A sliver of the Upper East Side’s private art world is opening its doors — or at least its gallery — for the next month.
“Urhobo + Abstraction” is a new show from art dealer Adam Lindemann, a prominent collector of African art. Though he owns galleries downtown and in Montauk, Lindemann is staging this show in his East 77th Street carriage house: the first Manhattan building designed by Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye, who led the townhouse’s multiyear renovation in the late aughts, and a residence so renowned it’s the subject of a coffee table book from Rizzoli.
"Urhobo + Abstraction” is on now through June 13.
“I always felt that this building had a somewhat African feel, as his architecture does,” Lindemann said in a phone interview. “So to do an African art show in a David Adjaye building kind of works.”
The gallery space occupies nearly the entire ground floor of the home, which New York magazine architecture critic Justin Davidson in 2011 called “an eccentric concrete château … scarified with angled window slits like some demonic jack-o’-lantern.”
Because the house is in a historic district, the striking renovation is completely invisible from the street, with the façade appearing much as it did in 1898.
The free show, which is open Mondays through Thursdays from noon to 3 p.m. through June 13, centers on five life-size sculptures carved by the Urhobo people in the 19th and early 20th centuries in what is now southern Nigeria.
The works, which were once honored in clan shrines, rarely leave their private or institutional collections and have never been grouped together in the United States before this exhibit, Lindemann said.
He was able to bring the five statues to the United States this year for the show with the help of Bernard De Grunne, an art scholar and former head of the Tribal Art department at Sotheby’s. The works in the show are not for sale.
Lindemann timed the show to coincide with the reopening of the Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan Museum, which features art from sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania and the ancient Americas, and has been closed for several years for an extensive renovation.
“New York is a cultural center of the world; people from all ethnicities can come to New York and see something that relates to their people, their culture, their history,” said Lindemann, who contributed to the renovation of the wing. “That’s what’s so great about the Met reopening. It globalizes our view into what is art and what matters. It’s not just ancient Egypt.”
Lindemann paired the sculptures with contemporary masters of African descent like El Anatsui, Alma Thomas and Jack Whitten, who has a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art until August.
Lindemann acknowledges that many visitors may be more curious about the architecture of the house than the art.
“That’s an unfortunate reality,” he said with a laugh. “But I’m also thinking that no one will come anyway. So if some people show up, I’ll be happy to see them.”
