Gavin Brown's enterprise was an art gallery with venues in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

and

Rome , established_title = Founded , established_date = 753 BC , founder = King Romulus (legendary) , image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg , map_caption ...

owned by Gavin Brown between 1994 and 2020. In 2020, it merged with Gladstone Gallery.

History

Broome Street

The gallery was established by Gavin Brown in 1994 on Broome Street, in the west

SoHo Soho is an area of the City of Westminster, part of the West End of London. Originally a fashionable district for the aristocracy, it has been one of the main entertainment districts in the capital since the 19th century. The area was develo ...

neighborhood of New York City. In 1993, prior to opening the Broome Street location, Brown installed an exhibition of Elizabeth Peyton drawings in a room at the

Hotel Chelsea The Hotel Chelsea (also the Chelsea Hotel or the Chelsea) is a hotel in Manhattan, New York City, built between 1883 and 1885. The 250-unit hotel is located at 222 West 23rd Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, in the neighborhood of ...

– considered one of the first shows to fall under the umbrella of “Gavin Brown’s enterprise.” The inaugural show at the Broome Street location was an exhibition by the British artist Steven Pippin. Pippin transformed the gallery space into a

camera obscura A camera obscura (; ) is a darkened room with a small hole or lens at one side through which an image is projected onto a wall or table opposite the hole. ''Camera obscura'' can also refer to analogous constructions such as a box or tent in w ...

, and in doing so quickly established the unconventional meter that has since become a defining characteristic of the gallery's approach. Other early shows at GBE include a show of paintings by

Peter Doig Peter Doig ( ; born 17 April 1959) is a Scottish painter. One of the most renowned living figurative painters, he has settled in Trinidad since 2002. In 2007, his painting ''White Canoe'' sold at Sotheby's for $11.3 million, then an auction rec ...

Catherine Opie Catherine Sue Opie (born 1961) is an American fine-art photographer and educator. She lives and works in Los Angeles, as a professor of photography at University of California at Los Angeles. Opie studies the connections between mainstream and i ...

photographs, and a two-person show of works by

Andy Warhol Andy Warhol (; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the Art movement, visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore th ...

and

Rirkrit Tiravanija Rirkrit Tiravanija ( th, ฤกษ์ฤทธิ์ ตีระวนิช, pronunciation: [] or Tea-rah-vah-nitJerry Saltz (May 7, 2007)Conspicuous Consumption''New York Magazine''.) is a Thai contemporary artist residing in New York City, Be ...

Relocation to Meatpacking District

In 1997, Gavin Brown's enterprise moved to the

Meatpacking District The Meatpacking District is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan that runs from West 14th Street south to Gansevoort Street, and from the Hudson River east to Hudson Street. The Meatpacking Business Improvement District along ...

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

. A few years later in 1999, Brown also opened a bar, Passerby, on West 15th Street next door to the gallery. Notably, the bar featured a fully operated disco floor, ''Untitled (Dance Floor)'', created by one of Gavin Brown's represented artists,

Piotr Uklański Piotr Uklański (born 1968) is a contemporary Polish-American artist who has produced art since the mid 1990s which have explored themes of spectacle, cliche, and tropes of modern art. Many of his pieces and projects take well-known, overused, s ...

that was first created in 1996 at Gavin Brown's Broome Street Gallery. Exhibitions at the second gallery space included early works by the British painter

Chris Ofili Christopher Ofili, (born 10 October 1968) is a British Turner Prize-winning painter who is best known for his paintings incorporating elephant dung. He was one of the Young British Artists. Since 2005, Ofili has been living and working in T ...

, installations by

Martin Creed Martin Creed (born 21 October 1968) is a British artist, composer and performer. He won the Turner Prize in 2001 for exhibitions during the preceding year, with the jury praising his audacity for exhibiting a single installation, ''Work No. 22 ...

, the first show of work by

Oliver Payne and Nick Relph Oliver Payne and Nick Relph are British artist-filmmakers who have collaborated since 1999. Payne was born in 1977, and Relph in 1979. Both studied at Kingston University, London. Payne failed his undergraduate Intermedia course in 2000, and Relph w ...

, and in 2000, the first of artist

Rob Pruitt Rob Pruitt (born 1963/1964) is an American post-conceptual artist. Working primarily in painting, installation, and sculpture, he does not have a single style or medium. He considers his work to be intensely personal and biographical. Pruitt has ...

’s famed “ flea markets.”

Relocation to West Village

In 2003, Brown moved the gallery to Greenwich Street in the

West Village The West Village is a neighborhood in the western section of the larger Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, New York City. The traditional boundaries of the West Village are the Hudson River to the west, West 14th Street to th ...

