Eli Broad, the billionaire collector and arts patron whose $30 million challenge grant to the museum in 2008 helped save the faltering institution.

At first glance, the work of the artist Retna looks like an undiscovered ancient script: a series of hypnotic symbols—complex, beautiful and captivating. But Retna has created an original alphabet, fusing together influences from ancient Incan and Egyptian hieroglyphics, Arabic, Hebrew, Asian calligraphy, and graffiti. Each piece carries meaning, conveying an event or dialogue that the artist experienced.

As a youth of African-American, El Salvadorian and Cherokee descent growing up in Los Angeles, Retna (real name Marquis Lewis) was mesmerized by the gang graffiti that surrounded him. He began practicing the art form, and adopted the name Retna from a Wu-Tang Clan song. In the mid-nineties he began making murals on walls, trains and freeway overpasses throughout the city.

Retna has transformed from a street artist to a break-out star in the contemporary art world. He has garnered attention from Usher, an R&B artist, who commissioned the artist to create a portrait of Marvin Gaye, and MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch, who wrotein the September 2010 issue of Juxtapoz “one of the most exciting exhibitions…this year, anywhere, was Retna’s exhibition at New Image Art.” This spring, MOCA will feature Retna’s work in the “Art in the Streets” exhibit.

On February 10th, Retna opened his first solo show in New York, “The Hallelujah World Tour”, presented by Andy Valmorbida and Vladimir Restoin-Roitfeld, in conjunction with New York City’s Fashion Week. The tour will continue with exhibitions in London and Venice. Retna spoke with More Intelligent Life about his script, growing up in L.A. and graffiti.

How did growing up in Los Angeles affect your work?

The people that I met, the neighborhood guys, the fascination with graffiti and things that weren’t always seen as a good thing. It was illegal for the most part, what it was that we were doing. It’s influenced in my work. Everything represents a very strong L.A. influence.

Were you ever in a gang?

I think I had asked to join the neighborhood guys, and they were like ‘Marquis there’s nothing here for you, you can come hang out with us, we’ll let you paint on our walls but you don’t have to be a part of us’. And I owe them a lot for that for letting me pursue my own dream.

Do you still write on the streets?

I haven’t been as active as I want to be. I’ve done murals, but I haven’t been active in that area. It’s been a while, maybe like two years, but I’ve been really busy.

How and when did you decide to take traditional gang graffiti and turn it into your own script?

I was influenced by Old English since I was eight or nine-years-old. It was very popular amongst street gangs and they were writing Old English, which was really taken more from the LA Times and the New York Times and I just really enjoyed the way the letters were formed. They just had such an elegance to them. Then I went into a phase where I was just writing in the traditional graffiti style and I believe somewhere in 1997 or 1998 I started combining the two, where the Old English style, the graffiti style and I was very highly influenced by Asian calligraphy. I was really fascinated with ancient cultures and writing, and then became interested in Hebrew and Arabic writing after September 11th because they became more prevalent in the news and started to find their way within my work. I’m not copying any of those letters, but I think the influences are from that.

How did your art go from the streets to the more highbrow establishments that they’re in now?

These artists Chaz and Mear were curating a show in L.A. and they invited me to be a part of it. That was the first show I had every done. That was in 1997 I want to say.

And after that I think I kind of got the bug and I thought that it would be fun to do this. It was a way of being a legitimate artist but I also felt like I could make my mom proud, I could do it the right way. You gotta love where you came from too because if I hadn’t come from the street or been a graffiti writer, I wouldn’t be where I am now. And there might be guys who don’t like people like us, [because we are]  inside the galleries, they go, “oh, it’s not real”. I don’t really care. I know who I am and what I’ve done and there’s people from that movement that just love seeing it inside places, and they’re happy because they do it too.

I wouldn’t be where I’m at if it wasn’t for all the graffiti artists and writers that came before me. And this is my way of saying thank you.

Where did you come across the various writings (Arabic, Hebrew, Hieroglyphics, etc.) that inspire your script?

Just books, looking at stuff, researching. Obviously I can’t read any of that stuff—I just liked it. I’d look at it or want to study about it or learn more about it. I gravitated towards that because that’s what I’ve been doing—I’ve been writing and I wanted to make this text that was influenced by the world and I wanted everyone to be able to relate to it. I was mixed [race], so I never really felt like I fit in, or I was either one or this or that, so I just started to say I was down with everybody and I wanted my work to reflect that. That was the idea I was after.

Is there a verbal element to it, or is it just visual?

