‘It Was the Greatest Adventure of My Life’: Olivier Babin and the True Story of CLEARING
“It was the greatest adventure of my life,” says Olivier Babin at one point during our two-hour conversation a week ago. I’d set out to uncover the real story behind CLEARING; it quickly became clear that his was a story defined by a rare alignment of lucky stars. As we spoke, he was painting—something he could finally return to after fourteen years as a gallerist during which he’d built an internationally recognized gallery that bridged the U.S. and Europe and championed, early on, some of the most inspiring artists of the past decade.
Babin’s roster has ranged from figures embraced by the international institutional circuit—think museums and biennials—such as Marguerite Humeau, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Huma Bhabha, Hugh Hayden, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Sara Flores and Meriem Bennani to market stars now showing with mega-galleries like Harold Ancart. But let’s restart his story, this time from Babin’s perspective, to track the ascent of CLEARING, which experienced the kind of swift upward trajectory that would leave most people breathless and without the distance to see the full picture for a long time.
Babin moved from France to the U.S. to make art, coming neither from money nor from elite cultural circles. “When I started the gallery, it was actually the lowest point of my life. At the time, my only goal was just to make it to the next day,” he recalls. His career as an artist had stalled after what he calls the “very foolish” decision to leave his gallery in France. “The gallery is really the only job I’ve ever had in my life. I’d had a few small jobs, but nothing serious.” The transition felt pure. He had tried to make it as an artist, but shifting the focus away from himself to support and champion other people’s work was, he says, incredibly liberating: “I realized it was about the sauce—it didn’t have to be my sauce, just the sauce.”
He had just found a studio in Bushwick and, encouraged by Ancart, began organizing shows there. “He was my best friend; we spent all our time together, constantly looking at and discussing each other’s work,” Babin tells me. The first was a striking presentation of Ancart’s works paired with paintings by Jacob Kassay. Kassay already had exposure in New York, with a beautiful show two years earlier at 11 Rivington, and around that time, he’d also shown at L&M Arts—the short-lived joint venture between Dominique Lévy and Robert Mnuchin. Collectors came, even to deep Bushwick, and they sold one of Kassay’s paintings to Miami mega-collector Rosa de la Cruz. They even sold Ancart’s work, which was still years away from commanding five-figure prices at Gagosian. At the time, he was making wall installations, including one composed of black dust and charcoal powder cascading down in the corner of the gallery.
The debut exhibition, “BADLANDS,” was named after the 1973 Terrence Malick film of the same title starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. From the start, the titles of CLEARING shows would remain poetic epigrams, part of a cryptic lyrical script that would read, over time, like chapters or episodes in a long-running series.
On February 17, 2011, they launched SEASONS 1: WINTER / SPRING / SUMMER, staged across an artist’s studio in Bushwick, a diplomatic partnership in Manhattan and a pop-up in Venice. Although Babin could sense the pace and scale building quickly, it was still a very different art world from the one he would leave behind when the adventure concluded this June with the final episode of SEASONS 21: TONIGHT AT NOON. The full list of “seasons” and “episodes” is archived on the gallery’s website, which has always maintained its uniquely rudimentary layout that made it feel like a never-ending script of this “wild ride.” Perfect probably for a Netflix series now.
From the beginning, everything Babin was doing was anchored in the community and in personal relationships with the artists. That was just New York at the time, he recalls: “There was this incredibly strong sense of community. And the gallery landscape back then was very different—Gavin Brown was still the coolest thing on earth, Michele Maccarone’s gallery was still open and the whole scene felt different.”
The gallery’s name came to him serendipitously. One morning, Babin had woken up with the word ‘clearing’ in his head. “It felt immediate—boundless—and it came with this mental image of a giant sequoia in an old grove,” he recalls. “There was something romantic about that landscape. I’ve always loved sequoias, and the name felt aspirational.”
