“People want to give me their money, and I say, ‘Okay!’” said Talal Abillama, founder of Gratin gallery, as he ate Peking duck and sesame noodles this past May. Initially, this came off as naive, but I gradually realized that it was just this kind of projection of ease that attracts collectors and artists alike to begin with.
The 27-year-old New York gallerist has made a name for himself in the two years since he opened Gratin gallery, which just took over 47 Canal’s old space on Grand Street. Young artists want to work with him, and he’s known for bringing success to relatively unknown talents. Having Abillama represent you is about as close as an emerging artist can get to having a fairy-godmother.
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We chatted this past May, just a few days after his opening for the French artist Elise Nguyen Quoc, who was showing nine of her gray-toned paintings. Initially, she wasn’t sure Gratin was the right fit for her.
“When I saw his program, I thought that it wasn’t the best, but it would do,” said Nguyen Quoc. Abillama winced, but she continued on: “But it’s amazing. The work has been sold out for weeks. In France, this doesn’t happen. Maybe after the opening, some works are sold. And there’s a waitlist—I can’t believe how long it is.”
At the time, it hadn’t even been a year since Nguyen Quoc graduated with a graduate degree from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2023. The fact that Abillama has managed to build her market in such a short amount of time is impressive, yet it’s not unusual for the young gallerist.
He claims that collectors really respond to him, that they find him “nice and welcoming” (some people close to him refer to him as “teddy bear”), that he has a good eye for art and a gut instinct for talent. As if it’s all so simple as that.
Abillama was born and raised in Beirut by a family with a long history of collecting, though he tends to play that down. “They are very conservative,” he explained. “They like the big names—Warhol, Basquiat. They collected some of the Italians.”
That’s a bit of an understatement. His family has a world-class collection that includes works by Richard Serra, Louise Bourgeois, John Baldessari, and Yayoi Kusama. He is similarly evasive about the nature of his family’s wealth, eliding certain details: “My father works in Africa, the Middle East. He has companies in Japan.”
Al-Amir Holdings, the company run by Abillama’s father and uncles, is nearly 100 years old. It began in Lebanon as a coachbuilding business before expanding into its current portfolio of global real estate, architecture, and manufacturing.
Christoph Matthes’s Gratin show.
Courtesy Gratin
Though Abillama grew up surrounded by art at home, his grandfather’s habit of taking him to museums left a more lasting mark. But initially, he seemed more poised to become a businessman, leaving Beirut at 18 for a brief stint in London before moving to Boston to attend Northeastern University. His family pushed him to study business there, hoping that Abillama might one day help run the family company. Yet he spent nearly every weekend in New York, seeing exhibitions and making friends with the dealers, collectors, and artists.
By the time he was 19, he said, he had sold his first artwork, a Sterling Ruby piece, for $300,000. He used the money to buy art and quickly got into the habit of buying something new every week. It wasn’t too long before he was working for Vito Schnabel, selling artworks and discovering talent. (His family owns the building that houses Vito Schnabel Gallery.)
On at least one occasion, Abillama’s business practices have received some negative attention. In 2022, Artnet News reported on claims that he failed to pay for an artwork on time. When a New York dealer behind the now defunct Mother Gallery told her social network about the allegedly broken deal, Abillama became “threatening,” according to the report. He denied to Artnet that he spoke down to the dealer and said that he canceled the sale because he felt the dealer was being too aggressive about payment. (He declined to comment further for this article.)
During the pandemic, Abillama decided it was time to start his own gallery with a program focused on introducing New York audiences to young international artists. He enlisted the help of his childhood best friend, Tariq Haraoui, then an underpaid underling at Deloitte, to become a founding partner and Abillama’s right-hand man. Another early staffer at the gallery was Max Werner, the son of storied New York dealers Mary Boone and Michael Werner, who eventually moved on but remains on good terms with Abillama.
