How did this guy become such an art world big shot?

NEW YORK -- It's a chilly Thursday night in Chelsea, the day of the week when many of the district's 300 art galleries open new exhibitions. Few are more keenly anticipated than the one at Zach Feuer Gallery: It's the gallery's third solo show of Dana Schutz , who at 30 has been producing some of the most critically admired and coveted paintings in American art.

Friends and well-wishers cluster around Schutz, dressed down in blue jeans and a plaid shirt . Backed up against the wall on the other side of the room, Feuer warily eyes the crowd, which has gotten so thick there's barely room to view Schutz's vividly expressionistic, post-apocalyptic narratives. You can't miss the big one, though: Measuring 10 by 12 feet, it envisions the vast space of an airport waiting room transformed into a makeshift hospital for the victims of some unspecified, futuristic plague. In the foreground, doctors attend to a standing man whose body is covered by tumors; they're running intravenous tubes from a giant dead shark into his body. It's a nightmarish yet somehow weirdly comical picture.

Feuer sips nervously from a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. "I hate openings," he says in a near-mumble. He's wearing a baggy, pale gray suit, an open-collared beige shirt, and chunky brown shoes. A short and stocky 28-year-old with close-cropped hair and a full beard, he looks more like a rabbinical student than one of New York's most closely watched young art dealers. It's hard to believe this is the same person who, just last year, was on ArtReview magazine's list of the 100 most powerful people in the international art world.

"I'm going to go hide in my office," Feuer says. "I just hope they don't start bumping into the paintings." He shuffles away through the crowd and disappears behind the front desk. In a few minutes he's out again, greeting people with casual handshakes. Mostly, he looks like he doesn't know quite what to do with himself. Once he goes out to the street to smoke a Camel filter cigarette. Every so often he checks his Treo, but he doesn't make calls of his own.

"I'll be glad when this is over. Then I can relax," he says.

You'd think he'd be relaxed already: The show has essentially sold out, as museum curators have placed reserves on every piece. Feuer doesn't like to say what Schutz's paintings sell for, but he does note that the highest price paid at auction for one of her works is $130,000.

Feuer (pronounced like foyer) has come a long way since his graduation from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts just seven short years ago. Many Boston contemporary art followers still remember the splash he made with an exhibition he organized in his own $650-a-month, one-bedroom Mission Hill apartment in April 1999.

For that event, called "The Apartment Show," Feuer did not just use his apartment as a conventional gallery. Rather, he sent out an open call for artists who would create works specifically for his rented home, pieces that would play with ideas about apartment living in all sorts of improbable and zany ways. Forty-seven artists responded, and their works included photographs of dirty socks on the floor; a toaster and telephone that had been shot with a gun; a rug made of lint; a recorded voice repeating "I love you, I need you, I miss you" under a pile of dirty towels, and, most famously, a dresser drawer filled with Jell-O.

Two enthusiastic reviews of the show ran in the Globe, and the event brought him to the attention of Provincetown art dealer Nick Lawrence, who invited Feuer to work at his DNA Gallery the following summer. That led to the idea of opening a gallery in New York, with Feuer as director and Lawrence and his business associate Russell La Montaigne providing the funding. "They said, 'Here's your budget, go open a gallery,' " says Feuer.

Named for the three partners, LFL opened in a raw, fourth - floor space with no elevator on 26th Street in Chelsea in May 2000, a month before Feurer's graduation from the Museum School. He submitted photographs of the empty gallery as his senior project.

"We didn't sell much at first," Feuer recalled over lunch a week before the Schutz opening. "We were operating at a loss and I had trouble paying the rent for the first year and a half. The phone was always off for non-payment. I thought eventually my partners and I would give up and I'd have to get a normal job."

Then in February 2002, New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote a positive review of a two-person show of paintings by Holly Coulis and Schutz. The show sold out. "Three or four collectors called," says Feuer, "and it all snowballed from there." Nine months later, Feuer was able to move to his present ground - floor space on 24th Street, where his neighbors include some of New York's biggest name galleries: Gagosian, Andrea Rosen, and Barbara Gladstone among others. Two years later, he bought out his partners and changed the gallery's name to Zach Feuer Gallery.

Feuer was not clearly destined for such success from the start. Growing up in Bernardsville, N.J., he was doing poorly in school, so for eighth grade his parents sent him to a nearby boarding school that specialized in learning disabilities.

"I had trouble with organizational skills," Feuer says with a certain irony given that his success as an art dealer has depended so much on solving complex organizational problems. Recently, for example, he opened a new gallery in Los Angeles -- a partnership with gallerist Niels Kantor called Kantor/Feuer Gallery -- and he will soon open another partnership in London, Brown Gallery, that will be run by the former director of his New York gallery Kimberly Brown . He also co-founded NADA -- the New Art Dealers Alliance -- an association of smaller, up - and - coming galleries that has gotten a lot of attention for art fairs it has put on in Miami in conjunction with the giant Art Basel Miami Beach fair that happens every December.

In 10th grade Feuer transferred to the Cambridge School of Weston -- "a more art-friendly school," he says -- where he became deeply involved in photography and was encouraged by teachers in the art department. From there it was a short, logical leap to a photography major at the Museum School.

Never one to hide his ambition despite his unassuming manner, Feuer describes his time at the Museum School this way: "I was a cocky student. I wanted to be a famous artist. I thought I was going to show my work at the Museum of Modern Art. My art was pretty bad, but I was hustling for it and trying to get into every show I could."

