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One of the biggest names in the international art world has quietly gone dark on the Upper East Side, leaving a marquee 69th Street townhouse empty and dealing another blow to a stretch of blocks that not long ago anchored the neighborhood’s blue-chip gallery scene.
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The tenant packing up is David Zwirner, the global gallery giant, which has closed the branch it ran at 34 East 69th Street since 2017, as Artnet News first reported. Zwirner occupied the first three floors of the townhouse, with the art advisory Adler Beatty upstairs on the fourth.The move was planned, according to the gallery. “It was always our plan to leave the Upper East Side,” a spokesperson said by email on Monday morning, once the final phase of the gallery’s Chelsea overhaul wrapped. That moment came when its renovated 525 West 19th Street space, designed by architect Annabelle Selldorf, reopened. The rep added that the gallery is sad to go.
Zwirner now runs what amounts to a campus in West Chelsea, with a building at 537 West 20th Street and a run of connected spaces at 519, 525, and 533 West 19th Street. It also holds a large Tribeca outpost, the former 52 Walker, which was rebranded David Zwirner Tribeca earlier this year, plus galleries in Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Hong Kong.
The departure continues a slow thinning of the block. Hauser & Wirth left the space right next door, at 32 East 69th Street, about a year ago, with Manuela and Iwan Wirth selling that building, which had doubled as a home, for $10.5 million. The Brazilian gallery Nara Roesler exited the same block back in 2020.
During its nine years on 69th Street, the Zwirner townhouse hosted roughly three dozen shows for major figures including Yayoi Kusama, Bill Traylor, and Dan Flavin, gallery mainstays like Sherrie Levine and Marcel Dzama, and younger artists such as P. Staff, who turned the polished interior into an unsettling video installation. The final exhibition in the space, “Set in Stone,” organized with the Paris gallery Galerie Kugel, closed on June 26.
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Still, the neighborhood’s gallery scene is not going quiet. The dealer Felix Rødder has spent the past year mounting inventive shows in an East 80th Street building that also houses Sprüth Magers and Old Masters dealer Robert Simon, of Salvator Mundi fame. Opera Gallery landed on East 69th Street last year after Dolce & Gabbana shifted south. And Sotheby’s takeover of the Breuer Building has drawn fresh crowds to the area, helped along by the buzzy Marcel restaurant tucked into its basement.Have a news tip? Send it to us here!
