Opening Saturday: Rental Gallery Presents Kenny Schachter: Retrospective

Rental Gallery is pleased to announce Kenny Schachter: Retrospective, an exhibition exploring the life, works, and feigned death of the art-world provocateur. The exhibition opens in the upstairs gallery with a public reception on Saturday, August 25 from 6-8pm.

The conceptual conceit that binds the exhibition together is a relentless analysis and critique of the art ecosystem-the dissemination channels as art enters (and reenters) the commercial stream of commerce once it leaves the studio.

Retrospective consists of a broad array of Schachter's work, spanning nearly 30 years and as many media. The works on view include video, computer manipulated photos, and various sculptural expressions in a host of materializations-from a floor-to-ceiling wall installation of wallpaper plastered with Schachter's abundantly penned artnet News columns, to an explicit piggy bank inspired from a Chinese bath house sign that reads: "Forbidden Amuse Yourself". Hardly an artworld or social figure is left untouched, with Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, and Art Basel some of the names, faces, and brands computer manipulated in Schachter's trademark style.

Accompanying the exhibition is a limited edition book of remembrance based on Schachter's false demise:

Kenny Schachter was a writer, lecturer, curator, artist, and dealer who made his mark as an incorrigible observer-critic of the art world and, in particular, the machinations of the market. He wrote a no-holds-barred opinion column for artnet News, but also for ARTnews, The Art Newspaper, GQ, and New York Magazine. When Schachter staged a 2013 exhibition with Vito Acconci, who designed a temporary space for him while simultaneously represented by gallerist Barbara Gladstone, the celebrated dealer described him as "a thorn in my side"-a sentiment many would readily subscribe to. Though some art-worlders found Schachter's biting polemic an annoyance, especially when they found themselves featured in his tales of shady commercial shenanigans, more were drawn to his revelatory analysis of the dissemination of art once it left the studio and entered the pipeline to galleries, fairs, auctions, and collectors, if they could still be said to still exist. (Schachter coined the term "spec-u-lector" to describe what he saw as the growing ranks of self-professed art lovers whose collecting is in fact motivated by quick-to-flip greed.)

Brought up on the South Shore of Long Island, Schachter experienced an isolated childhood and lost his mother early on to cancer. Somewhat like Richard Prince, who famously worked in the basement of Time Inc. collating advertisements from magazines before re-photographing and iconizing a cropped image of the Marlborough man to the point it galloped into art history, Schachter, alone for much of his childhood, cut-and-pasted the pages of Road & Track and National Geographic into collages that he pinned to a cork wall in the bedroom he rarely left, to infinitely less fanfare. Later, Schachter created digitally collaged images and crudely crafted short videos to illustrate his artnet articles, that mimicked his secluded early efforts in the suburbs.

With a degree in philosophy and political science, Schachter attended law school in the 1980s in an effort to evade the marketplace, rather than seek distinction in the legal profession. After a short stint in the fashion business, it was at Andy Warhol's estate sale at Sotheby's when the notion of an art market first reared its head, exposing him to the intoxicating possibilities of the transactional side of the business for the first time, as he had only experienced art in museums during university.

Shortly after, Schachter began lecturing (more to avoid going back to school, he commented, than out of any pedagogical leaning) at the New School, New York University, RISD, Columbia, and, for years, at the University of Zürich, where he was an adjunct professor in the Executive Masters in Art Market Studies at the time of his death.

After Schachter's introduction to the market at Sotheby's, he began organizing a series of scrappy, itinerant shows of unrepresented emerging artists in New York in the 1990s, showcasing such nascent (at the time) talents as Cecily Brown, Wade Guyton, Rachel Harrison, and Joe Bradley, as well as underappreciated older artists like Acconci and Paul Thek. Schachter's hit-and-run group shows (staged before the term "pop-up" popped up) were a veritable mess-some might say they bordered on the unprofessional-but there was always something to see, even if you had to look hard to find it.

In 2009, Schachter contributed to exhibitions of Thek's art at the ZKM Museum in Karlsruhe, the Falckenberg Collection in Hamburg, and the Reina Sofia in Madrid; he also helped write a MIT book on the artist and, in 2013, curated a Thek show for Pace Gallery. Schachter also had a long-term relationship with Zaha Hadid, organizing shows of her design, art, and architecture at venues including Sonnabend Gallery in New York and Galerie Gmurzynska in Zürich; he also curated a show of her work with Norman and Elena Foster in Madrid, and privately commissioned Hadid to create two cars, a boat, and other projects over the years.

All of Kenny Schachter's efforts, from his own artworks to his freewheeling lectures (which made his writing seem demure), were well-meaning in intent, not unlike the capering of a faithful dog, albeit one caught in the act of eating the couch. Will another writer grab the baton, reporting so candidly from art's trading floors with such (seeming) self-sabotaging abandon? It's doubtful anyone as deep in the art-dealing trenches would want to repeat such a feat anytime soon, particularly given the now-famous circumstances of his spectacular death. But few would argue that Schachter's work in pulling back of the opaque curtains obscuring the art world have benefited us all, if only marginally.

He is survived by his wife, the artist and fashion designer Ilona Rich, and four sons, including the artists Adrian and Kai Schachter, who the columnist shamelessly plugged in his writing and curatorial practice (successful, it would seem, as they are now both represented by the dealer Schachter called "Larry G."); Gabriel, a student at the NYU School of Real Estate; Sage, who infamously set the family house on fire in London in 2017; and his beloved pug, Gremlin."

- Caspar Stracke

ABOUT RENTAL GALLERY
Rental Gallery began in 2004 in Los Angeles as a way to bridge the New York and West Coast art communities, as well as to provide a venue for flexible and experimental programming, both by local curators and gallerists, and those from out of town. For more information, visit rentalgallery.us.