. The gallery continued to present atypical shows like “Drunk vs. Stoned” (an irreverent two-part exhibition that explored different states of

intoxication Intoxication — or poisoning, especially by an alcoholic or narcotic substance — may refer to: * Substance intoxication: ** Alcohol intoxication ** LSD intoxication ** Toxidrome ** Tobacco intoxication ** Cannabis intoxication ** Cocaine i ...

and induced convivial openings). In 2007, the Swiss artist

Urs Fischer Urs Fischer (born 2 May 1973) is a Swiss-born contemporary visual artist living in New York City. Fischer’s practice includes sculpture, installation and photography. Education and early career Born to two doctors as the second of two children ...

produced his show ''You'' by digging a massive crater in the gallery's floor. In that same year, Rob Pruitt staged a second “flea market” at the

Frieze Art Fair Frieze Art Fair is an international contemporary art fair in London, New York, and Los Angeles. Frieze London takes place every October in London's Regent's Park. In the US, the fair ran on New York's Randall's Island from 2012–19 and in 2 ...

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

in the GBE booth. In 2008, at Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Gavin Brown and Urs Fischer co-curated ''Who’s Afraid of

Jasper Johns Jasper Johns (born May 15, 1930) is an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker whose work is associated with abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, and pop art. He is well known for his depictions of the American flag and other US-related top ...

'' – a large group-show installed over a wall reproduction of Shafrazi's ''Four Friends'' exhibition. In November 2008, Jonathan Horowitz installed his exhibition ''Obama ‘08'' that focused closely on the pivotal

United States presidential election The election of the president and the vice president of the United States is an indirect election in which citizens of the United States who are registered to vote in one of the fifty U.S. states or in Washington, D.C., cast ballots not dir ...

. In 2008, the Passerby location was closed. Gavin Brown's enterprise relocated to 620 Greenwich Street in New York City. From May 2010, the gallery also occupied the space that its neighbor, famed Manhattan meat purveyors, LaFreida Meats, once occupied. The inaugural exhibition at the expanded site was an exhibition of new work by Horowitz entitled, ''Go Vegan!''

Relocation to Harlem

In summer 2015, Gavin Brown's enterprise closed its Greenwich Street location and moved to a former brewery at 439 West 127th Street in

Harlem Harlem is a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, New York City. It is bounded roughly by the Hudson River on the west; the Harlem River and 155th Street on the north; Fifth Avenue on the east; and Central Park North on the south. The greater Ha ...

, with three floors of exhibition space.

Other locations

In 2015 Gavin Brown opened a gallery in

in a former chapel in Via de Vascellari. In 2007, Brown entered into talks to open a gallery in Los Angeles with L&M, the since-split New York gallery then run by collector and former banker Robert Mnuchin and former auction house specialist Dominique Lévy; these plans were eventually abandoned.Sarah Douglas (December 17, 2020)
In Making Gavin Brown a Partner, Barbara Gladstone Is Betting That You Can Get Big and Still Think Small
''

ARTnews ''ARTnews'' is an American visual-arts magazine, based in New York City. It covers art from ancient to contemporary times. ARTnews is the oldest and most widely distributed art magazine in the world. It has a readership of 180,000 in 124 countr ...

''.

Artists

Artists represented by Gavin Brown's enterprise included: *

Franz Ackermann Franz Ackermann (born 1963 in Neumarkt-Sankt Veit, Bavaria) is a German painter and installation artist based in Berlin. He makes cartoonish abstraction. Life He attended the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Munich from 1984 to 1988 and the Ho ...

* Ed Atkins * Joe Bradley (2011-2015) *

Kerstin Brätsch Kerstin Brätsch (born 1979) is a German contemporary visual artist. She is primarily known as a painter, also making work collaboratively as DAS INSTITUT (with artist Adele Röder) and KAYA (with artist Debo Eilers).Garutti, Francesco"Das Insti ...

Jeremy Deller Jeremy Deller (born 30 March 1966) is an English conceptual, video and installation artist. Much of Deller's work is collaborative; it has a strong political aspect, in the subjects dealt with and also the devaluation of artistic ego through th ...

Peter Doig *

* Jonathan Horowitz *

Joan Jonas Joan Jonas (born July 13, 1936) is an American visual artist and a pioneer of video and performance art, and one of the most important artists to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s.Alex Katz Alex Katz (born July 24, 1927) is an American figurative artist known for his paintings, sculptures, and prints. Early life and career Alex Katz was born July 24, 1927, to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, as the son of an émigré who ha ...

(2011-2020) * Christopher Knowles *

Mark Leckey Mark Leckey (born 1964) is a British contemporary artist. His found object art and video pieces, which incorporate themes of nostalgia and anxiety, and draw on elements of pop culture, span several works and exhibitions. In particular, he i ...

Bjarne Melgaard Bjarne Melgaard (born 9 September 1967) is a Norwegian artist based in New York City. He has been described as "one of Norway's most important artists" and, following the 2014 publicity about his sculpture ''Chair'', "the most famous Norwegian arti ...

(2013-2020) * Laura Owens *

* Elizabeth Peyton (1993-2014)Dan Duray (February 5, 2014)
Elizabeth Peyton Leaves Gavin Brown for Gladstone
'' New York Observer''. *

* Rachel Rose * Steven Shearer * Avery Singer (2014-2019) * Frances Stark * Sturtevant *

References

External links

*
Art Review Power 100 City FIle: Gavin Brown Urs Fischer + Gavin Brown, Interview magazine, 2009
{{Authority control Art museums and galleries in Manhattan Art galleries established in 1994 1994 establishments in New York City Contemporary art galleries in the United States Contemporary art galleries in Italy