Jeffrey Deitch Gallery
Jeffrey Deitch has been involved with modern and contemporary art for nearly fifty years as a dealer, curator, writer, and advisor. He opened his first gallery in Lenox, Massachusetts in 1972, and in 1974 talked his way into a job at the John Weber Gallery in SoHo, then representing Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman, Hans Haacke, and leading Arte Povera artists. The gallery office doubled as a clubhouse where those artists argued out their ideas — an education Deitch has described as extraordinary, and one that shaped everything after it. His first curatorial project, Lives, was mounted in an abandoned TriBeCa office building in 1975 and gathered artists who used their own lives as a medium — a theme he has returned to ever since. He went on to curate Post Human, which opened in Lausanne in 1992 and traveled to Turin, Athens, Hamburg, and Jerusalem, a section of Aperto at the 1993 Venice Biennale, and an influential series of exhibitions for the Deste Foundation in Athens. Alongside the exhibitions he has written continuously since the mid-1970s, including the most extensive first-hand account of the 1980 Times Square Show, and served as the first American editor of Flash Art. Deitch Projects, which he ran in New York from 1996 to 2010, presented more than 250 projects by artists from thirty-three countries and operated more like a private institute of contemporary art than a commercial gallery, known equally for its performance program and public events such as the Art Parade. He closed it to direct the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where he presented fifty exhibitions in three years, among them Art in the Streets, the best-attended show in the museum's history. He was an early champion of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Jeff Koons — the first writer to review Basquiat's work, later the exclusive representative of the Haring estate, and Koons's American dealer through most of the 1990s. His New York and Los Angeles galleries, the latter opened in 2018, are known for thematic exhibitions including People, Punch, and Shattered Glass, and for solo shows with Ai Weiwei, Judy Chicago, Urs Fischer, Robert Longo, Nari Ward, and Rammellzee.
Jeffrey Deitch has been involved with modern and contemporary art for nearly fifty years as a dealer, curator, writer, and advisor. He opened his first gallery in Lenox, Massachusetts in 1972, and in 1974 talked his way into a job at the John Weber Gallery in SoHo, then representing Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman, Hans Haacke, and leading Arte Povera artists. The gallery office doubled as a clubhouse where those artists argued out their ideas — an education Deitch has described as extraordinary, and one that shaped everything after it. His first curatorial project, Lives, was mounted in an abandoned TriBeCa office building in 1975 and gathered artists who used their own lives as a medium — a theme he has returned to ever since. He went on to curate Post Human, which opened in Lausanne in 1992 and traveled to Turin, Athens, Hamburg, and Jerusalem, a section of Aperto at the 1993 Venice Biennale, and an influential series of exhibitions for the Deste Foundation in Athens. Alongside the exhibitions he has written continuously since the mid-1970s, including the most extensive first-hand account of the 1980 Times Square Show, and served as the first American editor of Flash Art. Deitch Projects, which he ran in New York from 1996 to 2010, presented more than 250 projects by artists from thirty-three countries and operated more like a private institute of contemporary art than a commercial gallery, known equally for its performance program and public events such as the Art Parade. He closed it to direct the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where he presented fifty exhibitions in three years, among them Art in the Streets, the best-attended show in the museum's history. He was an early champion of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Jeff Koons — the first writer to review Basquiat's work, later the exclusive representative of the Haring estate, and Koons's American dealer through most of the 1990s. His New York and Los Angeles galleries, the latter opened in 2018, are known for thematic exhibitions including People, Punch, and Shattered Glass, and for solo shows with Ai Weiwei, Judy Chicago, Urs Fischer, Robert Longo, Nari Ward, and Rammellzee.
