Lyles & King, a taste-making downtown New York gallery that’s been in business for just over a decade, announced on Thursday that it had closed.
Its final exhibitions, a solo for Jessie Makinson and a three-person show for Cato Ouyang, Fernanda Galvão, and Ren Light Pan, closed on June 20. The gallery’s roster included artists like Aneta Grzeszykowska, Mira Schor, Jo-ey Tang & Thomas Fougeirol, Kathy Ruttenberg, and Lily Wong.
A number of artists had exhibitions at Lyles & King before being included in major international exhibitions, like Grzeszykowska in the 2022 Venice Biennale, Shala Miller in the 2026 Carnegie International, and Kiyan Williams in the 2022 Whitney Biennale. Aaron Gilbert, who first showed at Lyles & King in 2019, is now represented by Gladstone Gallery.
In an email to its listserv, addressed as “Dear Friends,” founder Isaac Lyles wrote, “It is with profound gratitude and a tinge of sadness that I announce after eleven years and 118 exhibitions Lyles & King has closed.”
He continued, “I founded Lyles & King in May 2015, with a belief in the importance of experiencing exhibitions in an all-too-mediated world. I believed then, as I believe now, in art’s capacity to engage us with our humanity: with our bodies, with one another, and with subjectivities outside our own. I feel we need this sense of connection today more than ever.”
Founded in May 2015, Lyles & King started out in the Lower East Side at 106 Forsyth Street, opening with an exhibition titled “The Inaugural,” which included an intergenerational mix of artists like Mira Schor, Violet Dennison, Davina Semo, Despina Stokou, and Eli Ping. Solo exhibitions for Schor, Semo, Chris Hood, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Aaron Gilbert, and Rose Kallal, among others, followed.
The gallery’s last show on Forsyth closed in May 2020 before it relocated to a larger location at the corner of Catherine Street and Henry Street in Chinatown. It inaugurated that space in September 2020 with an exhibition titled “I WANT TO FEEL ALIVE AGAIN,” which a press release described the show as coming at a time when the “world [has] grown uncertain” and as such it would be apt to “refocus on figuration, to take refuge in the facticity of our bodies (when pricked, we bleed: fact),” with “skin as the central motif.” Among the artists included were Rebecca Horn, Farley Aguilar, Ivana Bašić, Jenna Gribbon, Ariana Papademetropoulous, Chiffon Thomas, Faith Wilding, and Elia Alba.
The gallery has more recently staged solo shows for Natalie Frank, Julia Thompson, Kiyan Williams, Lily Wong, Ren Light Pan, Daniela Paz Gomez, Shala Miller, and Ophelia Arc. The gallery also organized a number of group exhibitions, including “In Praise of Shadows,” curated by Ebony L. Haynes, and “The Skin I Live In,” curated by Geena Brown.
Last October, it mounted a “10th Anniversary Exhibition,” which featured a number of artists who had shown at the gallery throughout its history. “There’s this new sense of energy and vitality that’s hard to describe, which I think comes from a period of deep reflection, especially through this exhibition,” Lyles told the Observer on the occasion of the exhibition.
In his Thursday email, Lyles thanked “the artists, their visions, their risks, and their ambitions,” as well as “collectors, curators, fellow gallerists, writers, gallery visitors, and my family” for their support during the gallery’s run. He concluded, “I look forward to sharing with you what’s next.”
