London dealer Simon Lee has announced the opening of a showroom in New York City. The modestly-sized venue will open on the Upper East Side this October and will be run by Manuela Mozo, formerly of Metro Pictures.
“I envisage it as being more like a sort of a communal living room than a gallery,” the gallerist told BLOUIN ARTINFO UK. “We won’t ever be doing any exhibitions, but it would be a place where curators and museum people could meet artists, see things — so we can just service that side of our business.”
Simon Lee represents many artists based in the city part- or full-time, including Mel Bochner, George Condo, Sherrie Levine, and Christopher Wool.
“We realize we are there a lot because we have probably 8 or 10 artists working in New York now,” Lee continued. “So it works in both directions: us having good connections with our artists who are on the ground there, and it can be a point of access for our artists in Europe who don’t necessarily have representation in the States.”
The New York office is Lee’s second venture abroad. Last year, the dealer launched his gallery’s first foreign branch, in Hong Kong — an enterprise that has grown significantly since then.
But the dealer is clear that this U.S. outpost, which will be located on the 2nd floor at 26 East 64th Street, isn’t the forerunner of a fully-fledged New York gallery in the future. “I don’t think that it’s a step in that direction, and that’s not necessarily the ambition of the gallery,” he explained. “The ambition of the gallery is just to provide a good service for our artists in terms of being their agent.”
