Set to open later this month, the gallery, a partnership between seasoned art dealer Leon Tovar and design impresario Cristina Grajales, will occupy a gritty stretch of West 25th Street. A few blocks east of the Chelsea arts district—and surrounded by a hodgepodge of floral wholesalers, mannequin shops and delis—the area is still pioneer land for galleries. And together Grajales and Tovar have devised an innovative program for their light-filled loft, which has been loosely partitioned into thirds. Each will run independent galleries from the space, employing the remaining square footage, which they’ve named the Third Room, for curatorial experiments that cross-pollinate their artists, their disciplines and even their philosophies.
The gallerists, both Colombian, found they already had an overlapping audience. Tovar, 50, who also has an Upper East Side space, is a respected source for Latin American modernist art, trading in an area of the market that has taken flight in recent years: 20th-century masterworks of geometric abstraction, kineticism, op art and minimalism from living artists or their estates, including Carlos Cruz-Diez, Sergio Camargo and Gego. Grajales, 57, is an expert in 20th-century European decorative arts and an aggressive seeker of new talent across the globe. Her stable includes almost two dozen contemporary designers who are testing the boundaries between functional objects and sculpture, arguably the hottest sector of the fast-growing collectible design market.
For their inaugural outing, Grajales will present free-form metal furniture by Los Angeles–based designer Stefan Bishop and woven and beaded constructions by sibling Brooklyn design team Steven and William Ladd. Tovar will open with work by the late sculptor Edgar Negret, whose massive steel pieces introduced modernist abstraction to his Colombian homeland. And in the Third Room, the partners will install Marisol’s Picasso from 1977, an ambitious abstract work in bronze representing the Spanish artist in old age, seated like a medieval king on a throne. It’s a collection of work that would be hard to imagine coexisting anywhere else—and that’s the way the dealers like it. “This is a creation between Cristina and myself,” says Tovar. “We will not do everything by the book. And that is great.”
