On a sunny late-August afternoon, Lindsay Jarvis was installing works for his opening exhibition at his new 2,000-square-foot gallery, located on the second floor of 96 Bowery. The London-born dealer is charmingly British, considered, and polite, with a sharp tongue when he needs it. Jarvis, who spent time at Sadie Coles and greengrassi back in the UK, talked through consignments—most of which were leaning against walls—with a mix of passionate enthusiasm and forensic calm.
For the past decade in New York, Jarvis has cultivated a reputation as an auction savant, a trusted art adviser with a knack for spotting overlooked value in twentieth-century names such as Lois Dodd, Richard Mayhew, and Joan Snyder. Now, after years of placing works with collectors, he’s decided to back his own taste with a gallery program.
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The timing might look contrarian: The art market, depending on which headline you read, is either in free fall or in “recalibration.” Jarvis sees something else. He points to the record-setting auction results of certain twentieth-century artists and sold-out primary shows as evidence that, while the froth of pandemic-era speculation has subsided, connoisseurship is back.
That pragmatism extends to the numbers. Jarvis is blunt that real estate is what kills most galleries, not the art itself. With that in mind, he stalked lower Manhattan for the right space. For Jarvis, the lease itself is an opportunity: Long-term, reasonably priced real estate is as rare as undervalued Mayhew canvases. But it’s not impossible to find.
ARTnews sat down with Jarvis to discuss the gallery’s debut exhibition, “Ghost,” which opens Wednesday and runs through October 4. Organized with Max Werner, the show takes landscape as a starting point, mixing contemporary artists like Francesca Mollett and Daniel Licht with twentieth-century figures including Beverly Buchanan, Lois Dodd, Richard Mayhew, Joan Snyder, Peter Saul, and Janet Sobel.
This interview has been edited lightly for clarity and concision.
ARTnews: Why open a gallery now, when so much of the talk is about contraction?
Lindsay Jarvis: People love to say the market’s in trouble, but it’s more complicated than that. Yes, some collectors are less active, but other areas are flourishing. Primary shows are still selling out, and certain twentieth-century artists are posting strong results at auction. Collectors who’ve been around know the market is cyclical. For me, it feels like the right moment to start something because the air has cleared. If you want a decades-long career in the art market, this is actually a healthier climate than the one we had during the pandemic years, which were wildly speculative and unsustainable.
What do you want this gallery to stand for, what will set you apart?
Long-term value. I’m not interested in chasing trends. The program is about showing contemporary artists alongside undervalued twentieth-century figures—people like Lois Dodd, Richard Mayhew, Joan Snyder, Janet Sobel—where the cultural significance is there and the market is only just catching up. It’s about connoisseurship and quality, not quick flips.
Daniel Licht. Liar, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Jarvis Art, New York
Tell me about “Ghost.” Why landscapes, and why now?
Landscape feels urgent again. During the Industrial Revolution, there was this anxiety that technology was cutting us off from the natural world, and I think we’re back in a similar moment now. Phones, AI, the pace of life—it all makes people crave something slower and more material. Many of the works in Ghost have that neo-romantic sensibility, where the landscape becomes less about scenery and more about a stage for questions: organic versus synthetic, decay versus renewal, even geopolitical borders. It’s a genre that can hold a lot of our present anxieties.
You’ve spent years advising collectors and bidding at auction. How does that background shape the program?
At auction you see what endures. I’ve always gravitated toward artists whose work holds up under that kind of scrutiny—Dodd, Mayhew, Snyder, Sobel. Janet Sobel is a great example; she was there at the very beginning of gestural abstraction, and only now is her market catching up to her importance. That kind of historical correction interests me.
The pandemic pushed fast, graphic, Instagram-ready painting. Where do you think we are now?
I think we’ve swung back to connoisseurship. People want to live with art that rewards time. One of my best clients said to me, “Time is the best friend of great art,” and I think that’s exactly right. You don’t need something that looks good for a season; you want work fo quality that will still matter in twenty years.
You told me once that real estate is often what sinks galleries. How are you thinking about that side of things?
That’s the practical piece. If your bread and butter is selling $15,000 paintings, you can’t be paying $50,000 a month in rent. That’s just maths. The space here is a fraction of what one of the recently closed galleries was paying. There are opportunities right now if you’re careful about the deal you make. For me, rent is part of the program: keep it sensible, keep it sustainable.
And what happens after “Ghost”?
The next show will be the first New York solo by Daniel Licht, a young painter I’ve been following for a while. He has one piece in “Ghost,” and the solo will open that conversation up in a bigger way.
I have to admit I love the nieghborhood, and even called it home once. But tell me, why open on the Bowery?
Because it feels alive. There’s history, there are scrappy spaces, and there are serious ones too. We’re right across from Bridget Donahue, and there’s a whole cluster of galleries in walking distance. It’s the right place to stake a claim.
The press loves to cover closures and crises. What do you think they’re missing?
The positives. There’s huge demand for certain twentieth-century artists and Japanese artists in particular, and almost no one’s reporting that. Or take Blum closing … there’s been little acknowledgment that they did so from a position of strength. If you only read the headlines, you’d think the whole market was collapsing. That’s just not true.