(Source: Eden Gallery)
New York City’s Eden Gallery is making money selling works by artists who have yet to discover a resale market
by JAMES TARMY
ON A recent weekday afternoon in New York, a cleaning woman in all black stood in the Fifth Avenue window of Eden Gallery dusting a very large bronze purse. Created by the artist Roman Feral and priced at US$400,000 (RM1.73 billion), the larger-than-life replica of a crocodile Hermes Birkin bag featured a cluster of monochrome butterflies emerging from its depths.
Inside the gallery, other artworks had similar brand affiliations. There was a digital print by the artist Gal Yosef depicting Winnie the Pooh wearing a Louis Vuitton T-shirt and holding a honey pot filled with US$100 bills; a painting by the artist Angelo Accardi that features, among other figures, Disney’s Aladdin standing next to a red Ferrari; and a Swarovski crystal- covered sculpture of a very large Balmain perfume bottle by the artist Metis Atash.
The gallery features works that tend to incorporate symbols of pop culture (Star Wars, luxury brands, Disney) as well as very bright colours.
Eden Gallery CEO Guy Martinovsky said the gallery is actually shifting focus away from brand-oriented imagery. “I can show you artworks where there’s no brands at all,” he said. “Too often people just use brands for opportunism, and we’re trying to move away from that more and more.”
Regardless, much of the art on the wall seemed to be marching to the beat of a different drum than, say, mega gallery Hauser & Wirth. “I always listen to collectors and not to what other galleries are doing, what museums are expecting, what the art world is expect- ing,” said Eden Gallery founder and sole owner Cathia Klimovsky.
Unsurprisingly then, Eden Gallery is not a gallery in the same mould as many of its traditional counterparts, which typically mount single, month-long exhibitions that fill their entire space. Should a person want to buy a work, they have to wait until a show is over; historically, the only places where so-called “cash and carry” occurs is at an art fair.
Eden Gallery, in contrast, showcases a cacophony of work by a variety of artists. Pride of place at the Fifth Avenue location seemed to go to the star street artist Alec Monopoly, whose paintings, sculptures and prints — nearly all of which include the cartoon Monopoly man — have earned him a massive following.
It’s easy enough for people in the broader art world to sneer at this aesthetic, but it’s harder to argue with its success, particularly as the art market continues to suffer. In 2024, the market slumped 12% by value to US$57.5 billion, an Art Basel and UBS Group AG market report found. Art deal- ers collectively sold 6% less by value year over year; and sales the year before that fell by 3%, accord- ing to the report.
By contrast, the leaders of Eden Gallery said that it’s thriving. Along with the Fifth Avenue gallery, which covers 20,000 sq ft across three floors, it has a four-storey, 25,000 sq ft gallery in SoHo and a 10,000
sq ft gallery on Madison Avenue. It also has outposts in Aspen, Miami, London, Dubai, Las Vegas and the Maldives, where a showroom sits inside of a Waldorf Astoria on Ithaafushi Island.
Annual revenue has “eight zeroes”, said Martinovsky. “In the last 10 years we grew by 25% a year on average,” he said, attributing the success to the company’s business model.
That model, simply put, is retail — the same as nearby luxury boutiques on Fifth Avenue. “[This] could be Christian Dior SE or Louis Vuitton, but it’s Eden Gallery,” Martinovsky said. That sounds like bluster, but Martinovsky said that 50% of the gallery’s revenue comes from people simply walking in off the street, something absolutely unheard of in the contemporary art world.
“Call it a store,” said Klimovsky. “But the art market is following us.” Prices in the gallery generally range from US$2,000 for a print to about US$800,000 for a major sculpture. Most of Eden Gallery’s revenue is derived from work priced between US$25,000 and US$250,000, Martinovsky said. A quarter of a million dollars is not much in the broader contemporary art market, where paintings regularly sell for millions of dollars at auction.
But Eden Gallery’s comparatively low price point explains and underscores how different it is from a standard gallery.
That’s because those Chelsea institutions do their best to cultivate their artists’ reputations (and prices) through a standard playbook of commissioning books and scholarship, supporting museum shows, and, perhaps most important, propping up an artist’s resale market.
This is particularly true when it comes to very expensive artworks: If you buy a painting for US$1 million, you want some kind of assurance it will still be worth US$1 million when you decide to sell.
With the exception of Alec Monopoly, Eden Gallery’s artists, in contrast, don’t have visible resale markets to speak of. Roman Feral, of the bronze Birkin, has never had a work sold at auction, for instance, according to the Artnet database. Neither has Atash, of the bejewelled Balmain bottle.
Accardi, whose painting depicted Aladdin and the Ferrari, has seen his work come to auction three times; two of the three lots failed to sell. Once Eden Gallery sells a work, there is a very good chance its value has gone to zero, at least in the short term.
Martinovsky brushed this aside, saying that Andy Warhol’s secondary market didn’t take off until he was in his 50s, and that many of Eden Gallery’s artists are much younger.
“The classic journey was auction houses, museums, major private collections, top renowned art fairs,” he wrote in a follow-up email. “Today, an artist can establish himself, become very successful, and have his retail price raised organically and consistently, just because of the balance between the offer and the demand.”
Plus, he added, people sell art when they don’t like it anymore — and Eden Gallery’s clients really love what they buy. “Many of our clients simply don’t sell the art. They want to live with it.” — Bloomberg
- This article first appeared in The Malaysian Reserve weekly print edition
The post Eden Gallery bucks the contemporary art biz model appeared first on The Malaysian Reserve.