There’s a verbal element. It could be a poem, it could be just stuff that I’m thinking about, for me it’s just a very meditative process; I’m just having a conversation with myself. Sometimes I allow the music to influence what I’m writing. A lot of them are names my mom would call me when I was growing up, and some are things I’m talking about, friends who have passed away—they’re interactions with what’s going on with people that I just meet, or a conversation I just had. I hear a word or a phrase or a dialogue, and then that becomes my response. They all say something.

Would you ever make a translation?

I’ve been asked. I want people to try and figure it out. I think I give them what it says, but I like the interaction part. That reminds me of when I’m looking at like Hebrew or calligraphy, or anything like that—I don’t know what it says. But if I try to do my homework, or look into it, I’ll find a meaning and try to find why it’s like that, or maybe I won’t, but at least you give it that attempt of trying to see it.

That’s really interesting to me. It makes more sense now, because as someone observing your art, how do I know it’s not just a bunch of nonsensical symbols?

Right, no definitely. I think once people are more familiar with my work, they can understand it. The more you familiarize yourself with, you start to see, ‘okay there’s the ‘S’, there’s an ‘E’, there’s a ‘V’. I’ve ran into a couple of people that are really able to read the stuff, and it always surprises me. 

What artists inspire you?

I love art nouveau, Alphonse Mucha, Gustav Klimt, Monet, Basquiat, Haring. There’s a whole list of graffiti artists—Lee Quinones, Chaz Bojorquez. I love Degas’s ballerinas. I have a pretty wide range of art that I like. There’s this artist here in New York I believe he just had a show—Folkert de Jong. Oh my God, his work is beautiful. And I love sculpture, I love architecture, I love ancient buildings, Masonic buildings, cathedrals, churches, synagogues, mosques—I just love the way they look they just have a really elegant kind of thing to them. I love Asian temples. I like a lot of cultures and things.

Do you think there’s a difference between street art and graffiti?

To me it’s interesting because a lot of street artist people, they call themselves graffiti writers. They’re two different things. A graffiti writer is someone that writes their name on the wall, but they’ve blurred the lines. But, I think it’s a great movement. I’m glad to be associated with it. There are a lot of great artists in that in that, and there are a lot of people that aren’t so good—that’s like anything. There are guys who are really talented at graffiti and there are guys whose stuff you just don’t like, but that’s the nature of it. I can’t say anything bad about them. Without the people who have become popular with street art, I probably wouldn’t be here now. I’d like to think I would have got to my goal anyway, but I’m sure I owe them some kind of gratitude and I’m alright with that.

“The Hallelujah World Tour” is at 560 Washington Street in New York through Feb. 21st.

~ ANN BINLOT

RETNA, a popular Los Angeles street artist, opens his first major solo show in New York this week. But will it translate?

A few years ago, RETNA was a street artist painting murals on a warehouse in Skid Row. Now he’s invading New York with a major show debuting during Fashion Week, is a favorite of art world heavyweight Jeffrey Deitch, and will soon take his talents up in the air by designing the tail of an airplane. But those are the sort of improbable things that can happen when you’re a talented guy in the right place at the right time.

RETNA grew up in Los Angeles and waded into the art world by managing a major street art collective while still in high school. The 34-year-old has worked there his entire career, more recently connecting with New Image Art Gallery, where Deitch, who moved from New York to helm MOCA last year, saw his paintings at an exhibition. “I thought the work was extraordinary, some of the freshest work I had seen all year,” Deitch wrote last fall in the street art magazine Juxtapoz. And now, RETNA will be included in Art in the Streets, a large group show of street artists opening at MOCA in April. But first, RETNA is opening his first New York solo show,The Hallelujah World Tour, at 560 Mercer Street, a cavernous warehouse that has been converted into a gallery.

On a recent morning at RETNA’s light-filled studio in downtown Los Angeles, Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld and Andy Valmorbida, curators of the new show, are keeping an eye on their artist. Watching RETNA, it’s easy to see the pressure mounting on an untested artist on the cusp of staging his first major solo show. There’s the small matter of appeasing the dealers, anxiety over actually finishing the works set to debut—and then, looming over it all, the larger question of capitalism versus art. How can he make money from this new endeavor and still maintain his credibility as a local street artist?

Though RETNA is based out of Los Angeles, a sense of inclusiveness exists in his work. His paintings consist of a gestural script simultaneously simple yet impossible to decipher. The symbols look like a mix between Arabic and Egyptian hieroglyphics, although RETNA maintains he writes in English and Spanish, drawing inspiration from anything from Old English script to gang graffiti writing.

His nonconformist work is a perfect fit for Valmorbida and Roitfeld, who are rather untraditional art dealers themselves. They’re especially young, and jet set around the world creating pop-up art galleries. (Attention to aesthetic is in Roitfeld’s blood: He’s the son of former French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld.) The curators’ typical artists hold a certain international cachet—and RETNA is no exception. He owns enough street-cool to make him appeal to young collectors and his iconography is so transcendent it can be understood anywhere from Detroit to Dubai.

