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by Sandra Schulman
February 4, 2010

Recently profiled in the New York Times, Bernard Leibov, who is originally from South Africa, has been making like the 17th-century salonistes, as a home gallerist. This was done centuries ago as well as in the East Village in the 1980s, when it was more of a necessity of rent rather than choice.

Today, suggested Jed Perl, the art critic for the New Republic and author of “New Art City,” a social history of Manhattan’s ’50s-era art scene, a home gallery is “maybe just part of a broader mix-it-up mentality: i.e., an industrial loft can be a home, a home can be a gallery, et cetera.”

Liebov was jonesing for a life change when he was downsized as managing director of a design studio last January. He began curating shows featuring artists from his native South Africa, then he took a trip to Joshua Tree in March of 2008, the art world’s alternative universe in the California desert, which inspired him to make his own work.

Back in New York, “my relationship with my apartment had grown stale,” Mr. Leibov said of the Printing House loft he has lived in for 12 years. “I had fallen out of love with it, it didn’t inspire me anymore.”

The space is a lofty 875 square feet with double high ceilings and lots of wall space. The day he was laid off from his new job, he said, he felt a kind of release. “I was like, O.K., now I know what I’m doing,” which was to bring a larger audience to the Joshua Tree community he’d grown familiar with.

He had his first home show of the work of the Joshua Tree artist John Luckett, who makes abstract mixed-media pieces. Mr. Leibov’s most recent show, his fourth, is by part time Joshua Tree/NYC resident, Randy Polumbo. Called “Satellite of Love” the exhibit features bouquets of glowing cast-glass sex toys in rainbow colors arranged into strappy handbags, also made of cast-glass.

A similar group of works that Polumbo showed at Art Queen, the gallery complex he owns in Joshua Tree, was showus interuptus after some complaints.

“I’m showing work by friends whose work and ways of being inspire me. Everyone who shows here is a friend and they contribute to my life beyond the direct activities of the gallery,” he says.

Mr. Leibov’s relationship with his apartment has been similarly rejuvenated. “I’d been looking for ways to pep it up,” he said. “I had felt a lack of energy when I came home. Now, it’s fantastic. I get to live like a big-time collector. I can exhibit 13 or 14 pieces at a time – photos, sculptures, paintings. The shows have been well received with some sales. It’s not totally profitable yet but there is the low overhead. I have more shows lined up through the fall of this year, one featuring Diane Best, the landscape artist. I’m looking for a house in JT so I can split my time, there’s a lot of love there.”