Painter Yirui Jia Sues Miami Beach Dealer Gabriel Kilongo Over Unpaid Sales
Artist Yirui Jia says she is owed most of the money from five paintings sold through Jupiter, a Miami Beach gallery. She has sued the gallery's dealer, Gabriel Kilongo, in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, ARTnews reported.
The lawsuit was filed in September. Jia alleges that Kilongo paid her $2,000 of the $42,000 she was owed for the five works. These are her allegations, set out in the court filing, and they have not been proven in court.
Jupiter's own sales report lists all five paintings as sold for between $2,000 and $32,000 each. According to that report, two went to Bing Zhang, a buyer based in Vancouver, Canada, and three went to Bradley Chubb.
The lawsuit also quotes an exchange between Jia and Kilongo. In it, Kilongo says he is managing very tight cash flow and is waiting for things to clear on the gallery's side before he can send payment. A dealer is the person who sells artists' work for them, usually collecting the sale price and paying the artist her share afterward.
Kilongo, who is from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, founded Jupiter in March 2022, according to an interview with Artnet News in 2023. Before that he worked as an associate at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, a commercial gallery in New York. Jupiter began in Normandy Isles, a neighbourhood of Miami Beach, and the gallery also operated in New York at one point.
Jupiter has shown its artists at art fairs, the trade events where galleries rent booths to sell work. Its fair appearances include Untitled, Expo Chicago and Zona Maco in Mexico City, and most recently Independent New York in May. Jia had a solo show at Jupiter's Miami Beach location in 2025. Her work was also the subject of a solo show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in 2024.
ARTnews reported that Kilongo has faced four lawsuits in the past two years. The gallery's website says its last exhibition, a two-person show for George Clinton and Gerasimos Floratos, closed in Miami Beach in February. Jupiter was administratively dissolved on September 25, a New York status that formally ends a company's legal existence on paper.
For artists who sell through galleries, the question is simple. Who collects the money, and when does it reach the person who made the work? Jia's case asks that question in a New York court, and the answer is not yet settled.