Just a few months later, Babin was invited to curate a show with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York at the Payne Whitney House; it coincided with The Armory Show, and brought him greater visibility and connections. Titled “TRANCHES DE SAVOIR”—a French phrase meaning “slices of knowledge,” it featured a mix of French, Belgian and European artists. (The title was inspired by a collection of poems by Henri Michaux, the Belgian-French writer and visual artist celebrated for his intricate ink drawings and known as a major proponent of psychedelics.) “A lot of people were in town for it, and a lot of Europeans, too. The Armory Show was hugely popular back then,” says Babin. “I’d been in the country for two years, and Harold for about the same, but we definitely didn’t have a Rolodex of collectors’ names. Still, we met a few people, got some interest, and it really became about the energy.”
Things began to align, and within the span of a year, events moved so quickly Babin admits it’s hard to recall the exact order of events. “It felt like there was no way to not take it seriously,” he says. “Actually, I don’t know if we ever truly thought of it as ‘serious,’ but from the very beginning it was an adventure—one we immediately believed in, and somehow managed to get other people to believe in too.”
At one point, a collector offered Babin a space in Venice, allowing them to stage a show timed with the Venice Biennale’s preview—back when it still opened in June just before Basel. The show paired works by Ancart with sculptures by Esther Kläs and only came together because of what Babin calls “another miracle.” “It was not exactly a gallery space—it used to be a call center, with electrical outlets everywhere, which was used by Emily Harvey Foundation—but it was beautifully located, about forty seconds from the Rialto Bridge, right across from the fish market,” he recalls.
Ancart had been in Brussels with Kläs to produce the works, and they drove down to Venice. Babin traveled separately with an Italian friend from the art world; “you always say you need to bring an Italian with you in Italy, and in Venice that’s even more true.” But when they met at the space, Ancart realized he had lost the keys. Panic. “I’m going to find the keys,” Babin said, knowing it sounded completely absurd. Ancart told him, “Why don’t you bring back a joint so we can chill?” and Babin agreed. He launched into a desperate, seemingly impossible search back at Tronchetto, where the van had been parked, and fate intervened. “By the time I got back, I’d over-promised and over-delivered—keys in one pocket, joint in the other,” Babin says.
He thought that was exactly what a gallery should be: a very sophisticated concierge service. They opened a beautiful show and met important collectors, including Don and Mera Rubell; it felt like something significant was beginning. Babin describes it as an ascending narrative arc that kept them moving forward.
“We really had nothing, and therefore absolutely nothing to lose. Everything was one way only,” he says. After selling a few works from the first show, he had about $7,000—more money than he’d ever had in his life. Overhead was on a completely different scale: rent for the space was $15,000 per year—an amount that today, especially in New York, wouldn’t cover a single month.
That summer, at a barbecue, Babin met Heather Hubbs, who had just founded NADA. She invited him to take part in the Miami edition of the fair, marking CLEARING’s first fair and providing another chance to grow the gallery’s collector base. For the booth, Ancart created one of his dust installations on the wall, layering over it a set of burned photographs with soot still clinging to the surface. “They were beautiful in this haunting way: tropical seascapes and palm trees, turquoise water, scenes of paradise, but scorched, like hell in paradise. We made sales, met a lot of people and had a lot of fun,” recalls Babin.
In Miami, they also received a piece of valuable advice: get into Liste in Basel as soon as possible, as it was then considered a key fair for emerging galleries. But that advice came with a warning that the fair was highly Eurocentric, and being an American gallery didn’t necessarily offer an advantage. Harold was from Belgium, so the path forward seemed simple: open in Brussels… or at least print Brussels on the letterhead and pretend.
More stars aligned, and exactly one year after CLEARING’s first show in Bushwick, the gallery opened a Brussels location in a beautiful multistory neo-eclectic brick townhouse in the 1190 Forest (Vorst) district. “I remember picking the date because I wanted the second gallery to open exactly a year after the first,” Babin says, admitting that he was offered the space rent-free for a month, but he wanted to commit from the start. It was ambitious, but the formula worked—at the time, there were very few galleries bridging the U.S. and Europe to present emerging artists of that generation.
