Francisco Correa Cordero, the founder of Lubov Gallery, died on Sunday, August 2, at 37. The news was announced a day later on the gallery’s Instagram account, putting a sudden end to the life of a gallerist who had spent the past decade building a downtown New York program around artists such as Mira Dayal, Shannon Cartier Lucy, Parker Ito, Bryce Kroll and Xingzi Gu.
For readers following art in New York, the timing matters because the announcement came on August 3, turning a private loss into public news while the gallery marked his death in its own words as a passing that left him “surrounded by what he loved the most — his chosen family, laughter and so much love.” That message offered a rare glimpse into the person behind the roster of exhibitions, but it did not list a cause of death, leaving the central question of how Correa Cordero died unanswered.
Correa Cordero’s work at Lubov Gallery had given shape to a decade of exhibitions and helped define the gallery’s place in downtown New York. Those shows connected his name to a group of artists whose work moved through the space under his direction, and they now stand as the clearest record of what he built. The gallery’s announcement confirms the loss, but it also shows how much of his story is being carried forward through the artists he presented and the community he called his chosen family.
What remains unsettled is simple and immediate: the death is public, the tribute is public, but the cause is not. Until that is disclosed, the news centers on a founder whose influence was already visible in the exhibitions he mounted and whose absence will now be measured by what Lubov Gallery does next.