Photographer Jim Dow , a lecturer in Visual and Critical Studies at the school, remembers Feuer as a "tremendously impressive" student. "He was interested in a variety of things, but he clearly understood how to negotiate the difficulties of the art world and of being an artist. You see lots of students with ambitious ideas who don't dot the I's and cross the T's, but that was certainly not the case with Zach."

Recalling his work on "The Apartment Show," Sandra Stark , who teaches photography at the school, marvels at "the amount of organization and his tremendous push for publicity -- I'd never seen anything like it." As for Feuer the person, she says, "He was always generous and supportive of his fellow students. He was very ambitious but it didn't affect how he treated people. We all just loved him."

Eventually Feuer found that he liked organizing exhibitions more than making art. For one project, he occupied a vacant space in the Assembly Square Mall in Somerville and set up a portrait studio, where he produced portraits of kids who hung out at the mall and pictures of potted plants that he paired with the portraits to create slyly comical diptychs.

He also organized the Museum School's annual photography show. Ultimately, when "The Apartment Show" took off, "I lost interest in creating art," he says. "I realized I was better at promotion and that I was getting more consistent approval by doing exhibitions. I needed more contact with the outside world than you get by being alone in your studio."

Kelly Taxter , a classmate at the Museum School whose recording of the ambient sounds in Feuer's apartment was included in "The Apartment Show," says she's not surprised by his success. "He had a kind of ingenuity about ways to show art that was more advanced than just showing in the school gallery. He was always one step ahead."

Like Feuer, Taxter also gave up making art to become a gallery director. She's a partner in Taxter & Spengemann , a small, cutting - edge gallery on 22 d Street in Chelsea, two blocks south of Feuer's gallery. Taxter credits Feuer as an inspirational role model. "I wouldn't have been able to do it if I hadn't known someone my age who'd done it himself."

Has Feuer's success incurred resentment in the New York art world? "Anyone who becomes that successful fosters opinions that are black and white," says Taxter. "There are plenty of people who think ill of him and don't think his program is rigorous enough. My defense is that he is one of the only people I know who is truly obsessed with art. If that's your motivation and not economics, that's a good thing."

The 20 artists who Feuer represents are mostly around his age. When he was starting out, he looked for young, emerging artists who had no affiliations with other galleries. Coulis was a classmate at the Museum School, as were several others who he showed early on. He met Schutz at a party in Brooklyn when she was a first-year graduate student at Columbia University.

"When we first met we had a big fight," Schutz recalls. "I told him what I did and he said, 'I don't know why anyone would want to paint.' I thought he was a creep. Then he called and we got to be friends. I thought dealers were terrifying people, and he seemed very open. He's not the typical super-dealer type -- he's really down to earth, and he always pays on time." (Her current show runs through May 19 . )

At first Feuer did many studio visits -- four or five a week -- but now it's closer to four or five a month, and he doesn't look at student work anymore. He relies on his own artists for recommendations. "I trust them more than anyone else," he says.

Like many other New York contemporary galleries in today's pluralistic era, Feuer's exhibits no obvious house style. Phoebe Washburn creates immense, wave-like sculptural installations out of zillions of small piece s of wood and cardboard. Jules de Balincourt makes visionary, neo-hippie paintings. Conceptualist Danica Phelps systematically tracks the minutiae of her financial and sexual lives in complex, diagrammatic drawings. Nathalie Djurberg makes darkly comic, violent, and sexually explicit stop-action animated videos starring grotesquely ugly puppets. Aaron Spangler carves amazingly complex and realistically detailed narrative reliefs from large slabs of wood. And Tamy Ben-Tor , a gifted performance artist, produces satiric, politically barbed videos in which she plays various ethnic types.

For all the diversity of style and media that Feuer's artists exhibit, it is possible to discern a certain underlying shared attitude: a penchant for exaggeration, excess, and extremism; a love of humor and absurdity; a preference for surrealistic eccentricity over formal elegance. It's the well-schooled, skeptical, romantic yet super-hip spirit of a generation steeped in art history, popular culture, new media, and anxiety about the apparently increasingly perilous state of the world.

Jerry Saltz , formerly art critic for The Village Voice and now for New York magazine, observes that since the early years of Feuer's breakout success, a certain aesthetic sameness has crept into his gallery.

"He obviously had an eye for his moment," says Saltz. "He had a knack for staying up late with some of the right artists. But it's a tough period he's coming into now, and there are probably a lot of decisions he has to make about his direction in the immediate future."

"Art and galleries can get uncool," Feuer acknowledges. "You can't stay hot forever. So you have to be prepared to be uncool. I've always been surprised to be accepted. I hope to be able to handle it when we're not so cool."

Asked if he's a workaholic, Feuer says he's not sure and then admits he might be. He does like to garden and bicycle around his home near the upstate New York town of Hudson where he goes on weekends with his wife of three years, Allison Smith , a sculptor and performance artist who shows with another Chelsea gallery.

In any case, early success has not taken the edge off his ambition. He tells all the numerous journalists who have written about him -- including this writer -- the same thing: "I want to represent the most important artists in the world." In today's global art world, that may sound like a preposterous goal -- when will there ever be widespread agreement about who are the world's most important artists?

More likely what he means is that he wants to be one of the most important art dealers in the world. Now that's a distinct possibility. He's certainly off to a good start.

Ken Johnson can be reached at kejohnson@globe.com.