Hollywood Sequel

After stepping down as the director of the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Jeffrey Deitch returns five years later at the helm of his own 15,000-square-foot gallery

By Stephen Wallis

Sept. 10, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-frank-gehry-designed-gallery-space-opens-in-l-a-1536588352

It’s not quite the next installment of Star Wars, but Jeffrey Deitch’s return to Los Angeles is, in art-world terms, a blockbuster event. Five years ago, Deitch stepped down as director of the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), amid a swirl of negative press and board resignations, and returned to New York to revive his career as an art dealer. Now he’s back, this time at the helm of the new 15,000-square- foot Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Hollywood. Renovated by architect Frank Gehry, the space offcially opens on September 29 with an exhibition of works by Ai Weiwei—highlighted by a sprawling installation of 6,000 traditional Chinese wooden stools.

“It was important to me to start with a great international artist, someone with whom I have a personal connection,” says Deitch, who notes that, along with concurrent exhibitions at the Marciano Art Foundation and the UTA Artist Space, this show marks the first major presentation of Ai’s work in L.A. “And I wanted to stage something truly spectacular that would just knock people out.” It’s a characteristically high-impact gesture for Deitch, 66, who’s had a remarkably varied career—from curator and writer to co-founder of Citibank’s art advisory (he has an M.B.A. from Harvard) to private dealer and gallerist to direc- tor of MOCA and, finally, back to being a gallerist.

At Deitch Projects, the New York gallery he ran from 1996 to 2010, the program mixed together up-and-coming talents, neglected establishment figures, graffiti artists, fashion designers, experimental filmmakers and all manner of performance acts. In his pinstripe suits and round-frame buffalo-horn glasses, Deitch himself was easy to spot at show openings.

“I always saw Jeffrey as sort of a pied piper, an impresario who brought people to contemporary art,” says Maria Bell, a writer, producer and lifetime MOCA board member. Bell has long supported Deitch, even after he ran afoul of more conservative sensibilities with populist shows of street art and Dennis Hopper photographs. She argues that Deitch’s tenure at MOCA—which recently named MoMA curator and PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach its latest director—was actually “a superdynamic time that people in L.A. look back on a bit wistfully.”

Deitch, who plans for now to keep his New York galleries, insists his return to L.A. is not about redemption. Nor is it, he says, even a return. He still has his art-packed Los Feliz home, once owned by Cary Grant and Randolph Scott. His relationships with L.A. artists, collectors and museums go back to the ’70s and ’80s. He even considered opening a Melrose Avenue gallery a decade ago, but the space just wasn’t right.

This time around, Deitch says, he found “the exact right kind of building in the exact right location,” a former lighting-rental warehouse on North Orange Drive. Not far from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Marciano, it’s also close to galleries such as Regen Projects, Kohn, Gavlak and the recently opened outpost of Tanya Bonakdar, the latest New York gallery to get in on L.A.’s humming contemporary art scene.

Then he landed his ideal architect, Gehry, whom he calls “arguably the most significant person in visual culture in Los Angeles of the past 50 years.” Deitch recounts how, 20 years earlier, Gehry turned down his request to do his Wooster Street gallery in New York.

“I volunteered this time,” says the architect. “I knew that given the right kind of space, Jeffrey was going to soar with it. And I really wanted to do that, because I like him. I like his spirit. He goes to street art and places other dealers don’t.”

The most significant architectural work involved removing a mezzanine level, inserting additional skylights and putting in a level concrete floor. “We created a wide-open space where you can build partitions quickly,” says Gehry. “Nothing is precious, so if you have to knock a hole in a wall, you can.”

The program will be geared toward museum-quality exhibitions and solo presentations of major artists who don’t often show in L.A. “While sometimes his infatuation with the new gets the better of him, Jeffrey understands the laying on of hands, of art as a continuity,” says artist David Salle, who has known Deitch since the ’70s. “Few people make such interesting connections between works of art, past and present.”

For Deitch, the new gallery marks a return to the spotlight in a city he loves. “I’ve always wanted to provide platforms where you can have a discourse between artists, intellectuals, writers,” he says. “That’s what we hope to do here in Los Angeles.”