The inaugural show in Brussels, “LACKAWANNA,” staged dialogues between Sebastian Black and Kyle Thurman and between Ryan Foerster and Ben Schumacher. Black had just shown in the Brooklyn space, and they had also brought his work to Miami earlier in December, where, in addition to mounting a booth at NADA, they hosted a group show with Journal Gallery, “ROYAL RUMBLE AT WAFFLE HOUSE.” “From the start, we were doubling up—our booth or show was always followed by a second presentation somewhere else,” Babin explains, considering the pace of their early growth. Almost overnight, the gallery became international. “Suddenly we had a strong U.S. DNA and a strong European DNA—an American identity in Europe and European identity in the U.S.”
At the time, Babin still wasn’t a guy in a suit; it would take several years before he bought his first. “I was just this crazy French guy in Brussels. And, of course, a lot happened on a personal level: I was drunk at the first opening, sober at the second, and I’ve been sober ever since. I had to realize that things were getting serious.” I’m curious. Does he miss those years? There’s a natural progression to things, he says. “I wouldn’t say I miss them, but I think about them fondly.”
Still, Babin would never lose the artist’s mix of naïveté and vision—the qualities that kept him from looking too closely at the books for a long time. He’s quick to admit his attitude toward risk was cavalier. “We scaled up pretty fast because that’s what it’s about,” he says. “We don’t sell car parts or fertilizer or shoes. We sell language, we sell vision. And before we sell it—if we even do—we look at it, think about it, talk about it, and present it in the best way possible. That was pure magic. It was an adventure, a trip, the purest part of my life, and there was no money, but we still made it work.”
And it did work—even when he decided to host his first gallery dinner during The Armory Show and struck what he thought was a “deal” at Lucien that came to ten times his monthly rent. “Growing up middle class, the idea of spending what felt like ten months’ rent on a single dinner was insane. But in the end, we decided to go for it,” Babin recalls. “I almost passed out. My vision went blurry, but I forced myself to smile and hand over my card—that’s the key, you have to smile and hand it over while praying it goes through.”
That was the moment he realized that if you’re going to compete with the megas, you have to be willing to spend like the megas. It was a gamble, but it worked. CLEARING’s name was cemented, and parties in unconventional venues became a major driver of the gallery’s popularity in the years that followed.
Months later, Babin decided it was time to scale up to a bigger New York space and landed on the legendary 396 Johnson Avenue location—a venue capable of hosting museum-quality shows on a massive scale, giving artists the space to fully realize their visions. “We found the space literally by spotting it on the street one day while driving a U-Haul in Bushwick, which had become my second home,” he says. “The rent was almost ten times less than that one night. We figured it was a great long-term move, so we took it. We did the build-out ourselves—no permits, working at night.” Almost four years after opening his first Bushwick gallery, Babin inaugurated the new space with Koenraad Dedobbeleer’s whimsical, witty sculpture show “A USELESS LABOUR, APOLITICAL AND OF LITTLE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE,” which ran through November 9, 2014. “People were just amazed, saying, ‘Oh my God, what a space for a gallery,’” Babin remembers.
Marking the start of SEASONS 8: FAST ACTION, the opening of the new Brooklyn space was defined by the same relentless momentum he’d felt from day one—a continuous acceleration with no pauses and little concern for the numbers. CLEARING would stay there for the next nine years. “Nine years is a lot of shows,” Babin reflects, recalling a stretch in Bushwick defined by amazing exhibitions, advancing their artists’ institutional careers, sponsoring institutional shows and publications and finding inventive ways to fundraise. “One of our rules has always been that everything we were doing was important,” he explains. Otherwise, why have a gallery at all? We were always operating with that mindset.”
