Pat Oleszko, a 79-year-old performance artist who makes brash inflatables, began the year in obscurity and greeted the spring as a rock star. In January, she filled the entirety of SculptureCenter in New York with a retrospective that centered her blow-up sculptures—including one resembling a woman’s spread legs. Two months later, across the East River, Oleszko’s 1995 sculpture Blowhard, a gigantic green face with a flaming tongue, took over a sizable gallery of the Whitney Biennial, where it has since become one of the most acclaimed contributions in the show. Over the summer, she won the Biennial’s $100,000 Bucksbaum Award.
The reason Oleszko is known at all right now in New York is largely through the work of David Pagliarulo, who mounted a show for the artist at his Chinatown gallery, David Peter Francis, in June 2024, before he had even turned 30.
Pagliarulo’s Oleszko show was only the third exhibition he had ever mounted by himself, and it was all the result of cold emailing the artist about a year earlier. Intrigued by her inclusion in a 2020 group show held by the now-defunct JTT gallery, Pagliarulo decided to write her. “She kind of brushed me off initially,” he recalled earlier this year. But he remained persistent, undogged by Oleszko’s assertion that she was on residency outside New York. “I was like, ‘I want to come over to your house’”—a loft in Manhattan where she’s lived since the 1970s. After a couple months, “she was like, ‘Sure, come over.’” The two hit it off, and Pagliarulo sealed the deal with a play on words, signing one of his emails “Day Bed” instead of David, charming Oleszko, who has a penchant for puns.
The exhibition was a risk for a young gallerist who had yet to fully prove himself, especially since Pagliarulo spread the show across not just one space but two. (The second space was a unit adjacent to his gallery space that happened to be vacant at the time.) Moreover, Oleszko hadn’t had a New York solo show since 1990, so the exhibition’s built-in audience was limited. “I said, ‘This isn’t for me.’ So, the fact that he came up with the offer of a show was so far out of my comprehension,” Oleszko recalled. “I was just kind of stunned.”
Pat Oleszko’s 2024 show at David Peter Francis.
Photo Object Studies
Pagliarulo, 31, said the show was in keeping with his focus on supporting artists he believes in, rather than on whether or not their work will sell. “I really am motivated to do a good job for the artists,” he said. “You just have to put your head down and do it, because for them, these are career-defining moments. They’re trusting me to be the person in the sidecar with a beautiful scarf and a head wrap. I have to make it work.”
A survey of Pagliarulo’s program suggests that he has done just that. Oleszko is one of two David Peter Francis artists in the current Whitney Biennial, which also includes Emilie Louise Gossiaux, whose contribution to the show is a group of drawings and a sculpture paying tribute to their late guide dog. (Pagliarulo’s partner is Drew Sawyer, a co-curator of the Whitney Biennial. Pagliarulo declined to discuss their relationship.) Meanwhile, Carrie Schneider, an artist known for photo-based installations formed from oversized rolls of chromogenic paper, is currently featured in the Venice Biennale; her current exhibition at the gallery closes this week. (She previously showed at Chart gallery, where Pagliarulo worked before founding David Peter Francis, which now represents her exclusively.) That twofer makes Pagliarulo one of the few dealers with artists in both biennials—no small feat for any gallerist, let alone one who is neither very old nor particularly established.
Yet when Pagliarulo speaks, one is constantly reminded that he is also a very young dealer with a very youthful spirit. He talks with the kind of professionalism that charms collectors and curators, but he’ll also regularly describe artists and artworks that he likes as “fierce.” He wears thin-rimmed glasses and encourages comparisons between himself and Harry Potter, that icon of millennial culture. Even his gallery’s name has a playful quality: There is no real David Peter Francis. Pagliarulo borrowed the names from his father, Peter, and his grandfather, Francis.
“My dad’s not really an art person, my grandfather wasn’t an art person, so I was like, ‘I want to bring you guys into this in some way,’ to implicate them,” Pagliarulo said. Of the gallery’s name, he added, with a laugh, “It’s weirdly Catholic.”
Growing up in Tampa, Florida—“not the culture capital of the world,” Pagliarulo said—he was exposed to art through an artist friend whose studio became a hangout spot. “Looking back on it, I’m like, ‘Oh, those are early studio visits,’” Pagliarulo said. “I think I’ve always lived in parallel to artists in that way.”
Lucas Odahara’s 2025 show at David Peter Francis.
Photo Charles Benton
He studied visual culture at American University in Washington, D.C., minoring in art history. While he viewed the discipline primarily as an academic pursuit, art ended up becoming his life. He graduated in 2018, then got an internship at Fort Gansevoort, a New York gallery known for championing un-canonized artists such as Myrlande Constant and Shuvinai Ashoona. Next, he branched out to work at other New York galleries, first joining Chart and later becoming a director at Marinaro.
In 2021, Pagliarulo was in an Uber with the artist Elaine Reichek after a gallery dinner. He had by then begun contemplating striking out on his own. “You know, you could do this yourself one day,” Pagliarulo recalled Reichek telling him. He ended up taking her advice in 2024, starting out with a group show that featured artists such as Peter Hujar, Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez, and Lucas Odahara. The latter two artists are now on his gallery’s roster.
David Peter Francis’s program has since displayed a sense of ambition that has become increasingly rare in New York. In January, the gallery mounted a group show called “Snake, Turtle, Alligator” that was centered around drawings by Bryan LaPlante, a security guard who watched over meetings about atomic weaponry that were held by the US government in the postwar era; pieces by Gregg Bordowitz, Lucy Raven, and others were presented alongside his doodles. In May, it staged a solo exhibition for William Scott, a self-taught artist whose drawings of an imagined majority-Black and -Brown city known as Praise Fiasco are rarely seen in New York. Up next, in September, is a show for Unglee, a French filmmaker and photographer whose work is virtually unknown in the US.
Asked to sum up the purview of the gallery, Pagliarulo responded, “Someone said, ‘There’s a lot of poetics in the work here,’ which I feel is true.” But poetics do not always translate into a solid cash flow. Many young New York galleries who specialize in conceptual art, as David Peter Francis does, have begun to face the prospect of closure due to the costs of participating in art fairs and paying rent each month. Each passing month seems to bring at least one more headline of another gallery’s shuttering, and along with it more anxiety about the state of the market (which some dealers insist isn’t so bad, actually).
“I don’t know how he does it,” Oleszko said. “I’m astonished every time he sells something.” But she did say that Pagliarulo stands out for one reason, and this may have something to do with his gallery’s appeal: “I don’t see the ego or the testosterone-laced control that that you usually see with other gallerists…. It’s refreshing and delightful to work with him.”
Carrie Schneider’s 2026 show at David Peter Francis.
Photo Charles Benton
Asked if money was ever a source of anxiety, Pagliarulo said, “I think it always is.” But he also pointed out that he opened during what he described as a “down market,” and that a range of interesting galleries had done something similar nearly two decades ago when they launched in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Some, like Ramiken Crucible and 47 Canal, took big swings at that time by showing art that was difficult to monetize, and they managed to survive in spite of it. Pagliarulo hopes to achieve that same momentum.
“Things have gotten progressively better,” he said. “It’s like the gallery opened at the same time that the market went back up.”
It helps that Pagliarulo keeps his overhead small, participating in a select few fairs each year. (This past summer, he made his debut at the Swiss edition of Art Basel with a booth for Gossiaux’s work.) He also maintains a tiny staff, currently employing only himself and one other person.
He has no plans to expand, because galleries run into trouble when they grow, he said. He added, “I don’t want to get to a point where I’m too far removed.”
