How Harper Levine Became an Under-the-Radar Art World Powerhouse

Harper Levine by no means predicted this. Now 54, he has expended most of his specialist everyday living as a rare ebook seller, creating a organization in St. Paul, Minnesota, and, since 2010, the Hamptons. Above the yrs artists such as Richard Prince and Eddie Martinez would appear in to get assistance on making their libraries or to acquire books on obscure Japanese photography or Beat literature. Some turned his friends.

It was at their urging that Levine started staging exhibitions at Harper’s Guides, in East Hampton. In 2014, when an artist canceled, he texted Prince, inquiring for solutions to fill the location. “Figgis,” came the reply. Prince had just lately found Genieve Figgis on Twitter and fallen for her feathery, macabre paintings. Levine took Prince’s tips, and the demonstrate offered out. “That was when I started out to actually feel that a vocation as a gallerist was attainable,” Levine states.

Courtesy Harper’s, New York

In March, Harper’s Gallery opened a 4,000-square-foot area on West 22nd Road in Manhattan, on the exact block as heavyweights like Hauser & Wirth. It is Levine’s sixth branch—his footprint has tripled around the previous two years—and he now has outposts in East Hampton, Manhattan, and Los Angeles. He represents 16 artists and employs 12 people today. “I had a vision,” Levine claims. “I made the decision that what I wished to do with the rest of my everyday living was to operate a greater gallery.”

Many are shocked by Levine’s ascent, and Levine shares the sentiment. A New York Town indigenous, he required to be a author, but he dropped out of an MFA program at St. Paul’s Hamline University in 2001 and went into bookselling. “All the a long time prior, the time as a book dealer and a writer, was just major up to this summary that I was intended to be a gallerist,” Levine suggests.

Courtesy Harper ’ s , New York

In 2016 he opened Harper’s Condominium, a pied-à-terre turned exhibition area on East 74th Avenue, his initial foothold in New York. It was a domestic affair, with exhibits of rising artists like Jennifer Guidi and Joel Mesler, and immediately after openings Levine would at times snooze on the pullout sofa. Nowadays his procedure is much larger, but its lower-essential vibe nonetheless appeals to artists and collectors. “People are fired up about his plan,” suggests art adviser Benjamin Godsill, who has bought will work from the gallery. “It feels pretty of the minute.”

Levine has also had the great fortune of driving the up to date artwork market’s wave. Get Figgis, whose jewel-toned rococo ghouls influenced the 2019 spring assortment by Marc Jacobs. As her audience expanded, her paintings ignited bidding wars at auction, marketing for as substantially as $638,692, a much cry from her 2014 solo debut at Harper’s, wherever costs started off at $6,000. “Harper’s a man who’s generally searching forward,” says Marcus Brutus, the painter whose operate opened the new gallery. (In Might Harper’s two Chelsea spaces will present do the job by the late abstract painter Younger-Il Ahn.)

Artists want to clearly show with Levine, Godsill claims, due to the fact they feel that he understands them. Even even though his gallery is young, Levine has used many years on the lookout and pondering about artwork from a distinct place of see than quite a few of the field’s prime players. “He’s a distinctive art vendor,” Godsill states. “A peaceful, mild, and developed soul.” Evidently, nice fellas do not have to end last.

This story seems in the April issue of City & Region. Subscribe Now