In “Eruption,” Lindsay Jarvis and Max Werner Make a Case for Collaboration

Collaboration may well be the defining strategy for gallery success today, particularly on the primary market. The past year closed with a headline-making secondary market alliance—Pace, Emmanuel Di Donna and David Schrader joining forces to serve top-tier clients through a network of top-tier dealers. Earlier that fall, primary-market dealers Bridget Donahue and Hannah Hoffman unveiled a partnership of their own, merging their eponymous galleries in New York and L.A. into the bicoastal entity Hoffman Donahue. Elsewhere in Tribeca, JDJ, Deanna Evans Projects and the Chozick Family Art Gallery teamed up to open a shared exhibition space on the second floor of 370 Broadway, with each gallery presenting on a monthly rotating schedule. A similar model now shapes the collaboration between Instituto de Visión and PROXYCO, which share space at 88 Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side, alternating programs that spotlight complementary artists from their respective rosters.

Sharing infrastructure, sharing costs and sharing audiences—without collapsing individual identities—is a model many galleries now embrace to navigate rising operational expenses, from rent to shipping, while expanding their reach across artists and geographies and cultivating a broader, more engaged community around their programs.

Opening later this year, “Eruption” is another example of this collaborative spirit is uniting two dynamic figures of the new global art world generation. A multigenerational exhibition organized by Max Werner—the son of veteran German dealer Michael Werner and New York powerhouse Mary Boone—has just opened at Jarvis Art, the gallery launched late last year by art advisor and former Arsenal Contemporary director Lindsay Jarvis at 96 Bowery, directly across from Bridget Donahue. Originally from the U.K. art scene, Jarvis launched a career at Sadie Coles and Greengrassi before becoming one of the most active advisors in the ultra-contemporary boom, known for closing smart acquisitions and deals with a charming British accent.

Werner and Jarvis’s collaboration allowed them to assemble an ambitious lineup of German Neo-Expressionist and Transavanguardia masters alongside a younger generation of rising artists, exploring an emotionally and psychologically charged expressionist approach to painting—one that resurfaces, again and again, in moments of crisis, often as a response to periods of social tension and division.

“We met at a party loft in SoHo about five years ago, through a colleague. Around that time, we were doing a lot of studio visits and noticing a kind of emptiness in contemporary art—a prevalence of these vacuous neo-romantic gestures,” Jarvis tells Observer, noting how they began to identify threads of sensibility and aesthetic response connecting contemporary practices to those of the 1980s, artists working in a post-World War II and Cold War context that, in many ways, mirrors today. “We were encountering artists who were genuinely thinking through the conflicts unfolding in the world, the social tensions that feel so present right now, both domestically and internationally.” What struck them, however, was the absence of museum exhibitions addressing these issues and this particular artistic response to the troubled times we are living through.

Thick, often abrasive surfaces and a raw physicality define these works, where gestural, distorted bodies and masked or animal-like grotesque faces inhabit a charged psychological space. From this terrain, something visceral yet revelatory emerges from the subconscious, channeling a broader societal anxiety and a pervasive emotional unease shaped—and frequently suppressed—by systems of control.

“We started thinking about expressionistic painting as a language capable of holding that kind of emotional and cathartic intensity. There hasn’t really been a compelling exhibition that revisits Expressionism in a serious way,” Jarvis notes. Titled “Eruption,” the exhibition features works rarely seen in a second-floor Bowery space: a high five-digit signature Georg Baselitz, an intense painting by Ellen Berkenblit, an elaborate watercolor by Transavanguardia artist Francesco Clemente and a rare drawing by Maria Lassnig—likely one of the few currently available in the U.S.—hang alongside work by other established figures of the period such as Martin Kippenberger and Eric Fischl, as well as artists who have been comparatively overlooked and arguably deserve renewed attention, including Sylvia Snowden and Archie Rand.

“Our interest spans German Expressionism, the neo-expressionism of the 1980s—particularly as that term was used differently in the U.S. and Europe—and also artists who have historically been excluded from those narratives, especially women and artists of color like Sylvia Snowden,” Jarvis explains. These historical works are placed in dialogue with a group of emerging contemporary artists based in the U.S. and Europe, including Georgia Gardner Gray, Jake Fagundo, Lorian Gwynn, Alexandra Metcalf, Osama Al Rayyan, Jan Eustachy Wolski, Andrew Woolbright, Konstantina Kirkzoni and Amrita Dhillon.

There is a clear strategy in combining generations: placing younger artists alongside more established figures provides both visibility and context. “I think that’s interesting on both ends. It’s great to create those dialogues,” Jarvis says, arguing that this approach opens the door to a broader collector base. Seasoned collectors may be drawn to younger practices that resonate with artists they’ve followed for decades, while new collectors may discover that they can acquire historically significant names at price points comparable to those of emerging artists with less remarkable CVs featured in mega-gallery programs.

According to Werner, the art that emerged along the axis between New York and Europe in the 1980s has yet to receive sufficient critical study or sustained recognition, despite its early market success. More broadly, he sees today’s art world as shaped by a kind of historical amnesia. “There’s also a real loss of historical awareness. People are often not aware of recent art history; they don’t know the lineage of many things we see today.”

Notably, this is not Werner’s first attempt to stage an exhibition focused on the neo-expressionist milieu he grew up around. As Annie Armstrong reported in Artnet in 2023, he previously planned a SoHo pop-up exhibition with Dylan Brant, the son of collector Peter Brant, that ultimately did not materialize. Werner had also collaborated in part on Jarvis’s previous show, “Ghost,” helping him uncover overlooked value in 20th-century artists paired with in-demand contemporary names such as Francesca Mollett.

When Jarvis opened his own space in the midst of a market recalibration, he envisioned it from the outset as fluid rather than hierarchical or owner-driven. “It’s not about one person running it alone, but about collaborating with other galleries, advisors and dealers,” he explains. According to Werner, this model represents less an innovation than a return to an earlier spirit of art dealing: “If I could talk to my dad in the 1970s, his whole operation was built around colleagues in New York. That’s how it used to function.”

Both agree that the “imperialist” gallery model that emerged later—defined by dealers opening multiple outposts across cities—has proven financially unsustainable for most, creating pressure that ultimately impacts programming and relationships unless one operates at a mega-gallery scale. “The mega-gallery model is about consolidating and owning everything internally. But functionally, it makes more sense to acknowledge that a dealer in Berlin knows Berlin better than we do in New York. Each local dealer knows its own market better, so it just makes sense to collaborate across very different circles,” Werner points out. This, he argues, is how a new global generation should now operate—by building cross-border business models rooted in collaboration with international peers, rather than competition.

While “Eruption” is, for now, a one-shot exhibition rather than the start of a formal partnership, neither Werner nor Jarvis rules out future collaborations. In fact, the next project is already underway: a solo exhibition of Archie Rand, who also appears in the current show. Werner has known Rand for years; the artist had a breakthrough moment in the 1980s, when he was represented by Tibor de Nagy, one of the most influential galleries of the time, before falling into relative obscurity as family responsibilities took precedence. Often incorporating text, vibrant color, comic-inspired imagery and dense narrative surfaces, Rand’s work resists easy classification while retaining the neo-expressionist pulse of that era—its intense, often surreal chromatic force turning the canvas into a stage for the emergence of individual and collective subconscious states.

So what’s the formula that lets these collaborations to work? Sharing everything—costs, risks and revenues—equally. “Everything was shared, including decisions around creation and the artist list,” Werner says. “It’s not one business where one person is the sole author. It’s very equal. And honestly, it’s useful—if one of us has a hard no, that matters. I value hearing a hard no; it helps to improve.”

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