After veteran curator Chris Sharp announced the opening of his own space in Mid City in January 2021 with a solo show from art world meteorite Emma McIntyre and a paragraph in ArtNews and then rapidly arranged a program of critically-acclaimed exhibitions by a variety of artists from Los Angeles, Mexico, the East Coast and overseas, he moved the gallery to Melrose Hill in June of 2025, kept it open through June, July, August and September of that year, as well as all the unseasonably warm Los Angeles months in between then and this year’s June, July, August and early September—the hottest summer in the history of the United States—and still has not purchased for it an air-conditioner.
What can it all mean?
Is this cruelty or madness? A weird flex? A degree of laziness unknown even in these lassitudinously stoned and sun-shot latitudes? Is it secretly a reality that there is in fact an air-conditioner but it is only turned on when a collector calls and the device is left otherwise idle to discourage visits from students, journalists and Melrose Hill’s poor? If it’s an elaborate avant-prank or comment on global climate change the artists do not appear to be in on it. And he has to be there, too.
Chris Sharp can afford an air-conditioner. The technology exists. A viable unit capable of putting out a number of BTUs more than sufficient to cool even for two high-ceilinged and brightly-lit rooms costs considerably less than most paintings sold at Chris Sharp Gallery. Is this business secretly a front? A place for selling heroin? That would not explain it—the returns on heroin would be more than enough to provide air-conditioning and from what I am told by musicians, the product requires it.
If he is hell-bent on not having air-conditioning, why does his gallery feature so many artists whose work—delightfully and unfashionably—provoke prolonged in-person examination? The enigmatic and insectile openwork sculptures of Isabel Nuño de Buen, the quietly ecstatic oil-stick-transfer ruminations of Sean Sullivan and, most recently, the seriously mischievous canvases of Adam Higgins—who has gone from painting hyper-real salads drizzled in vinaigrette or ranch that meditate on abstract composition to precise renderings of screwdrivers with gorgeously translucently colored handles resting on equally precisely-rendered autobiographical photographs that take the pictorial logic of Jasper Johns’ flags paintings to a mouth-watering conclusion—all are fantastically ill-served by Sharp’s lack of climate control.
In an imperiled art scene still top-heavy with exhibitions of artists whose work repays no more than a scroll past a jpeg, this is work worth engaging with—on the ground, at length and without the threat of melting. The artists and the public deserve better than this. It is at the point where the conscientious critic contemplates protests or interventions. I do not wish to shame Chris Sharp, I do not wish to sting Chris Sharp, I simply want to announce this has reached the point where the press will notice. Whatever reason you have—it isn’t good or isn’t good enough, get some fucking air-conditioning.
Image: Courtesy Chris Sharp Gallery