Mila Askarova Adds Chelsea to Gazelli Art House’s International Footprint

September 21, 2026 / Sophie Clearwater /

Harold Cohen’s “Refactoring (1966-74)” at Gazzelli Art House, London, in 2024. Courtesy of Gazelli Art House and the artists

It’s not every day that news breaks of a gallery opening in New York, given how many closures have made headlines in the last 24 months. The city lost 20 galleries in 2025 alone, according to Artwrld data, with rising costs and a prolonged market slowdown continuing to put pressure on dealers. But among some determined souls, optimism prevails, and on Sept. 22, just before the opening of this year’s Armory Show, London- and Baku-based Gazelli Art House is set to take over the space formerly occupied by Marlborough Gallery at 545 West 25th Street, vacant since its closure in 2024. According to Artforum, Gazelli Art House bought the two-story space for $7.5 million, although Jeffrey Zoldan and Roger Gillen of the real estate firm Brown Harris Stevens originally listed the property in 2025 for $10.9 million.

For Mila Askarova, the gallery’s founder, the move reaffirms that, in an increasingly digital world, the experience of encountering art in person is more important than ever. “With all the closures and everything going on in the market, it felt like we needed some positive news. I hope our opening sends a positive message that it’s still not only possible but necessary for a gallery to have a physical space,” Askarova tells Observer.

The new gallery will let Gazelli Art House build a more international platform, triangulating London, New York and Baku, Azerbaijan, the fast-growing capital where Askarova is from and where the gallery first opened in 2012. The name connects directly to the region’s layered heritage, drawing on the ghazal, an Eastern poetic form traditionally associated with love and spiritual beauty. Gazelli Group is also the company that Askarova’s mother, Dr. Zarifa Hamzayeva, founded 25 years ago; hers was the first national cosmetics producer in the Caucasus region.

And it was Askarova’s mother who first carved out a path for the arts in the company, launching Gazelli Art House in around 2002 and supporting local artists in Baku and Istanbul even before it had a physical space. “Her philosophy was that one needs to work on internal wellbeing as much as external,” Askarova explains. “When I was ready to get into it, after a short consideration, it only made sense to build on the foundations she laid down.” She quickly adds that she never imagined becoming the kind of dealer who would have her own name on the gallery door. “There’s something about having gallery staff, artists, visitors, clients being part of this constantly evolving story; it’s bigger than me.”

A smiling woman in a green blouse with a dramatic white collar stands against a pale background with her hands in her pockets. — Mila Askarova. Courtesy Gazelli Art House

Gazelli was an early pioneer in the digital space through its GAZELL.iO digital residency program. Last winter in London, it staged “Subject to Change,” a major group exhibition bringing together nine internationally recognized artists who work critically with algorithms, datasets and machine learning processes often bundled together under the term artificial intelligence. Yet the gallery’s program has been kept deliberately diverse, spanning contemporary and historical art, with shows dedicated to overlooked Azerbaijani pioneers alongside historical figures of British Pop, Light and Space and female Abstract Expressionism.

Before settling on Dover Street in 2012, the gallery experimented with exhibitions in different types of spaces, asking how artworks could respond to an office, a run-down building or other temporary settings. The curatorial logic centered less on a single medium than on instinctive and emotional responses to art—what makes someone feel they need to own a particular work. “My curiosity from back then, and it’s still ongoing, is what makes a collector really pull the trigger on an artwork: how prices are defined, what people value, what value art adds and, beyond the question of what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ art,” Askarova reflects. “It’s all about that emotional and instinctive element each of us has from different angles—whether as a critic, writer or collector. It’s that feeling of, ‘I need to have it. It needs to be mine.’”

From the outset, Askarova said, the program mixed media and career stages rather than following a narrow category, focusing on voices that felt relevant to the moment and to its audience. “From the beginning, the program was also reflective of what audiences were responding to or not responding to,” she notes.

When the gallery landed in a permanent space in London, she initially assumed a prime Mayfair location would be enough to generate traffic and sales. The first few years brought visitors, some sales and press, but once the novelty wore off, the challenge became creating a sustainable commercial model. By 2015, according to Askarova, the gallery had reached a critical point. Collectors and curators needed confidence that the gallery, and the artists it supported, would still be active years later. This was when it moved more decisively toward both historically focused exhibitions and digital art.

