NYAB Event - “Look at Me: Portraiture from Manet to the Present” Exhibition

“Look at Me: Portraiture from Manet to the Present” Exhibition

Leila Heller Gallery

This event has ended.

The exhibition, titled “Look at Me … Portraits: Manet to the Present” is organized by Ms. Heller as well as Paul Morris, the founding director of the Armory Show, and Beth Rudin DeWoody, a curator and collector who has worked with the gallery in the past. It will include works by more than 170 artists, including Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Jean- Michel Basquiat and Shoja Azari, an Iranian-born filmmaker and artist whose work featured in Ms. Heller’s Chelsea gallery last year.

Ms. DeWoody said Ms. Heller is up to the hurdles of the new space. “A space that size gives you great opportunities, but you also want to make sure that everything is top-quality, and you don’t just fill it with stuff to fill the space,” Ms. De Woody said. “If anyone has the energy, it’s got to be Leila.”

“I think the challenge is not different from what you have in any gallery space,” said Mr. Arnold, “which is really just doing interesting shows and engaging the people who come to the gallery. It’s just on a larger scale.”

The gallery space will be spread across six floors overlooking bustling 57th Street, including a top floor made bright and airy by glass skylights. Four floors will be devoted to exhibition space, private viewing areas and offices, while one floor, with plywood ceilings and walls, will be available as an experimental space for artists, and another houses a 60-seat screening room and adjacent conference room.

Mr. Morris believes the gallery’s ability to host a wide range of exhibitions will give it a competitive edge. “Artists love the idea of doing a show in not just a white box,” he said. “If you want artists to come see your space, you want artists to do things with your space.”

The facade of Leila Heller’s new 16,000-square-foot, six-floor art gallery. Keith Bedford for The Wall Street Journal
The gallery is “really in the same spirit of what I’ve always wanted to do—have salons, to bring different groups of curators, collectors, writers together,” Ms. Heller said.

Screenings, panel discussions and educational programs have often accompanied the shows she has put together with curators in the past.

In planning the expansion, Ms. Heller, who is originally from Iran and has master’s degrees from George Washington University and the Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London, said she also got an injection of energy from her 22-year-old son, Alexander Heller, who will assist in the uptown location while finishing his master’s degree in art history.

“He sort of reinvigorated us,” said Ms. Heller.

She spent two years looking for an uptown space and almost picked a location on the Upper East Side before finding the 57th Street location. She describes Midtown, already home to Mary Boone, Marian Goodman and Pace galleries, as “the middle of everything” and convenient for her clients, many of whom live in the area or stay in hotels while visiting.

“In way, the uptown space is going to be a bringing together [of] a gallery from the Lower East Side, together with a gallery from Chelsea with a gallery from the Upper East Side,” said Ms. Heller. “It’s sort of like a meeting point.”

[Image: Andy Warhol “Jackie” (1964) Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 20 x 16 in.]