With her gallery Salon 94 in her uptown home and one on Freeman Alley—not to mention a TV career—consultant and dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn is similarly maxing out her new space on the Bowery. The gallery reopens on Feb. 15 in a space overhauled by architect Rafael Viñoly, who has worked with Greenberg on each of her gallery spaces.
“He gets my aesthetic,” says Greenberg, “and knows how to work with my space limitation.” Salon94’s newest space is narrow, like the buildings for the New Museum and Sperone Westwater, and the gallery has dug deep (into the floor) to create more space and vistas.
The Bowery location has about 2,000 square feet, so, inspired by 42nd Street, Salon94 will carve out another exhibition space: the street. A key architectural feature of the new space is an exterior LCD video wall, measuring 6-by-10 feet and featuring works by gallery artists. Greenberg anticipated that some of the videos would be related to concurrent exhibitions while others would complement them. “Artists have been so excited by the wall that most of them want to create new work for it,” she says.
Three pre-renovation shows have already appeared at the Bowery location (Richard Prince, Liz Cohen and Huma Bhabha), which closed in December to begin work.
Inaugurating the newly revamped gallery is Laurie Simmons’s first show with Salon 94 since 2005, “The Love Doll: Days 1–30.” It is a photographic project that tracks her relationship with a customized sex doll ordered from Japan. Simmons is creating a new piece for the video wall, with her Love Doll dressed as a geisha. The show will be on view through Mar. 26.
A three-channel film installation by Katy Grannan will follow [Apr. 1–30], timed to a show at Freeman Alley comprising photographs that the artist shot on Hollywood Boulevard. The video features a Marilyn Monroe impersonator. An exhibition by Lorna Simpson is scheduled for May-June.
The Bowery is a far cry from Times Square, where another Salon 94 artist has exhibited work screened as part of Creative Time’s project there. Marilyn Minter’s splashy, luscious video Green Pink Caviar (2009) baffled tourists-and competed well against advertisements for Samsung, Suntory Whiskey and McDonald’s.
ABOVE: THE LOVE DOLL/DAY 12 (BATHTUB), 2010. COURTESY THE ARTIST.