So far, the gallery represents seven artists from seven different countries. All of them are painters, minus Ziad Antar, a photographer who has had few New York showings since appearing in a 2014 New Museum show about Arab art. Above all, Abillama said that the most important criterion for taking on an artist is whether the relationship will work out in the long term. “I want to work with the same artists for the next 40 years, whether they’re selling well or not,” he explained.
Being able to grow with his artists means not taking on too many. “I want them to feel special, because when you make someone feel special you get the very best from them,” said Abillama about his approach to managing artists. “I want them to think only about the work, not about rent or paying the bills. I put myself in their shoes, I imagine what they want, and then I work for them. Do they want a show in Europe? Let’s arrange it. A bigger gallery, to show bigger work? The new space is three times the size.”
Abillama’s ambition, no doubt in part aided by his wealth and social network, has gained him admiration from heavy hitters in the art world. “He’s not there for the money, he’s there for the passion, and that’s why he’s going to be very successful,” said Loïc Gouzer, a former head of contemporary art at Christie’s who now runs the Fair Warning auction platform. Doesn’t it take money not to care about having it? Gouzer snapped back in frustration, “I know people with resources who don’t do shit. I don’t think it’s even a parameter. There are people who make things happen, and there are people who don’t.”
What does it take to be someone who makes things happen? Lorenzo Amos, Gratin’s only US-born artist, has a sense of what the X factor might be.
“He’s not delusional. But he’s a little bit delusional,” said Amos. “But he always manages to bridge the gap.”
Amos has taken over Gratin’s original space in the East Village as a temporary studio in preparation for his first solo show with the gallery. He is only 22 years old, with no formal education in the arts—just the rent-controlled apartment where he grew up and where he paints his friends, lying on the carpet, drinking on the couch, and leaning against the walls that Amos has used as a place to clean his brushes. He acknowledged that the arrangement was unusual, but Abillama was willing to indulge an artist as untested as him. Perhaps Abillama’s most crucial offering to his artists is a bit of hand holding.
“Low key, I’m a drama queen, I’m a diva,” said Amos. “But he has a lot of patience. He makes you feel like you’re special, like you’re good, like what you’re doing is good.”
Gratin’s original location in the East Village.
Courtesy Gratin
Christoph Matthes, the artist whose work is currently the subject of a show at Gratin, was similarly at the start of his career when Abillama contacted him. Matthes struggled for a few years after he graduated with an MFA, watching others in his generation land solo shows and gallery representation. He joined a punk band as a bassist, made work, and tried to keep the faith. Since meeting Abillama, he has had the glow of good fortune. “I see how hard he is working for me,” Matthes said. “It’s motivating.”
It was instructive to watch Abillama at work during the opening for Matthes’s show. The crowd around Abillama skewed young and international, with lots of French and Spanish in the air (the second official language of the gallery is French, in which Abillama and Torriglia de Altolaguirre are both fluent). As tequila flowed, Abillama was busy making introductions, wearing, as always, a T-shirt, no slick suit or flashy pieces.
But the true event of the night was yet to come: an afterparty at Abillama’s apartment, where a living room bleeds out into a terrace, inviting smokers to drift in and out. I scanned the white carpet anxiously for ash. There was an Alice Neel on the wall and a huge, pink Paul McCarthy sculpture by the dining room table. There was staff at the bar outside and chefs working in the kitchen. Haraoui DJed via the Spotify app on his phone while Matthes spent the night glued to his girlfriend. Competing lines for second helpings of uni, pasta, and steak formed. Abillama winked at me—“The best food in New York.” He wasn’t wrong.
It didn’t take long for the show to sell out. Abillama said that “a lot of bigger galleries” wanted to sign Matthes. Ngyuen Quoc and Amos also said the same thing happened after they showed with Gratin.
But none of them chose to leave. These artists said they merely forwarded the messages from others dealers to Abillama, then continued on with his gallery.
“I’ve always thought I care more about artists than other people,” said Abillama. “I can’t disappoint them. They can’t disappoint me. I talk to them every day, so if they ever leave, they will feel my absence.”
