David Zwirner is opening up its online viewing room to galleries in Brussels and Paris for the fourth edition of its ongoing Platform initiative. The selling opportunity—which allows smaller galleries in Europe to offer select works on Zwirner’s website—will be welcomed by a hard hit art market in Europe, particularly after a shocking report predicted the demise of a third of galleries in France before the lockdown era is through.
Art galleries around the world have been rushing to migrate their operations online ever since they were shuttered, but not every gallery has the budget or the technical infrastructure to support a functional website, let alone the international client base to populate it with sales. This is where mega-gallery David Zwirner, which was among the first wave of galleries to launch an online viewing room back in January 2017, has stepped in to help.
At the beginning of April, Zwirner piloted its Platform initiative to host a dozen New York galleries on its website for a month. (Lower East Side dealer James Fuentes reported that the experiment generated six figures’ worth of sales for his gallery.) Shortly afterward, Zwirner hosted editions for smaller galleries in London and Los Angeles.
“This current moment continues to be an objectively difficult situation for all of us, but we were lucky to have an online space already built out so we wanted to share it with our colleagues,” Justine Durrett, senior director of David Zwirner’s Paris gallery, tells Artnet News.
Now, the gallery is launching its fourth edition, Platform: Paris/Brussels. The online initiative will run May 22 through June 19, coinciding with the reopening of David Zwirner’s physical gallery space in Paris on May 23 with an exhibition of photographs by Philip Lorca-diCorcia.
Sharon Van Overmeiren, He Who Walks Behind The Rows (2019). Photo by HV Photography. Courtesy the artist and Damien & The Love Guru, Brussels.
The viewing room on David Zwirner Online will include 12 Paris- and Brussels-based galleries chosen by the Zwirner team, each showing works by a single artist. And although some in the trade grumbled that Zwirner would gain access to valuable client data in the process of opening up his website, the gallery has specified that visitors to Platform are not required to enter their email addresses, as they are to enter the gallery’s own viewing rooms, and that all Platform sales will be managed directly by the participating galleries.
Some of the galleries will be presenting work by artists who missed out on their exhibitions during the spring. The full program for Platform: Paris/Brussels is below.
Allen (Paris), presenting works by Daniel Turner (b. 1983, Portsmouth, Virginia, U.S.).
Art:Concept (Paris), presenting works by Jean-Michel Sanejouand (b. 1934, Lyon).
Balice Hertling (Paris), presenting works by Xinyi Cheng (b. 1989, China).
Campoli Presti (Paris), presenting works by Katherine Bradford (b. 1942, U.S.).
CLEARING (Brussels), presenting works by Loïc Raguénès (b. 1968, Besançon, France).
Damien & The Love Guru (Brussels), presenting works by Sharon Van Overmeiren (b. 1985, Belgium).
Édouard Montassut (Paris), presenting works by Maggie Lee (b. 1987, U.S.).
Galerie Crèvecoeur (Paris), presenting works by Autumn Ramsey (born 1976, U.S.).
Galerie Joseph Tang (Paris), presenting works by Daiga Grantina (b. 1985, Latvia).
High Art (Paris), presenting works by Lucy Bull (b. 1990, New York).
New Galerie (Paris), presenting works by Zevs (Aguirre Schwarz, b. 1977).
Office Baroque (Brussels), presenting works by Rezi Van Lankveld (b. 1973, The Netherlands).