Denny Gallery to Close After a Decade, Becoming the Latest Downtown New York Space to Shutter

The New York–based Denny Gallery said on Thursday that it would shutter after 10 years. Its closure marks the fourth gallery located Downtown and to have been in business for over a decade to close in the past three months.

The gallery, which also runs a space in Hong Kong, said in its statement that its current Sheida Soleimani exhibition in New York would be its final show. The gallery’s summer show in New York was titled “The First Ten Year,” and its final show in Hong Kong was a solo for Tim Garwood, which closed in May.

“Denny Gallery will close its doors on October 7th, 2023 after over a hundred exhibitions, three gallery spaces, two continents and ten years in business,” the gallery wrote in its announcement. “The gallery’s recent milestones presented an opportunity to reflect on the accomplishments of the past decade and consider actively and openly what we would like to focus on for the next ten. After heartfelt consideration we feel that it requires a shift.”

Among the most notable shows mounted there was a 2015 exhibition in which artist Michael Mandiberg printed Wikipedia entries and exhibited them as bound books that could be perused.

Other artists to have shown at the gallery include Kennedy Yanko, Amir H. Fallah, Clarity Haynes, Jeremy Couillard, Pamela Council, and Wendy White.

Denny Gallery, which first opened on the Lower East Side in 2013, was among the many to relocate to Tribeca in recent years. It opened in that neighborhood in 2019 and launched its Hong Kong space that same year.

One other gallery that followed a similar trajectory, JTT, also closed up shop recently. In August, JTT made the shock announcement that it was closing after 11 years. That closure was followed by ones for Queer Thoughts, a Tribeca resident since 2015, and the Chinatown gallery Foxy Production, which had been running for 20 years.

In the case of Denny Gallery, the closure appears to have coincided with a breakup between its founders, Elizabeth Denny and Rob Dimin, the latter of whom is the founder of another Tribeca gallery in his name. Dimin told Artnet News in July that he and his longtime business partner separated the year before.

Dimin spoke of a need to participate in fairs that resulted in strain for the enterprise that is now known as Denny Gallery.

“Our program was very institutionally friendly,” he told Artnet, “but that doesn’t always translate into market-friendly. I don’t want to sound like I’m just commercial, but if you want to have these really ambitious institutionally focused projects, one needs to be conscious of the market and the system around you, especially at our scale—a gallery with two locations, and at the largest point I think we had 10 or 11 employees…not huge, but also not small.”