After 4 years in East Village, 10 years in Soho and 15 years in Chelsea we are on the move again.

Postmasters 4.0 Tribeca: “Grow AND Go”

We want to afford ourselves the opportunity to show art that the market is not yet swallowing whole.

We want to continue championing work with challenging but relevant content that may take time to be loved, appreciated, and acquired.

We want to look for art by artists – old and young - that confounds us, that we don't know or understand.

We don't want to anticipate the market and try to deliver on its demands. We want to challenge the market and perhaps teach it. We have, after all, sold some impossible things in the past.

We want to search deep and wide for collectors who share this vision.

We are thrilled to announce that Postmasters will be moving to 54 Franklin Street in Tribeca, taking over a spectacular 4,500 square-foot ground-floor space complete with large functional basement.

New Postmasters will have significantly more exhibition space and this time around we will not make a cement box for the art. We will keep the 14-foot-tall Corinthian columns and wooden floors, build perfectly proportioned walls and bring some high-tech to the place. There is an incredible grace and beauty to Soho and Tribeca cast iron architecture. (Just ask Donald Judd).

And here is the thing: We would like to change the narrative of this transition. We view this move as an incredible opportunity. Changing environments facilitates a chance to think, re-evaluate, and adapt according to one’s own priorities. Ours was to keep Postmasters Postmasters: to continue building the careers of the artists we represent and believe in, but also to allow for risk and experimentation in our programing; search for new forms of creative expression that do not yet have the benefit—or the burden—of years, decades, or centuries of history behind them.

Defying the market mantra of “grow or go,” we will indeed do both. We believe in growth, but not in verticality of ambition, or a single path that everyone must take to succeed.

It really is quite simple: galleries are defined by their program, not size, location, or the architects that built them. Galleries, for us, are not a thing of the past. In the art eco-system they are not shops, but neither are they museums. They are by definition local and stationary, and that comes with power to create an active hub and a community around a place. We will be your destination space: large enough to have several projects presented at once; personal enough to be a place to hang out, talk about art, and contribute to ideas reflective of our time.

There will be sofas.

For a gallery to reach outside of its locality, the Internet is key. We will maintain and extend our already substantial online presence. We will of course do selected art fairs, while also experimenting with new tools for distribution and dissemination. For those that do not venture outside of Chelsea, we will be back—once a year— with an exhibition that a friendly foundation has invited us to do.

Postmasters will reopen sometime in the fall, depending on the graces of the NYC Building Department. As we renovate, our offices will remain open for business, we will trawl the web, do pop-up events, and a "hard hat" show or two. We will announce that timeline shortly. First and foremost we would like to thank our artists who, in the last few months, may have been poorly served by three Polish-speaking people snapping at each other in a language you thankfully don't understand. We are done with that.

We want to thank all the good, generous people that helped us pack almost thirty years of archives, libraries, and art, as well as personal possessions from our home. You know who you are.

We will miss many passionate gallerists and friends in the neighborhood. We send all the best to Leo Koenig who will take over our space in what has now bizarrely become a Swiss German corner of Chelsea. Enjoy the building we transformed from what used to be a garage for garbage trucks. It has a good vibe, and we wish you love.

There will be no closing party. There will however be a big opening party.

Do zobaczenia!!
Magda Sawon, Tamas Banovich and Paulina Bebecka

Exploring the new and the unfamiliar is what the best artists do. The artist’s job is to be a witness to his time in history (Robert Rauschenberg)