Harley Wertheimer wears many hats: The native Angeleno is founder and director of CASTLE Gallery, as well as co-owner of Hollywood’s Stir Crazy café, and up until recently he was vice-president of A&R at Columbia Records. While Wertheimer got his professional start in the music industry, he began paying closer attention to visual art when he started lightly collecting in 2015. He’s not sure why art specifically captivated him, although collecting does run in the family: “My father has been into classic cars since he was a young kid pumping gas at the station on Fairfax on Sunset,” said Wertheimer: “As a kid I would hang out at his and his friend’s shop in West LA. I never caught the car bug, but they were very much art to him. And in my mind a collector is a collector is a collector, someone who lives and breathes their interests.”

Following in his father’s footsteps, Wertheimer approached collecting as an exercise in cultivating personal taste: “I wasn’t some massive collector, I just got works from galleries that I really loved and respected like Nonaka-Hill, Parker Gallery, and South Willard.” The first piece he acquired was a ceramic sculpture by Magdalena Suarez Frimkess (the subject of a current LACMA exhibition) from South Willard’s Ryan Conder, back when it was a store on Sunset over a decade ago. “It was this insanely soulful space, an art gallery masquerading as a clothing store. I can only imagine the amount of people it must have touched. I would go in there looking for clothes, and all of a sudden you were looking at these ceramics by Frimkess or Roy McMakin tables…It was this really approachable world that had the energy almost of a skate shop or music store.”

Now, some years on, Wertheimer’s space is the one where people congregate on a weekend afternoon. The gallery often comes up in discussions of who in LA is showing interesting work and whose program people are intrigued by. At a typical daytime CASTLE opening, you’ll find artists and collectors sipping espresso in the apartment gallery’s spacious courtyard, along with perhaps a few children and somebody’s dog. “I really want people to have a nice time and feel like they’ll see their friends at the opening,” said Wertheimer. “Not that it’s purely social, because it is very much about the art.”

Harley Wertheimer at Castle Gallery, 2024. Photos: Bob Coulter.

CASTLE began in 2022 out of Wertheimer’s living room, joining the cascade of other Los Angeles “apartment galleries,” something of a tradition since the ‘90s. Said Wertheimer, “I had always thought that it was a really cool idea, especially after seeing Sam Parker’s gallery or Michael Werner in New York. It was burning in my brain as something that would be interesting if I was a different person.”

While a living room gallery has its appeal, there are also practical limitations. After two years of programming, Wertheimer decided to expand and took a lease on the downstairs apartment, which is the gallery’s current locale. When asked about the potential personal invasiveness of opening one’s house to the public, he tells me that he “never felt vulnerable” about it: “As soon as we decided it was a gallery, even though it was really a living room and dining room sandwiched between the bedroom and our kitchen, it became compartmentalized in my brain, like, ‘this is a gallery now.’ It almost didn’t feel like I was inviting people into my home… I felt a lot more vulnerable about taking a shot doing the shows than people actually being in the space.” Expanding to downstairs, however, became a necessity when he and his wife welcomed a child earlier this year. “There’s a reason that these domestic spaces often have a shelf life” says Wertheimer. “It can be really trying to have half of your home unusable for domestic life.”

Wertheimer’s program has been very much driven by the architecture and atmosphere of the gallery space itself. “I was definitely thinking about work that would shine in that space,” he said. “There are a lot of details, such as moldings, a big bookcase, my furniture. If works could hang out together, I think they would’ve been hanging out at a party in that apartment.” He says that “there definitely is an overarching aesthetic”, but he can’t quite put his finger on it. In this writer’s opinion, the abiding aesthetic leans towards the expressionistic and theatrical, and it tends to be small scale. As Wertheimer admits, he has a real but unintentioned penchant for tiny paintings.

Harley Wertheimer at Castle Gallery, 2024. Photos: Bob Coulter.

Further CASTLE expansions are in the works: Wertheimer opened a new location this fall in the guard house of a long-vacant old art deco building once owned by Howard Hughes, a stone’s throw from Jeffrey Deitch. The space will open with an exhibition by Japanese artist Koji Nakano, which will run concurrently with an exhibition at Nonaka-Hill by Nakano’s wife, sculptor Miho Dohi.

When asked about the changing cultural landscape and the influx of galleries in Los Angeles, Wertheimer grows enthusiastic and says he can’t imagine how the city is going to look in ten years. “I am really curious. I pretty much drive around the city in a circle every day. I love to drive and I think in the car. It’s definitely different than the city I grew up in and it’s different than the one I moved back to in 2011. But if you’re really an LA person, you can find stuff you love in every neighborhood…” When it comes to neighborhoods, Wertheimer doesn’t play favorites. “I am in
Beverly Hills often, West Hollywood often, Silverlake often, Pasadena often. I’m in the water often, I am on the boardwalk often. There’s great stuff to get into all over the city; it would take a long time for all of that to erode. It does always seem like there’s room to dream here, space to try stuff out.”