Talk about painting yourself into a corner.
A Chelsea art gallery was slapped with an $8 million lawsuit yesterday by a collector who claims its owners blabbed to a painter that he had sold off one of her works — landing him on her “blacklist.”
Craig Robins alleges that the David Zwirner Gallery breached a confidentiality agreement by telling artist Marlene Dumas that it helped him unload her 1994 painting, “Reinhardt’s Daughter.”
Robins’ suit, filed in Manhattan federal court, seeks $3 million in compensatory damages, plus $5 million for what he calls the gallery’s “reprehensible motives” and “wanton dishonesty.”
Robins, a real-estate developer from Miami Beach, says the artful deceit was part of the gallery’s plan to “gain favor” with Dumas in the hope that she would ink an exclusive-representation deal with it.
Dumas — a South African-born artist whose photo-inspired, figurative portraits have fetched up to $3.3 million at auction — was recently the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.
The David Zwirner Gallery signed her up in 2008 and is currently hosting a solo show of her new work, “Against the Wall,” through April 24.
At some point, Robins learned he had been blacklisted by the artist — barring him from directly buying from her representatives. Suspecting it was because he had sold one of her works through the gallery, he went there to see who had blabbed to Dumas.
The Chelsea gallery then “apologetically and unequivocally” admitted that it had told Dumas about Robins’ 2004 sale of her painting, the suit says.
Robins claims the gallery “disingenuously” promised to get him off Dumas’ blacklist so he wouldn’t sue them. The gallery also allegedly offered him first crack at any of Dumas’ pieces not bought by museums.
But the gallery “failed to respond” when Robins said he wanted three paintings from her current show last week, the court papers say.
And Robins says he “still remains on [Dumas’] blacklist and . . . has not been granted full access to [her] primary market works.”
Zwirner spokeswoman Julia Joern said, “The gallery believes that the case has no merit and plans to vigorously defend itself against Mr. Robins’ baseless allegations.”