| Intro | British art dealer |
| Is | Art dealer |
| From | United Kingdom |
| Type |
Arts Business |
| Gender | male |
Gavin Brown is a British art dealer, the owner of Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, the gallery he established in 1994 on Broome Street, in SoHo, and now at 620 Greenwich Street, New York City.
Early life and education
Brown grew up in Croydon. His mother was a social worker; his father an architect, who abandoned the family when Brown was 11. He attended Newcastle Polytechnic – where his classmates included Matthew Higgs – and Chelsea College of Arts. At Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London, Brown worked as an assistant in the back room alongside Damien Hirst before moving to New York in 1988 to continue his studies at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program.
Career
Brown began organizing exhibitions in the early 1990s – including one for 303 Gallery in 1991 as well as pop-ups in at the Hotel Chelsea, his apartment on the Upper West Side and in a cubicle he rented in a Midtown office building – and opened his first gallery in Soho in 1994. In December 1993, he had a solo show of his own work at David Zwirner Gallery in Soho.
In the early 2000s, Brown ran a gallery in Rome called Roma Roma Roma with fellow dealers Franco Noero and Toby Webster, who have galleries in Turin, Italy, and Glasgow, Scotland, respectively. In 2012 he took a lease in Los Angeles for 356 Mission, a gallery that is operated as an artist-run space by painter Laura Owens.
In 2014, The Guardian named him in their “Movers and makers: the most powerful people in the art world”.
Personal life
Since 2011, Brown has been residing in Harlem, where he moved with his wife, artist Hope Atherton, and their child. From a previous marriage with Scottish fashion designer Lucy Barnes, Brown has three children.