Tired of the featureless white cube, curators and dealers are staging shows in the most personal spaces of all: their homes.
Since the early 20th century, coinciding with the rise of abstraction, the art world has adhered to the notion that works should be displayed in deliberately featureless, generally white-walled spaces, the better to elevate and isolate them from the context of daily life. Now, however, a growing number of gallerists and curators are, like Biljani, taking the opposite approach, exhibiting in the very places where daily life dominates: their own homes.In Los Angeles’s Frogtown, the collector Jonathan Pessin, 54, has converted his residence into a veritable bazaar of vintage design objects. And on New York’s Lower East Side, the pro skater turned artist and gallerist Tony Cox, 49, runs Club Rhubarb — a tiny, deliberately hard-to-find contemporary art gallery — out of his sixth-floor abode.Located on a quiet residential street in North London, the Victorian-era townhouse that was, until his death in 2012, the home and studio of the activist, writer and potter Emmanuel Cooper still bears the name of his business, Fonthill Pottery, above the first-floor windows. Over the course of its 153-year history, the building has also been a butcher shop and a supplier of valves and transistors. Now it’s taking on a new identity: live-in art gallery.On a warm October night during the city’s Frieze Art Fair, the curator Rajan Biljani, 40 — who has owned the property since 2014 — invited 150 guests to his home for the opening of an exhibition showcasing work from South Asian diaspora artists, including Harminder Judge and Vipeksha Gupta, alongside rare furniture pieces by Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier collected from Chandigarh, the Modernist city in India conceived in 1947 by the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. “I wanted to share the house and honor the fact that it was an artist’s studio,” says Biljani of his motivation for turning his residence into a by-appointment gallery.
