RIVINGTON ARMS TO CLOSE

Rivington Arms in New York will close its doors in January, reports Katya Kazakina for Bloomberg. Friends and directors Mirabelle Marden and Melissa Bent announced their decision to part ways after returning from the Frieze Art Fair in London last month. While the news comes amid slumping sales in New York’s contemporary art market and fears that the financial turmoil will force many galleries out of business, the partners said their decision was unrelated to the economy. “It had to do with where each of us wanted to take the gallery,” Bent said. “We are not ending because we are getting crushed out.” Marden said they delayed announcing their decision so they could follow through with the gallery’s commitments. “Many of our artists had solo exhibitions abroad and in the US this fall,” she said. Kazakina writes that the two well-connected young women—Marden’s father is painter Brice Marden—helped launch the likes of Dash Snow and Dan Colen. They also placed works with private collectors, including advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, and in prestigious museum shows such as the Whitney Biennial. Marden and Bent met as students at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. On September 10, 2001, they signed a lease for a storefront space on Rivington Street, arriving on the Lower East Side years before the area transformed into a major gallery hub anchored by the New Museum. In 2005, the gallery moved into more elegant quarters, in a brownstone on East Second Street. The two women stated yesterday: “We are closing the gallery because our business partnership was no longer working, and we didn’t want our differences to affect the artists or the gallery as a whole.” They said the two of them would “remain close friends.”