Some dealers find it difficult to garner foot traffic in the far-west reaches of Chelsea. On November 5, Luhring Augustine will take on an even greater challenge: the blue-chip Chelsea gallery will open up a 12,000-square-foot project and storage space in Bushwick, Brooklyn with the hopes of attracting Manhattanites to the fast-growing artistic neighborhood. The warehouse, located on 25 Knickerbocker Avenue near the Morgan Avenue L train stop, will host filmmaker and artist Charles Atlas' first solo exhibition in New York in eight years, and his first-ever show in Bushwick.

The exhibition, comprised of one new work and two older works, will be on view through March. This sort of extended show will be characteristic of the project space, said senior director Natalia Sacasa. The gallery hopes to capitalize on the warehouse's expanded square footage and the neighborhood's "young energy" to experiment outside the rigid constraints of Chelsea. "We're not pinning ourselves down," said Sacasa. The program will be determined by owners Lawrence Luhring and Roland Augustine; the gallery has not determined if it will bring on additional staff members to man the space.

Like the gallery's previous storage facility, which it shared with several other businesses in Long Island City, the Bushwick location will host long-term installations available to select clients but closed to the public. Unlike the previous warehouse, however, Luhring Augustine Bushwick will also offer an intermittent program of public exhibitions.

In an amusing low-to-high shift, the building was previously a storage facility for 99-cent stores. It cost the gallery a pretty penny, too: $2.05 million (still $600,000 less than the asking price), according to Ed Bruckstein of City One Real Estate & Financing, who brokered the deal. (Luhring Augustine was one of several parties interested in the space, Bruckstein said, including a company looking to convert the building into artist studios.) In anticipation of the November opening, the gallery is finishing up renovations on the building, including re-cementing the floor and adding some skylights.

What can visitors expect from the space? Sacasa said Luhring Augustine hopes to install ambitiously-scaled artworks that would be too big for its Manhattan location, as well as installations previously on view in Chelsea for longer periods of time. A complex installation by German artist Reinhard Mucha, for example, could stay on view for six months in Bushwick, rather than six weeks in Chelsea, said Sacasa. The gallery "will defer to the interests of the artists we formally represent" in programming the space. But the experimental nature of the space means the gallery will also consider working with new names as well.

Why Bushwick? According to Sacasa, Luhring and Augustine had been looking for a storage building of their own to purchase and the staffers who live in Bushwick — Sacasa among them — gave the owners the idea. Though many of the existing Bushwick galleries are small and "cater to the local community," Sacasa noted that Bushwick and its environs have become home to many young artists as well as prominent art nonprofit Third Ward and the increasingly ubiquitous art-world restaurant Roberta's.

"There is already a lot of interest in the neighborhood," said Sacasa. "Roberta's ... draws people in from 'the city' and we hope that some of those individuals make their way over to our space."