On the historical side, she began organizing shows around themes that interested her personally but received little exposure on that side of the ocean, including California Light and Space and the women Abstract Expressionists, while also tapping into British Pop Art. These projects brought artists such as De Wain Valentine, Peter Alexander, Helen Pashgian, Derek Boshier, Pauline Boty and Jann Haworth into the gallery’s orbit, and introduced the gallery to new networks of collectors, curators and estates, eventually leading to new relationships that have withstood the test of time.

A contemporary installation view shows tree-stump sculptures, blue glowing flower forms and video works in a dim gallery. — “Subject to Change” at Gazelli Art House, London, 2025. Courtesy of Gazelli Art House and the artists

At the same time, Gazelli launched GAZELL.iO in 2015 to explore how a commercial gallery could support artists working with digital technologies, including A.I., V.R. and A.R. At the time, digital artists relied mostly on brand commissions and production grants, so Askarova wanted to see whether a sustainable collector base could be developed around their practices. GAZELL.iO began as an open one-month online residency. Artists were handed the website and allowed to use it however they wished. If a work emerged, the gallery could take it on consignment and try to sell it; if the residency remained purely research-based, that was acceptable, too.

Over time, the residency became more structured, especially during and after the NFT and crypto boom. Yet Askarova still sees it primarily as a community-building exercise. More than 120 artists have participated, resulting in a vast archive of emerging digital practices from across geographies.

At a certain point, the gallery translated part of that digital activity into physical space through the “Enter Through the Headset” V.R. exhibitions, the GAZELL.iO Project Space and a permanent V.R. Library. Artists including Jake Elwes, Brendan Dawes and Memo Akten received Project Space exhibitions and eventually became represented artists. Memo Akten has also become central to the gallery’s digital program.

A watershed moment came when the gallery began working with the estate of Harold Cohen, the British pioneer of computer- and machine-generated art, providing a historical foundation for its future-facing interest in digital and computational art. In June, the gallery presented Cohen’s work at the inaugural Zero 10 at Art Basel’s Swiss edition. At the center of the booth was his All Four (1964), a major early abstract painting exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1965, presented alongside his later machine-generated works, revealing a groundbreaking dialogue and continuity between his painterly practice and his later computational systems.

Askarova said New York will give the gallery more room to bring in new artists, including those working beyond digital practices, while preserving technology as a central strand. “We’re curious to find interesting voices that go beyond digital. We don’t necessarily need to hone in exclusively on the digital side of the programming, but we’re still very keen on maintaining that digital strand and our particular take on it.”

Working with digital art also led Askarova to rethink the conventional consignment and gallery model: if a physical artwork can be consigned for a fixed period, sold or returned, a digital work may instead generate value through circulation, public display, institutional presentation or other opportunities that do not fit a simple sale-return cycle. “Typically, whether or not we represent an artist, we take works on consignment for a period of time and try to sell them. If we don’t sell them, they go back to the artist. With digital art, it’s different,” she says. “It might not be a question only of placing the artwork. We might instead be successful at finding opportunities for it to circulate.”

A bright white gallery displays three large geometric paintings, with a blurred visitor walking through the space. — “The Way Forward: Derek Boshier and the Sixties” was the first posthumous solo exhibition dedicated to the artist. Courtesy of Gazelli Art House and the Artists.

Askarova points to Kalliopi Lemos’s sculpture at Frieze Sculpture in Regent’s Park in 2020. Featured during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the fair went ahead only with its outdoor component, the sculpture eventually secured public placement in Rotterdam. Around the same time, curators whom Askarova had contacted years earlier began responding and engaging with the artist’s work. “I noticed that for the first time I was actually getting interaction and correspondence from curators in the U.S. and other parts of the world whom I had reached out to five years earlier and had never heard back from.”

