Jeffrey Deitch, the sometimes-controversial celebrity gallerist and former director of MOCA, is making a big new splash on the Los Angeles art scene. He has leased a 15,000-square-foot warehouse in Hollywood to open his own gallery, located at 925 North Orange Drive, not far away from existing destination galleries like Regen Projects and Kohn Gallery.
Deitch told the New York Times that “the audience in L.A. is so open and receptive,” particularly when it comes to bringing art from a variety of media, including performance, fashion, film and music, into the gallery setting. When he was at MOCA, he staged exhibitions with an eclectic and pop-culture oriented array of artists, including Miranda July, Hedi Slimane, Dennis Hopper, and Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte.
An opening date for the new gallery has not been announced, but it's expected to open its doors this autumn. The inaugural exhibition will be The Extreme Present, a group show delving into the legacy of Dada and Pop Art in the modern digital age, a follow-up to an exhibition on the same theme that he recently produced at Shanghai’s Yuz Musuem.
While the gallery is a commercial one, the plan will be to stage just three large, high-profile shows each year. “When you do shows that are museum-level, you don’t want to take them down after a month,” he explained.
This year is already shaping up to cement Los Angeles as more of a modern art hub than ever before with the imminent opening of the Marciano Foundation and more museum spaces on the way soon, and this gallery is sure to give contemporary art lovers even more to get excited about.
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