ACE GALLERY FOUNDER FIRED AND FACING POSSIBILITY OF CRIMINAL CHARGES
After facing legal claims by artists represented by the gallery seeking their works back and payment for works sold, the founder of Los Angeles’s Ace Gallery, Douglas Chrismas, has been terminated from the business by a court-appointed financial manager according to Jori Finkel in the Art Newspaper. The manager, Sam Leslie, is a forensic accountant who now runs the day-to-day operations of the gallery after it filed for bankruptcy, and he has filed a report documenting millions of dollars diverted from the gallery to mysterious accounts and dozens of works of art that have been moved to private storage.
Leslie ended Chrismas’s role at the gallery after a review of Ace’s financial records, noting that from February 2013 to February 2016, a total of $16,910,139 was directed to Ace New York, and of that sum $4,568,382 was diverted to an entity known as the Ace Museum. Both companies are red flags, since Chrismas closed the New York branch of his gallery more than a decade ago, and his so-called museum on La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles has not had a consistent history of exhibitions. Leslie also found that Chrismas had instructed assistants to move sixty works of art from Ace Gallery to a private storage facility the day before Leslie took over management of the business.
In his court report, Leslie said, “I asked Chrismas to prove his ownership to me of these sixty pieces . . . He told me had had acquired them years before, and when pressed, gave me dates in the early 1970s and 1980s, and he confirmed all works he allegedly owns predated the year 2000 in any event. None of these pieces, including one of significant value, were listed in the bankruptcy petition he personally filed in 2004.”
The attorney who represented the painter Gary Lang in the Ace bankruptcy case, J. Scott Bovitz, says concealing assets in such a case could result in criminal charges: “If the artwork was in fact his personal property, Mr. Chrismas didn’t disclose it in his 2004 bankruptcy, and that’s a problem . . . If it wasn’t his own property and he stole it from the bankruptcy estate this year, that’s also a problem. Either way, he has painted himself into a corner.” Bovitz noted that transferring money out of a bankrupt estate may also be a crime, depending on intent. It is not clear as of yet whether a criminal investigation is under way.
The gallery is still open with regular hours and some staff, and it will open a new group exhibition on June 11—including works by John Armleder, Mary Corse, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Ben Jones, Jannis Kounellis, Gary Lang, Robert Longo, and Julian Schnabel, among others—at its location on Wilshire Boulevard.
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