Ellie Rines Gallery’s inaugural Tribeca opening fell on a muggy Wednesday in September, two weeks before The Armory Show and on the unofficial back-to-school night of the city’s art world. More than 50 Tribeca galleries were hosting opening celebrations that night, but few drew crowds quite like Rines’s.
Rines has long managed to straddle New York’s uptown and downtown art worlds, representing artists including Cynthia Talmadge, Al Freeman and Jo Messer, and was the first dealer to give Anna Weyant a solo show. Now, after a decade in Chinatown as 56 Henry, she has moved her gallery to Tribeca and joined the ranks of dealers operating under their own names.
“I knew I didn't have much autonomy before, but now I really know it,” Rines said with a laugh ahead of the opening. “Any delusions I had of being separate from my job had thoroughly evaporated.”
The new gallery, at 46 Walker Street, occupies the former home of theatre Soho Rep, with 14.5ft-high ceilings. Rines worked with the real-estate broker Jonathan Travis to secure the space, which sits across the street from the gallery founded by her former mentor, Stefania Bortolami.
“I wanted to give the artists a new space to work in, and I couldn't find a larger space that I liked in Chinatown,” Rines says. “So then, Tribeca was the next logical step.”
The high ceilings suit the inaugural exhibition, a presentation of 20 candelabra sculptures by Christopher K. Ho. Set on white pedestals at varying heights, the works draw on varying influences like Brutalism, Futurism and Cubism, while maintaining Ho’s characteristic sense of humour. One candelabra has ridges designed to hold cigarettes. Each candle was lit for the opening, giving the gallery the atmosphere of a bustling dinner party. Ho also scattered objects across the gallery's wooden floor, including a Toblerone wrapper, a strawberry, batteries, a sardine tin and other ephemera, which attendees dodged as they moved throughout the space.
A new chapter
The Tribeca opening marks a new chapter for Rines, whose first gallery opened in 2013 as 55 Gansevoort Street, in a converted elevator shaft in New York’s Meatpacking District. In the early years, she worked a day job at other galleries. That space closed two years later when the building was taken over by Restoration Hardware, prompting Rines to open 56 Henry at its namesake address in 2015.
Rines was among the first young dealers to establish a gallery in the Two Bridges neighbourhood. After the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, more gallerists signed multi-year leases there, helping turn the area into one of New York’s more interesting gallery districts. Rines expanded to a second location on the street, at 105 Henry Street, in 2022.
Rines is opening her new gallery as others that expanded into larger spaces after the pandemic have struggled with higher overheads. During the post-pandemic boom, art sales surged, interest rates were low and New York real estate was comparatively affordable. But after sales slowed, dealers who moved to larger spaces sometimes struggled to pay the more expensive rents.
For Rines, the move is almost a consolidation of her two Henry Street spaces, which she says had become increasingly difficult to programme alongside the growing demands of art fairs. “The shocking thing is that my overhead isn't going up that much higher, because it turns out that it's incredibly financially inefficient to have two spaces,” she says.
With the relocation to Tribeca, Rines has also brought in a new director, Isabelle Hogenkamp, who previously worked at Mitchell-Innes & Nash and briefly at Lehmann Maupin. Ellie Rines Gallery now boasts a six-person team. The gallery’s programme remains largely unchanged: Ho’s exhibition was originally planned for 105 Henry and was moved to Tribeca as the space’s inaugural show.
As for the future of 56 and 105 Henry, Rines would like to see other dealers take over and join the tight-knit community of gallerists there. “I hope that it's another art gallery that goes into the spaces,” she says. “We left all the lights for them.”
