Embattled Dealer Dies at 68 – RisePEI

Perry Rubenstein, a vendor with deep social connections in New York and Los Angeles whose profession was delivered to halt by a grand theft conviction, has died at 68. His ex-wife, the PR government Sara Fitzmaurice, confirmed Rubenstein’s passing and mentioned he died of pure causes.

“Perry had some twists and activates his journey, however his true north was at all times his unconditional love for his daughters and his legacy will reside on with them,” Fitzmaurice wrote in an electronic mail. “He can be actually missed.”

Previous to spending six months in jail a number of years in the past, Rubenstein had been esteemed within the New York and L.A. scenes, due to his eponymous gallery, which filed for chapter in 2014.

Rubenstein had labored with artists akin to Mike Kelley, Sturtevant, James Lee Byars, Diana Al-Hadid, Iwan Baan, Jesper Simply, Kamrooz Aram, and Robin Rhode. Having initially opened on Prince Avenue in SoHo in 1989, Rubenstein inaugurated two areas in Chelsea in 2004, after which relocated his total operation to Los Angeles in 2011, at a time when few New York galleries had executed so.

However his grand theft cost, which resulted from allegations involving two L.A. collectors, tarnished his popularity. Whereas he continued to work as an artwork adviser, his gallery by no means reopened.

Born in 1954, Rubenstein bought his begin as a mannequin. He claimed to have been first observed by the designer Gianni Versace throughout the ’70s whereas in Milan.

“Versace threw a number of sweaters at me, photographed me, after which mentioned, ‘You’re the very best mannequin on this metropolis,’” Rubenstein told Artillery in 2013. “After all, I used to be the one 6-foot tall male mannequin, because it was low season. On the finish of the day, he gave me $1,000 in money. Quickly I used to be working with Versace, Armani, Valentino and different main designers, modeling for French and Italian Vogue, touring throughout Europe and Africa.”

Whereas in Europe, he purchased works by Italian artists on the rise like Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, and Sandro Chia, amassing a set that Artillery described as “small however important.” A number of years later, he give up modeling and moved to New York.

In that metropolis, he fell in with a crowd that included Andy Warhol, Larry Gagosian, Tony Shafrazi, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. In certainly one of a number of Medium posts that Rubenstein wrote over time, he described his friendship with Basquiat, calling himself an “enabler” of the artist’s drug habits throughout the early phases of Basquiat’s brief profession.

“Our relationship was based mostly on my ardour for his work and our shared ardour for a number of the identical leisure medicine which grew to become fairly harmful for each of us as we progressed from ganja to positive wine to the queen of medication, cocaine,” Rubenstein wrote.

Though Rubenstein didn’t initially start his profession with severe art-world ambitions, his gallery ended up turning into successful. He instructed Artillery that he had been capable of achieve a foothold within the New York artwork world as a result of “boundaries of entry to this world had been considerably much less structured than in the present day.”

A lot in a while, Rubenstein’s transfer to open in Chelsea in 2004 was thought-about an necessary one. He grew to become an early adopter of the neighborhood, which is now thought-about certainly one of New York’s central gallery districts. “Should you go to Berlin and inform an artist that you’re solely going to indicate them on 57th Avenue and never in Chelsea, they gained’t present with you,” he told the New York Times in 2007.

His tune modified in 2011, when he moved to L.A. and instructed the Los Angeles Occasions that there have been “very restricted prospects by way of what you are able to do with gallery area” in New York. He mentioned that Los Angeles was “not the sideshow; it’s not second to New York as an arts capital.”

Issues began to shift when, in 2013, Michael Ovitz, a collector and the cofounder of the Inventive Artists Company, sued Rubenstein over the sale of two works by Richard Prince price practically $1 million. Ovitz claimed that Rubenstein had withheld the proceeds from the sale of 1 piece and peddled one other for a worth decrease than the one they’d agreed upon. That very same yr, collector Michael Salke additionally alleged that Rubenstein had defrauded him throughout the sale of a Takashi Murakami piece. Rubenstein denied Ovitz and Salke’s allegations.

One yr later, in 2014, Perry Rubenstein Gallery filed for chapter in L.A. Within the chapter submitting, the gallery reportedly listed $1.2 million in belongings, a lot of it within the type of art work, however mentioned it owed $5.4 million. Additionally in 2014, Rubenstein and Fitzmaurice divorced.

In 2017, Rubenstein pleaded no contest to grand theft embezzlement felony counts and was sentenced to 6 months in jail.

In a Medium post, Rubenstein described the “injustice” he witnessed throughout his time behind bars. He recounted varied cases of racism towards different inmates round him, a lot of whom had been Black or Brown, and he pledged to remake himself as a greater individual.

“By way of the fog of my very own distress,” he wrote, “I started to see extra clearly.”