The Hole closes West Hollywood gallery as market pressure hits expansion era
The Hole has permanently closed its West Hollywood space, ending a Los Angeles chapter that once helped project the New York gallery’s reach across the art fair circuit. Its final exhibition, devoted to the late Nicholas Hondrogen, came down in September 2025, and the gallery’s West Hollywood location has now shut for good.
Founded in 2010 by Kathy Grayson, a former director at Deitch Projects, The Hole built a reputation in New York for crowded openings, energetic programming, and a roster that mixed emerging and mid-career artists. The gallery expanded to Tribeca in 2021 and then to West Hollywood in 2022, part of a broader wave of New York dealers opening in Los Angeles as collector spending surged.
That expansion now looks costly. Court records show that between July and September 2025, landlords for The Hole’s two Manhattan properties filed non-payment complaints against the gallery’s New York entities. The Tribeca location was accused of owing more than $120,000 in unpaid rent and real estate tax arrears. Separate filings related to the Bowery space alleged more than $60,000 in unpaid rent and additional charges under a lease that began in 2021 and runs through January 2031.
Grayson said the gallery is trying to resolve the disputes. “We are current with Bowery rent and paying off arrears for the Tribeca space, slowly but surely,” she said. She also described the post-boom environment as a difficult correction after the unusually strong market years from 2021 to 2023.
The Los Angeles closure is especially striking because The Hole remained visible during February’s art week, when it presented work by more than a dozen artists at the Felix Art Fair at the Roosevelt Hotel and drew sustained crowds to 99CENT, a pop-up co-organized with Jeffrey Deitch in a former dollar store on Wilshire Boulevard. The contrast between that public visibility and the gallery’s private financial strain captures a larger shift now affecting many dealers.
As the market cooled, galleries that had expanded on the assumption of continued demand have been forced to retrench. In The Hole’s case, the result has been late payments to artists and workers, unpaid rent, and a shuttered Los Angeles outpost. The gallery’s next chapter appears to be a narrower one, centered on New York and on stabilizing what remains.
