New York’s Cheim and Read Shuttering After 26 Years

Respected New York contemporary art gallery Cheim & Read is ceasing operations for good next month,ArtnetNewsreports. The Chelsea gallery will go dark following the December 23 close of its current exhibition, a solo show of the work of Kathe Burkhart. Cheim & Read has been in business since 1997, when dealers John Cheim and Howard Read teamed up to open the gallery on West Twenty-Third Street. Four years later, they moved to their current address, at 547 West Twenty-Fifth Street.

The gallery, which launched with an exhibition of work by Louise Bourgeois and Jenny Holzer, gained a reputation for elevating the work of women during its twenty-six-year run.RelatedFORMER ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO PAYROLL MANAGER GETS PRISON TIME FOR $2 MILLION EMBEZZLEMENTINUVIALUK ARTIST KABLUSIAK WINS CANADA’S SOBEY ART AWARD “Cheim & Read has had the privilege of working with an exceptional group of artists, mounting important exhibitions, and producing scholarly catalogues over the past 26 years,” the gallery wrote in a November 21 Instagram post. “We are grateful for your support over these many years.” Cheim & Read’s longtime director and partner Maria Bueno is set to start a new dealership next year, called Bueno & Co. Besides the art stars she’s inheriting from Cheim & Read—among them Jean-Michel Basquiat, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, and Sean Scully—she will continue to work with the art of heavy hitters including Lynda Benglis, Louise Fishman, Matthew Wong, Pat Steir, Ron Gorchov, and William Eggleston. Though news of Cheim & Read’s closure triggered an outpouring of lamentations on social media, sharp-eyed gallery watchers might have read the tea leaves earlier this month, when John Cheim sold off $34.7 million worth of art from his personal collection via blue-chip auction house Sotheby’s.

Among the works Cheim parted with are those by Basquiat, Benglis, Bourgeois, Gorchov, Alex Katz, Holzer, Robert Mapplethorpe, Neel, and Cy Twombly, with the lion’s share of proceeds coming from the sale of Joan Mitchell’s 1990–91 diptychSunflowers, which Mitchell gave to Cheim in 1991, the year before her death..