Four years ago the New York dealer Marianne Boesky opened a huge Deborah Berke-designed gallery — with a residence upstairs for herself and her family — on Chelsea’s 24th Street power block. Now Boesky, 42, has made another daring real-estate move: In February she signed a lease on an entire three-story town house on East 64th Street, in which she plans to showcase her expanding secondary-market program. Two inaugural exhibitions, one of a 1997 series of collaborative works on paper by Donald Moffett and Robert Beck and another of paintings by Lucio Fontana, are both scheduled to run through mid May. But while she is showing historical work uptown, the dealer is not about to ditch her Chelsea program, which exhibits edgier artists like Liz Craft and Kaye Donachie. Sarah Douglas spoke with Boesky about her "cozy" new digs, how to look at a Fontana the way they did in the 1950s, and why she likes to keep the art world guessing.

The Upper East Side buildling has three full floors of exhibition space. Why did you decide to expand?

I’ve been craving a more intimately scaled space and started looking about nine months ago. I liked the idea of being able to do more thematic, historical shows, but I just didn’t have enough slots in my calendar. Having additional space will reinforce my primary program. I’m weaving in a lot of history, the source material that my younger and midcareer artists have been mining.

The art market has been through many changes over the past two years. Why is this a good time to expand?

I’m contrary by nature, which is good and bad, but I think there are opportunities right now to be bold and grow. This is the time to invest in a long-term business, not to hide and shrink.

Why expand within New York instead of internationally?

Four years ago I thought of Berlin, and then all of a sudden 300 galleries sprang up there, so what more can I really do there? How can I be really engaged in a city that far away? There are some galleries that I’m very close with in New York that have talked with me about showing our more histori- cal, secondary-market artists together with their artists — artists I don’t represent but whom I admire. There’s a great benefit for my program in terms of doing more historical shows. Also I want to have the experience of showing Fontanas from the 1950s and ‘60s the way people saw them back then, in a domestic, warm, human-scaled space.

The uptown program will be more historical and curatorial in nature?

It will absolutely be more historical and more thematic. There are opportunities for solo shows too. Barnaby Furnas says it could be amazing to do a portrait show up there. It gives my artists an opportunity to do something completely different and not have to fill a gigantic space. I love my Chelsea gallery — it’s versatile. But it’s not cozy. It doesn’t have that old-world charm that for art, as an experience, can be really compelling.

With the expansion, will there be any significant changes in your stable of artists?

I’m not changing my younger program. We’ve taken on the Salvatore Scarpitta estate, and we’re going to be weaving a lot of Arte Povera into the program, which makes sense for us because of artists like Donald Moffett, Jay Heikes, and Rachel Feinstein. We’ll do an Alighiero Boetti show in September, and I’m in discussions with Pier Paolo Calzolari.

You were recently elected to the Art Dealers Association of America and participated in the ADAA art show instead of the Armory show, with a booth of Arte Povera and contemporary work. Was that part of a reenvisioning of your program?

The timing was fortuitous. It was time to move on from the pier show, just because we’ve done it for so long and it’s good to do different things.

"Conversation With Marianne Boesky" originally appeared in the April 2010 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's April 2010 Table of Contents.