Damian Loeb

Damian Loeb was born May 9, 1970, in New Haven, Connecticut. He is self-taught: he left high school in Connecticut around age 17 and moved to New York City in 1989. He had no formal art school training; as a teenager he worked briefly at the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and later taught himself painting largely through independent study of images and materials rather than through any degree program.

He came to wider attention in 1997 after being discovered by Jeffrey Deitch of Deitch Projects. His first solo show followed in 1999 at Mary Boone Gallery in New York; further solo exhibitions followed at Mary Boone, White Cube in London, and Jablonka Galerie in Cologne through the early 2000s. In 2006 the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, mounted a retrospective of his work; no source confirms that any museum holds his work in its permanent collection.

He has been represented by Acquavella Galleries since 2008, and in 2021 Pace Gallery announced it would co-represent him alongside Acquavella, beginning with his first solo exhibition with the gallery, in Palo Alto. He continues to live and work in New York City.

Damian Loeb built an early reputation through gallery exposure and press coverage rather than institutional prizes. The New York Times covered him ahead of his 1999 debut at Mary Boone Gallery, coverage that Town & Country's Chloe Malle revisited in a 2021 profile. His continuous gallery representation, from Mary Boone Gallery and White Cube to Jablonka Galerie, Acquavella Galleries, and now Pace Gallery, together with the 2006 retrospective at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, has kept his hyperrealist, cinematic paintings in ongoing curatorial and critical view.

Loeb's reported auction record is Vertigo (2006), which sold for USD 182,500 at Sotheby's New York on May 10, 2012. Outside of that result, his auction history at Sotheby's, Phillips, and Heritage Auctions has generally run well under six figures, including a Phillips sale of Being There for USD 100,000, with most other estimates and hammer prices in the five figure range. The record points to a market driven primarily through galleries and private dealers, with a limited and comparatively low-volume secondary auction history.

Loeb's market runs on two tracks: a well-documented history of primary-market gallery representation (Mary Boone, White Cube, Jablonka Galerie, and now Acquavella and Pace) and a much smaller, lower-value auction record, with his single six-figure result, Vertigo at USD 182,500 in 2012, standing well above the bulk of his other public sale prices. There is no published catalogue raisonne, so buyers should rely on Acquavella Galleries and Pace Gallery, his current representatives, for authentication and condition information. His institutional exhibition history, including the 2006 Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum retrospective, is a useful signal of critical standing, but it should not be read as confirmation that any museum holds his work in a permanent collection, since no source verifies that.