A triplex loft in Tribeca, featuring a 1979 Keith Haring mural painted directly onto the structure, has come to market for $25 million. The 8,000-square-foot unit, located at 260 West Broadway in the landmarked American Thread Building, is listed with Compass real estate.
Haring made the work while a student at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). The school kept a student gallery space on the lower floor of the building at the time—now the first level of the triplex. He made the energetic monochrome mural with a mix of shoe polish and alcohol, atypical materials that make the artwork’s survival over the past 50 years ever more remarkable. Haring painted directly onto an iron column, a structural beam, and the ceiling, meaning it cannot be removed or relocated. The black-and-white mural features interlocking forms typical of the street artist’s iconic line work. When SVA vacated the space in the early 1980s and it became a restaurant, the mural was covered over with wallboard, inadvertently protecting it for decades. It remained hidden until the building's previous owners uncovered it in 2007 and found it largely intact.
The current owner, Adam Zoia, chief executive of Glocap Tech, recognized the work immediately when he encountered it. “It was so obviously a Keith Haring. His style is so distinct,” he told the New York Times, noting that the unsigned piece has since been authenticated by the Keith Haring Foundation. Zoia purchased the loft in 2021 and undertook a two-year, floor-to-ceiling renovation around the mural, ultimately building a bar in front of it as a physical buffer to prevent visitors from touching or splashing it. “What kind of a bar in New York City has an original Keith Haring painting on the wall behind it, and painted on the ceiling of the bar, too?” he said.
For Zoia, parting with the artwork is harder than parting with the apartment itself. “This kid made something spectacular,“ he said of Haring, who was in his early 20s and years from international fame when he painted it. He estimated that the mural alone, if it could somehow be extracted, would likely be worth more than the loft surrounding it.
Art dealer Jenn Singer, founder of a namesake Manhattan gallery, called the mural’s integration into the architecture central to its significance and to the challenge of pricing it. “The site-specific dimension is the real complexity,” she explained to the Times. “Works made for a particular space and physically integrated into it exist in a different market category altogether.” The new owner will effectively become a steward for the work. “Each owner of this loft is its caretaker for their time with it. Every future owner of this space becomes its guardian,” added Singer.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/4Q7NqpE
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