New York Gallery Lyles & King to Close After 11 Years
The gallery became known for championing the careers of Mira Schor, Chris Hood, Philip Birch, and Davina Semo, among others.
After 11 years in business, the contemporary art gallery Lyles & King announced its closure today, July 2, in a social media post thanking its artists and supporters.
The gallery mounted 118 exhibitions throughout its run, bookending its programming this June with a solo show of gouache and pencil works by Jessie Makinson and a group exhibition of new work by Cato Ouyang, Fernanda Galvão, and Ren Light Pan.
“I founded Lyles & King in May 2015, with a belief in the importance of experiencing exhibitions in an all-too-mediated world,” founder Isaac Lyles wrote in his public announcement, adding that he maintained his belief in “art’s capacity to engage us with our humanity: with our bodies, with one another, and with subjectivities outside our own.”
Lyles served as the associate director of Derek Eller Gallery prior to developing the independent venture.
After debuting at NADA New York's spring fair in 2015, Lyles & King established its first physical location on Forsyth Street, while the city's art scene was moving eastward from Chelsea. In its early years, the gallery became known for championing the careers of Mira Schor, Chris Hood, Philip Birch, Chris Dorland, and Davina Semo through solo and group presentations. Semo told the Observer that she decided to move from the established Marlborough Gallery to Lyles & King in its first year because she wanted a “peer group with more common intellectual interests.”
After expanding its roster with the likes of Makinson, Aneta Grzeszykowska, and Farley Aguilar, the gallery closed its Forsyth Street space in 2020 and reopened on Catherine Street with a massive group exhibition for the occasion. The Catherine Street location offered a larger floor plan and also included an outdoor space, which was used to host sculptural and installation exhibitions by Kathy Ruttenberg, Michael DeLucia, and Polly Borland, among others.
Shortly afterward, the gallery expanded around the corner to Henry Street. By this point, Lyles & King had grown from an emerging gallery into a reputable space that supported unique, dimensional exhibitions, performance work, and multimedia practices by emerging and established artists.
Lyles & King celebrated its 10th anniversary last year with another group exhibition that placed work by Schor, Claes Oldenburg, and Judith Bernstein with that of emerging artists, including Ophelia Arc, who was represented by the gallery shortly after earning her Master of Fine Arts in 2025.
The gallery did not provide a reason for the closure, but the move comes amid a spate of galleries shuttering their physical locations from coast to coast in recent years. In 2023 alone, New York City lost six galleries and saw two veteran dealers shift entirely to online operations. By 2025, Kasmin, Clearing, and Canal Projects had announced their closures, joined by Altman Siegel in San Francisco and LA Louver in Los Angeles, which downsized massively to focus on private relationships.
When asked for any words of support or wisdom for spaces and stewards of emerging talent that are braving the current climate of the contemporary art world (heatwave notwithstanding), Lyles wrote the following in an email to Hyperallergic: “Be fearless. Be slow. Be true to yourself. Don't compare. Collaborate. Be patient: you're building a foundation brick by brick. Work ferociously, show great work. Don't frame, don't ship—unless you are beyond obsessed with the work. Only exhibit work you're obsessed with.”
