Clearing, the influential New York gallery that has served as a launchpad for many prominent artists’ careers, will close its Manhattan and Los Angeles locations, founder Oliver Babin announced Thursday (7 August). In a statement, Babin said the gallery saw “no viable path forward”. Babin tells The Art Newspaper he’s turning in the keys to the gallery’s three-storey New York space tomorrow.
“We kept hope—probably in a sort of irrational way—that we could turn the corner. Turns out, there’s no corner,” Babin says. “Now, we are forced to face the fact that actually it doesn’t make any sense to put in another minute or another dollar trying to resurrect a corpse.”
The gallery launched in 2011 in Bushwick at a time when the Brooklyn neighbourhood had a thriving gallery scene. Babin had moved to the US from France in 2009, first as an artist for a residency, before opening the gallery. As Babin describes it, early Clearing shows were an adventure, “pure poetry [held together] with tape and rubber band”. The gallery held more than 200 exhibitions in its 14-year run, including staging important shows by artists including Harold Ancart, Calvin Marcus, Korakrit Arunanondchai and Hannah Levy.
“We’ve been crushed by the overheads, which is pretty classic. Rent, shipping, fairs—all these things continue to increase and revenue plummets,” Babin says. “A proper [chief financial officer] would have decided to pull the plug six months, 12 months, 18 months or 24 months ago.”
The gallery’s Bushwick space relocated to the Bowery in Manhattan in 2023. In retrospect, Babin says, taking on a more expensive rent just as the art market began to slow down was a bad gamble, and could be seen as “the first nail being driven into the coffin”.
Olivier Babin of Clearing. Photo courtesy of Clearing.
Those two years recovering from the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and leading up to the economic retraction, Babin says, “everyone was flush, business was excellent”. But by the time the new, more expensive space in the Bowery opened, “the music had stopped, the tide was low and we were overexposed”. Clearing also had other spaces to worry about by then: the gallery had expanded to Brussels in 2012 and Los Angeles in 2020. (Last year, the former Clearing outpost in Brussels split from the rest of the gallery in a restructuring that ended with that location’s former director, Lodovico Corsini, now operating the space under his own name.)
“I have no regrets, but yeah, I probably should have done a few things differently,” Babin says. “But ultimately, everyone’s suffering right now.”
Clearing’s final exhibitions were solo painting shows, Henry Curchod in Los Angeles and Coco Young in New York. In June, the gallery launched Maison Clearing, a pop-up group exhibition of works by 46 artists—most not members of the gallery’s roster—in a villa in Basel, Switzerland, instead of taking part in any of the city’s concurrent art fairs.
Clearing is the latest in a spate of US galleries to shutter this summer. On Wednesday (6 August), Chelsea stalwart Kasmin announced it would close in order to transition to a new venture called Olney Gleason, led by the former’s executive leadership. Venus Over Manhattan founder Adam Lindemann said last month he would shut down the business to focus on building his own collection, and Tim Blum announced he too would “sunset” his eponymous Tokyo and Los Angeles spaces.
As for Babin’s next steps, he says not to expect him to take a sales director position at a larger, more established gallery. It’s not an uncommon path to take: after Jasmin Tsou closed her closely-watched gallery JTT, she joined Lisson Gallery; Gavin Brown—whose namesake enterprise was a fixture of the downtown and, later, uptown scene—is now a partner at Barbara Gladstone; Simon Preston was hired by Pace after closing his eponymous Lower East Side gallery.
“I don’t want it, and I think I would be really bad at it,” Babin says. “I want to stay a wild animal. And I’d rather suffer in the wild than become like a lap dog.”
Babin says he has been touched by the outpouring of support since announcing the gallery’s closure. He wants to stay in an art-adjacent career, and is taking an expansive view of the situation.
“I’m going to drink Ayahuasca in the Amazon next week,” Babin says. “I’ll see what I learn and what I find out. Where I should go, what I should do.”