Art Dealer Zach Feuer Drops Eight Artists to Weather Recession

By Katya Kazakina

Feb. 12 (Bloomberg) - Zach Feuer, the New York dealer with a knack for turning young art-school grads into stars, has dropped eight artists -- nearly half of his roster.
“I didn’t want to be big in this economy,” said Feuer, 30. “Now is the time to have a lower overhead and be small and lean.”

After seven heady years in the art market, dealers and artists alike are adjusting to the slowdown in sales and prices. Four Manhattan galleries have shut down since September, and a fifth -- Soho’s Guild & Greyshkul -- will join them next week. The closings are leaving scores of artists without representation.
Artists who are no longer listed on the Zach Feuer gallery’s Web site include the commercially and critically successful Israeli-born Tal R, Brooklyn-based Danica Phelps and Christoph Ruckhaberle of Leipzig’s Academy of Visual Arts.

The gallery will continue to represent Dana Schutz, Anton Henning, Jules de Balincourt, Nathalie Djurberg, Phoebe Washburn, Tamy Ben-Tor, Justin Lieberman, Dasha Shishkin, Johannes VanDerBeek and Stuart Hawkins.
In addition, Feuer recently took on a new artist, Houston- based Mark Flood, and will show the work of Sister Corita Kent, a Los Angeles nun who died in 1986.

In pruning his program, which relied heavily on painting and figurative work, Feuer said he “wanted to make sure there were no redundancies, with two people covering the same area. There’s a lot less painting.”
Feuer has been working with his artists on the transition since November, giving them lists of interested clients and curators, returning the artworks from his inventory and making last-minute sales, he said.

New Homes
Some artists have found new homes: Painter Tom McGrath will be represented by Sue Scott, a curator-turned-dealer, on the Lower East Side; video artist Luis Gispert joined the Mary Boone gallery.

For Gispert, whose last show was a collaboration between Feuer and Boone, the transition seemed natural.
“I’ve been working with both of them since the end of 2006,” he said. “They basically shared me. Now I am more involved with Mary.”
McGrath was happy to land at a gallery that’s growing rather than consolidating, he said. When he joined Feuer in 2002, “Zach was beginning to show more painting,” he said. “It was an exciting time.”

Feuer’s present lineup includes only three painters.
Phelps, who has been showing with Feuer since 2001, had mixed feelings.
“I feel a little bit dissed,” she said.

Clear Ending
At the same time, she added, “it’s nice to have a clear ending rather than it fizzling out. Straightforward and honest is what I always admired in Zach.”
Feuer opened his gallery in 2000, with two partners, in a small fourth-floor space on W. 26th St. Two years later, he moved to a ground floor on a big-time stretch of W. 24th Street, where his neighbors included major players such as the Gagosian and Gladstone galleries. In 2004, the gallery expanded again, taking over an adjusting storefront. The same year, Feuer bought out his partners.
“That’s how I thought the gallery should run: Bigger, bigger, bigger,” Feuer said.

The gallery’s biggest star, 32-year-old Schutz, attracted collectors such as Walt Disney Co.’s former president Michael Ovitz, advertising mogul Charles Saatchi and painter Alex Katz. Ovitz, a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, donated a painting by Schutz to MoMA.
As Feuer’s artists became more successful, their works frequently have appeared at auction. Schutz’s 2002 canvas fetched $288,000 at Christie’s in 2007, only five years after she had her first solo show with Feuer. During that exhibition, her prices ranged from $800 to $6,000, he said.

As his gallery grew, Feuer found himself spending “more energy dealing with clients than dealing with artists,” he said. “Dealing with artists is what I enjoy doing the most. I don’t want to just be selling.”