Remember I wrote about the incredible gallery Salon 94, the one that showed Urs Fischer’s furniture?
It turns out Salon 94’s founder — Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn — was previously part of the young art consortium LGDR, founded in 2021.
History
Each letter in LGDR stood for a founder’s last name, and the idea behind the project was to combine the expertise of a scholar-gallerist, an auctioneer, an art advisor–dealer, and a manager of museum projects to create competition for mega-galleries like Gagosian or Pace.
As often happens with good ideas, this one didn’t last long — only a couple of years — losing precisely the fourth letter: Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn left and launched her own project.
Meanwhile, the trio — LGD (Lévy, Gorvy, Dayan) — remained in a luxurious 1932 townhouse on the Upper East Side, just 120 meters from Central Park.
For almost 85 years the building was home to the Wildenstein family — one of the most influential art dynasties in the world, dealers who once sold paintings to Henry Clay Frick himself.
In 2017 the property, then home to the gallery, was sold to the Chinese conglomerate HNA for $75 million — the most expensive townhouse ever sold in Manhattan at the time. Later the mansion was purchased by Odessa-born Len Blavatnik for $90 million.
Today the gallery keeps the name Lévy, Gorvy, Dayan, and it’s a must-see for anyone who loves art with their eyes first.
Interiors and Exhibition Concept
The lavish early-20th-century interiors — designed from day one to surround the finest art in the world — now serve as the setting for exhibitions curated by the star founding team of Lévy, Gorvy, and Dayan.
I was lucky to catch the exhibition Downtown/Uptown: New York in the Eighties, currently on view. The title is meant to bridge two artistic worlds of the city: downtown (lofts, clubs, graffiti, DIY culture) and uptown (white cubes, money, collectors).
The show brings together works by around 26 key artists of the 1980s, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Julian Schnabel, Kenny Scharf, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, and Christopher Wool.
The works are spread across several floors of the mansion; the layout is intentionally “uneven”: different voices clash rather than line up neatly — the curators’ way of recreating the chaos and collision of ideas that defined the decade.
Useful Information
Address: Lévy Gorvy Dayan / 19 E 64th St, New York, NY 10065
Admission: Free
Hours: 10 AM – 6 PM, Tuesday through Saturday
Exhibition Downtown/Uptown runs through December 13