That approach continued through April 2023, when Babin moved CLEARING to a three-floor space at 260 Bowery in Manhattan. He admits he never connected with the building, but the move felt necessary as his artists grew in acclaim and the bigger galleries started to poach them. The title of the inaugural Bowery show, “MAIDEN VOYAGE,” seemed to capture both the ceremonial and exploratory spirit that had always driven CLEARING—a first step into unknown territory charged with anticipation, discovery and vulnerability, a true rite of passage.
But Manhattan proved impossibly expensive, so for the first time, he was forced to compromise. Bushwick had been different. There was a certain magic to it, Babin says. “Looking back, I realize that being in Bushwick—being isolated—was actually a huge advantage. We were like an island, and that isolation allowed a real culture to form because we were entirely on our own.”
In 2020, CLEARING opened a Los Angeles outpost in Beverly Hills, before relocating to East Hollywood. Back in 2017, the Brussels gallery had moved into a far larger former industrial space, giving it the capacity to stage the same kind of ambitious, museum-scale exhibitions the gallery was mounting in New York. “When it was good, it was really good—everything about it was great. It was fun, and it was rewarding,” Babin recalls. Eventually, however, the winds shifted, and collectors were no longer as supportive.
For Babin, running a gallery was never about the money. “It helps to have money. We didn’t really have any, but it didn’t stop us,” he says. “Money alone doesn’t do that.” What made CLEARING work was the artistic vision, he says. “Before it was a business, it was an adventure. We let it grow at its own pace. That’s the thing about growth—you either have something else alongside it to feed on, or you’re very patient and resist taking from what’s still developing.”
Through it all, Babin’s focus never strayed; it was always about amplifying the visions of his artists. “I don’t even remember when I actually started paying myself. In those early months, all the money went straight back into the gallery,” he recalls. Forced to be frugal, he always put the gallery first. “I sacrificed myself for the gallery. We wanted it to grow, like the 2,000-year-old sequoia in our logo. But in a way, I was already getting paid just by doing it—it was so awesome to be running the gallery.”
Babin lived in a rent-controlled Bushwick apartment for 12 years. “Maybe some of my artists would have preferred I had a nice apartment with art on the walls and could host dinners at my place,” he reflects. “But the trade-off was this guarantee: if there was no money for them, there was no money for me.”
For most of CLEARING’s artists—especially those who have been with the gallery since the start—Babin was more of a friend than a dealer. “With all of them, there’s always been real friendship,” he says, noting that if you look at photos of Leo Castelli’s gallery, “that’s it: a dealer and his artists, joined at the hip, at the brain, at the heart. They loved each other, fought with each other, spent time together, drinking, smoking, comparing notes and showing up for one another. That’s what it was for us.”
The posts from staff and artists that followed the announcement of CLEARING’s closure made it clear that this was not just another gallery shutting its doors, but the loss of a community and the sunsetting of an entire model—one that can’t survive the pressures of today’s art market.
Babin started with nothing financially, and now, he says, he’s back where he started. Along the way, though, he managed to create other forms of value—cultural, social, human—that are more precious and far harder to build in a lifetime. It’s those forms of capital, he believes, that make this journey we’re on meaningful.
He’ll have time to reflect on all this during the ayahuasca retreat he’s heading to next month, where he hopes to find deeper meaning. In the meantime, he is rediscovering the satisfaction of working with his own hands. Yet he’s quick to stress that he wouldn’t now call himself an artist. “That’s not the point. For me, making things with my voice, with my hands, is soothing, grounding, humbling. It’s a good way of… well, I’m not even sure if I know or ever learned what ‘relaxing’ means, but this comes close.”
The paintings of baby and dog names Babin mentioned in a recent interview with Artnet News are gifts. “I much prefer giving things to trying to sell them. I’m convinced that most things will come to me if I keep an open hand, an open mind, and an open heart. Maybe I’ll receive something in return, maybe I won’t,” he says. “Still, right now, I feel better than I have in many, many years. Parts of me that had dried out, maybe even died, are growing back. That connection—it’s coming back.”