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

The gallery's three-city strategy embraces overlapping programming across generations and geographies rather than dividing artists strictly by region.

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.

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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.”

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........

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