“I want my text to feel universal,” says RETNA. “I want people from different cultures to all find some similarity in it—whether they can read it or not. My art allows me to see people all as one.”

For his New York show, RETNA is converting a massive New York warehouse into his own kind of temple. Next, the show heads to London, to a custom-built 10,000-square foot industrial space. “We’re like a traveling circus,” says Valmorbida. “When Cirque du Soleil comes to town, everybody comes to see it. This is what we’re doing with the arts.”

There’s even more on the horizon: Roitfeld and Valmorbida have connected RETNA with VistaJet, a major private plane company, and in April he’ll design the tail for a $60 million Global Express “XRS” aircraft. “One of the goals as a graffiti artist is hitting the hardest spots and doing the most complicated thing because you were trying to one-up the competition,” says RETNA.

It will be hard to top flying his ambitions around at 30,000 feet, but RETNA remains grounded—and constantly reminded of his roots. “I do work that finances my other work for people on the street,” RETNA says. “Here’s something that grew from the street that was looked at as a malicious, vindictive thing—and now it’s been glorified.”

Now, he gets paid to do this.

VistaJet, Swiss operator of 31 private aircraft, commissioned Retna to paint the tail of its largest corporate jet, the Bombardier Global Express XRS, this spring.

“It’s a $60 million canvas, so we decided to start with just this one,” said Nina Flohr, head of branding and communications at VistaJet.

Together with Bombardier Business Aircraft, VistaJet is also sponsoring a traveling exhibition of Retna’s paintings, “The Hallelujah World Tour,” with a $4 million budget.

First stop: A 13,000-square-foot warehouse in New Yorkdisplaying 35 large canvases and one sprawling sculpture of the artist’s name.

Hung cheek-by-jowl around the perimeter, the works bristle with mysterious symbols, resembling a cross between Asian calligraphy and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Retna’s imaginary alphabet has roots in Old English, gang graffiti, Arabic and Hebrew.

Furious Mother

“Even though I don’t understand them, I’m really intrigued by them,” said Retna, 31, who speaks English and Spanish. “I just really love writing.”

Retna, who grew up in downtown Los Angeles, got into graffiti as a 9-year-old Catholic-school student.

“I’d see graffiti on a freeway going to school,” he said. “I couldn’t think of anything else. I just wanted to draw, draw and draw.”

Over the years, he tagged freeways, public parks and bridges. Along the way, he got arrested for vandalism, he said.

His mother, who moved to the U.S. from El Salvador and had to work two jobs (including a night shift as a parking-lot attendant) to put Retna through a private school, was furious.

“She was worried that something would happen to me,” said Retna. “I put her through a lot of pain.”

He said his pieces include Spanish curses his mother hurled at him as well as names of dead friends.

Retna completed the largest piece — an 8-by-20-foot canvas filled with five rows of squat black and red runes — in a single day this week.

“That speed comes from working on the street,” he said, as he walked around the freezing warehouse while a production crew was busy arranging his paintings and adjusting the lights. “I am talking about hanging on a bridge. We’d have to finish in 45 minutes before the cops got there.”

Middle East

Decoding these enigmatic messages could take a lot more time. You’d need a guide to explain how a sparse composition of silver symbols — vertical lines, zigzags and curved shapes — translates into “stoned to death.” And that’s the simplest piece in the show.

The exhibition’s producers, Andy Valmorbida and Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld, are still working on the tour’s next destinations.

“We want to show it in the Middle East,” said Valmorbida. Egypt would have been a good idea a month ago. Not so much now.”

Prices for the paintings range from $25,000 to $180,000. The show runs through Feb. 21 at 560 Washington St.

(Katya Kazakina is a reporter for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the reporter of this story: Katya Kazakina in New York at kkazakina@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.

Venerably known as the ‘godfather of street art’, Hambleton was lining public spaces across America with his works long before the likes of Banksy and Shephard Fairey.

Some of Hambleton’s most thought-provoking works include his ‘Image Mass Murder’ series of the late 1970s. For this ‘crime scene’ street intervention of sorts, the artist enlisted volunteers to pose as homicide victims in cities across America, outlining their shapes with white chalk, then splashing red paint onto the resulting forms.

Street art aside, Hambleton’s talent is in the way he engages with the viewer. Despite the abstract nature of his energetic brush strokes, the forms they create are startlingly life-like and arresting. Pair this together with the chance to see a comprehensive body of both old and new work from the New York art scene luminary, and you have an undoubtedly intriguing show.