Jeffrey Deitch

Jeffrey Deitch has been involved with modern and contemporary art for fifty years as an artist, writer, curator, dealer, and advisor. Deitch’s first important curatorial project was Lives, a 1975 exhibition about artists who used their own lives as an art medium. His influential exhibition, Post Human, was presented at five museums and foundations in Europe and the Middle East in 1992-93. Deitch’s vanguard commercial gallery, Deitch Projects, produced more than two hundred and fifty projects during its fifteen-year history from 1995-2010. From 2010 to 2013, Deitch served as Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, where he presented fifty exhibitions and projects including Art in the Streets, which had the highest attendance in the museum’s history. Deitch reestablished his art advisory firm and his art gallery in 2015 and currently operates galleries in New York and Los Angeles. The galleries are known for thematic exhibitions like People, 2018, Punch, 2019, and Shattered Glass, 2021. The gallery has also presented ambitious solo exhibitions with major artists including Ai Weiwei, Judy Chicago, Urs Fischer, Robert Longo, Nari Ward, Faith Ringgold, Frank Stella, and Rammellzee. As a writer, Deitch co-authored a monograph on Keith Haring, published by Rizzoli in 2008, and edited and wrote the introduction to Jean Michel Basquiat, 1981: The Studio of the Street, published by Charta in 2007. Unrealism, his book on new figurative painting, was published by Rizzoli in 2019. His book City as Studio, a compact history of street art, was published in 2021 by the K11 Art Foundation. Luncheon on the Grass, featuring contemporary artists’ responses to Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, published by Rizzoli, was release in Spring 2024.