The gallery’s current London show, “Interweave,” demonstrates the potential of exploring connections between tradition and the latest technological advancements, and different trajectories of human techne, by bringing together five artists working with textiles, weaving and craft as well as technology and A.I. On view is a cross-media dialogue among works by Bea Bonafini, Adam de Boer, LoVid, Joan Truckenbrod and Paul Mouginot’s aurèce vettier, who share an interest in how images, stories and materials are constructed through acts of layering and exchange.

Among the highlights of the gallery’s London program is “A.I. Then & Now,” a landmark exhibition opening in November curated by Jasia Reichardt and inspired by her pioneering 1968 exhibition “Cybernetic Serendipity” at the ICA in London. It will feature work by more than 50 international artists, including Memo Akten and Emi Kusano.

Having such a broad and diversified program has allowed Gazelli Art House not only to respond to different audiences and collector groups but also to bridge and connect different worlds. “At the end of the day, you can’t force someone to be interested in something they’re not interested in, but for us, it’s about making things accessible,” Askarova argues. “Accessibility is key—how material appears on the website, how responsive we are to inquiries and, beyond the commercial side, how we can support scholarly work.”

For this reason, Askarova sees the physical gallery as an important intermediary that can bring those communities together through exhibitions, talks and events. The London space, for example, holds a regular program of talks every month to expand the dialogue around the show or specific practices. These are then circulated through its digital channels and archived on the website, where they remain available as resources over time.

Launched in 2003 and reopened in a new, expanded venue in 2017, Gazelli Art House in Baku developed alongside London but required a completely different strategy because the local market was much slower and smaller. “Baku was always slightly in the background. It’s a very different market—so we had two very different worlds that we were working in,” she explains, adding that even today there are probably only two or three other galleries operating there, though interesting projects and artist-run spaces have begun popping up in recent years.

A spacious white gallery presents several framed figurative paintings, reflected on a glossy dark floor. — Mikayil Abdullayev’s solo show, “The Light of Distant Roads,” at Gazelli Art House in Baku. Photo: Fakhriyya Mammadova | Courtesy of Gazelli Art House and the artists

Askarova is expanding the gallery’s work in Azerbaijan, championing both contemporary artists and overlooked modern masters from the country. The current Baku exhibition of Mikayil Abdullayev is bringing renewed attention to the work of this modern Azerbaijani artist through a comprehensive survey that highlights both the breadth of his international career and the multicultural richness of a country long positioned at the crossroads of different cultures. “There’s enormous potential in these overlooked masters of their time,” she says. “If we take a wider view, not only focusing on Azerbaijan but on Central Asia more broadly, and if we can bring some of these artists onto a more Western and international stage, that could be groundbreaking.” The main obstacle, she says, is scholarship. Archives and information need to be located, translated and developed into rigorous scholarly material before institutions and curators can fully engage with these artists.

Even in computer art, a field only now receiving more contextualization from critics and art historians, most of the names one encounters are Western and male. There is far less material readily available for anyone looking at the Middle East or the broader region and asking what was happening at the intersection of technology and art in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. Research into that intersection in the Middle East, the Caucasus and Central Asia during those decades remains far less developed. “I think there are interesting names that can emerge with the right research and the right people involved in helping us bring them forward,” Askarova asserts, noting that there is now growing institutional interest in these regions but that building that scholarly foundation is necessary if the gallery wants to sustain it.

She is looking forward to leveraging the relationship between the spaces in New York, London and Baku—a unique triangle that can create opportunities for programming and intercultural dialogue. “They’re such different places. London, New York and Baku bring in a very different dimension. There’s so much on the programming side and so many interesting dialogues we can start developing.”

If the initial thought was that the London space would focus on British and European artists while New York could concentrate on U.S. artists and create another platform for Central Asian material, Askarova now envisions the programs overlapping. The inaugural show will set the tone—coinciding with the gallery’s presentation at The Armory Show, it will present artists from Gazelli’s international roster in a dialogue spanning generations, geographies and disciplines. In October, the gallery will mount a solo exhibition dedicated to Harold Cohen, bringing together works spanning different stages of his career to highlight his pioneering investigation into machine creativity and autonomous image-making through AARON, the groundbreaking computer program he began developing in the early 1970s.