Executive gallery director Peggy Leboeuf, who launched the Upper East Side space in 2013 and has helped steer this “dream project,” graciously led a tour alongside Senior Director Matthew Wilkin through the construction site, which is slowly giving way to what will undoubtedly be as polished as any museum interior. Pointing out various details small and large—how the arched ceilings will pick up on the light, the impressive views of the bustling neighborhood from the sixth-story roof, the skylight to come on the third floor—Leboeuf paints a vivid picture of how elegant the building, a former fabric factory on the north end of Orchard Street, will look in just a few weeks.
“The Lower East Side was a sweet choice for [founder] Emmanuel [Perrotin] because of the charming area, but also the community of artists and galleries around it like Canada, Karma, Rachel Uffner, Simone Subal,” Leboeuf, who has worked with Perrotin since 1996, explains. Perrotin will certainly represent one of the larger specks on the Lower East Side gallery map: a successful yet still relatively young gallery. As to what distinguishes the space from its neighbors, Leboeuf notes, “There are not so many large galleries like ours, except a few great ones like Miguel Abreu and Salon 94, so we offer something different yet sympathetic to the museums, institutions and smaller galleries that exist already.”
Indeed, at more than seven times the size of their previous location on Madison Avenue, the ambitious space is rare for the Lower East Side, where galleries typically have the capacity of just one of Perrotin’s exhibition spaces. “Now we have a building where we can have multiple exhibitions for our emergent to very established artists," says Leboeuf. "The beauty of the space is the many rooms are complementary to each other.”
