After eight years as a partner of a small but highly respected contemporary art gallery – Denny Dimin in Tribeca – art dealer Rob Dimin struck out on his own earlier this year with his eponymous gallery. During his tenure at Denny Dimin, he helped build the careers of artists such as Amir H. Fallah, Justine Hill, Dana Sherwood and Kennedy Yanko. Dimin has worked closely with Fallah on his solo exhibition at CICA in Vancouver and has placed works in institutions such as LACMA, the Parrish Museum, the Davis Museum at Wellesley College and the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
We caught up with Dimin to find out what caused the split with his former partner, what it’s like to run his own gallery, and how a small gallery navigates the risk-reward of applying for and participating in major art fairs. increasingly compulsory art.
What happened that made you and your former gallery co-owner, Elizabeth Denny, decide to go their separate ways?
The breakup happened abruptly at the end of December [2022]. It wasn’t something I had planned on at the time. Elizabeth and I had worked together for eight years, [but] making decisions in the industry with another person has become a real challenge for both of us.
It was one of those things where I was really surprised in the moment…it wasn’t something that was brought to me by my business partner saying ‘Hey, I don’t think this partnership is working.’ Looking back, there were writings on the walls over the previous months and even years.
What was the source of the tension or where did the disagreements come from?
Honestly, I don’t know what the formal catalyst was. This stemmed from years of having drastically different personality types. I am very honest in my way of perceiving things; it may not be an absolute truth, but I’m being honest. I’m more of a glass half full type. Elizabeth started the gallery 10 years ago. I became his partner two years later. So she started by getting the gallery off the ground, then the gallery grew and she needed and wanted a partner. I thought it was the way forward, instead of opening up my own space.
I’m really grateful for a lot of this insight into starting partnerships where a gallery was entering its third year. It allowed me to catch up quickly and learn without having some start-up trial and error that she had already been through. However, looking back, it was one of those things where I don’t know if she ever really considered me a partner, even though we had a partnership agreement, my name was on the door, I co-signed PPP loans, the lease was in both of our names.
What do you mean by different personality types?
I have a great personality. And so people started recognizing me as the face, or one of the faces in the gallery. I was the most social person in the company, the one who attended events and spoke most regularly to the press. We then started to have really different ideas about what the growth of the program might look like. We had a lot of agreement, but I saw opportunities for some programming changes in our Asian space, and there was no consensus. I think it became a point of contention between the two of us.
What were your goals for Asia?
In the last seven months of our partnership, for most of the second half of 2022, I have seen Asia as an opportunity to expand the program by testing the waters with new artists and really exploring the Asian market. We had hired a very knowledgeable and intelligent director in Asia, and she and I were aligning ourselves on what the program should look like there. There was enormous resistance and it became a polarizing issue.
We worked very hard to get into Art Basel Hong Kong. I had put together a proposal with an artist with whom I worked extremely closely named Amir Fallah. It made sense for us to open shop in Hong Kong. It became a huge pain point.
Installation view of “Surface Level” at Dimin, from April 27 to May 27, 2023. Artists: Amie Cunat, Courtney Childress, Ye Qin Zhu. Image courtesy of Dimin.
Would you say these are typical growing pains of a small to medium sized gallery?
All of this tension came from the fact that the gallery had a lot of eyes but not necessarily the most commercially viable program. For example, our program was very institution-friendly, but that doesn’t always translate into a market-friendly approach. I don’t wanna give the impression that I’m just commercial, but if you want to have these really ambitious institution-focused projects, you have to be aware of the market and the system around you, especially at our scale – a gallery with two locations, and at the larger point I think that we had 10 or 11 employees… not huge, but not small either.
And how do art fairs take this into account?
The fairs you attend really define where you stand in relation to the market. When you are a young gallery growing to a certain point, one of your measures is fairs. Fairs are so closely linked to the market. You need to have sensational artists doing really stellar work that is also in line with market trends for these fairs to really make sense for a gallery.
Installation view of #1 “Surface Level” at Dimin, from April 27 to May 27, 2023. Artists: Jillian Mayer, Nsenga Knight, Kennedy Yanko, Brennen Steines. Image courtesy of Dimin.
What advice would you give to someone going through a similar professional breakdown?
I think it’s important to keep a cool head. Focus on the positives and the rebuilding. Do not argue with the ex-partner; that’s what lawyers are for.
In March, three months after the split, you opened your own space, Dimin, not far from your old location on Broadway in Tribeca. How did you experience managing your own gallery?
At first, the separation was really difficult. I must have hit the ground running; I needed to be busy. You go through this whole start-up phase. Finding a new location was really fun, even with its challenges and construction. I’m in a second-floor space that’s quite large at 2,000 square feet — about double the size of the old space — and I love it.
THE the programming challenges are very real. Our partnership ended in December and I should open as soon as possible. But you can’t expect artists to just hold a solo show for you. So that kicked me back to square one in a lot of ways, but it was cool. I’ve probably enjoyed 50 studio visits in two and a half years month.
One of the things that I realized is that after seven or eight years of working with certain artists, you have built careers. Starting from scratch with artists is really a challenge: it’s about learning their professional working styles, how they like to communicate, how they handle deadlines, how seriously they take private communication with collectors rather than understand the role of galleries.
I spent a lot of time building relationships with other dealers, with artists, with fair directors, with a lot of people in the industry. When their position changes and you don’t hear from them the same way again, all those years of hard work seem to have been wasted. That was why I needed to open so quickly – I didn’t need to skip a beat. People weren’t even necessarily aware that the separation had taken place.
Is there anything you would have done differently?
I didn’t hire the artists from the previous gallery early enough. Part of that was what I thought was out of respect for the partnership, but in hindsight it was a mistake on my part. I should have called everyone the next morning – not trying to ‘pick them up’, just let them know what was going on.
What will be your approach to art fairs in the future?
Personally, I like to go to fairs. The risk/reward is really scary, but I’m a very social person and like talking to people. These moments of hyper-communication, when you meet a lot of people in an afternoon, it’s exhilarating for me. Were doing NADA Foreland in upstate New York this month. I applied for a big fair for next year; we’ll see if it works. I applied to Art Basel Miami Beach, assuming I wasn’t going to get in, but just telling the fair committee that this is a place I see myself in the near future. There is a possibility of maybe doing another fair in Miami, a satellite fair.
What’s new next?
“The Fantastics,“a group show of a lot of really cool artists, opens today, July 12. It has work from other galleries and artists I’m friends with, including Nick Doyle, who exhibits with Perrotin, and Willie Stewart, who is exhibiting with Nicelle Beauchene. We have some work by Ann Craven that we sent over from Karma, which was really cool, and 56 Henry gave us a piece by LaKela Brown.
What else did you learn from this experience?
I love and feel absolutely blessed to be an art dealer. It’s like one of the coolest, quirkiest, weirdest jobs in the world. It’s a hell of a blessing to wake up and talk about art and fall asleep, even if it’s a frustrating day.
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