Unless you’re an artist or a dealer, chances are you don’t think much about how art is hung in a gallery –– why this painting is on the wall next to that one; why there are so many pieces, or so few. Somebody, though, has to put serious thought into an installation for people not to notice it — and just admire the art.

Last week, Kevin Wixted, a painter, teacher, and occasional art hanger, stood in the middle of the small exhibition space at Lohin Geduld Gallery on West 25th Street. He was studying several brightly colored abstract canvases by the painter Cecily Kahn, which had just arrived and been unwrapped by the gallery’s co-owner, Ro Lohin, who happens to be Mr. Wixted’s wife.

“If we hang it, it just looks like things on a wall,” Ms. Lohin, explaining why she calls in spousal support, said. “Kevin has a really good sense of proportion and flow, so that when you walk in the front door you’re pulled all the way around the room.”

Ms. Kahn, whose show opened Tuesday, had sent 18 paintings, of which they would probably hang 13 or 14. “The thing to avoid is overkill,” Mr. Wixted said.

Not hanging all of the works, of course, meant that Ms. Lohin and Mr. Wixted would get to choose the ones they thought were strongest –– which is one reason they rarely let the artists themselves participate in the installation.

“Ro and I are both artists, so we know the psyche,” Mr. Wixted said. “They have an emotional connection to something — it may be the thing they’ve struggled with the longest, but it’s not the one that looks best in the show.”

Lohin Geduld is on the first floor of the building, but it is quite small: about 500 square feet of exhibition space, divided by a floating wall into a square in front and a narrow rectangle in back. The architect, Donald Clinton, helped Ms. Lohin make the gallery feel as airy and spacious as possible by bleaching the floor white, installing a glass front entrance, and leaving a “reveal” –– that is, a gap where the wall meets the floor, like the one that the architect Yoshio Taniguchi used at the new MoMA.

Because of the glass front doors ––and the slight inconvenience of having a pole in the middle of the floor, left over from the gallery’s days as a loading dock –– Mr. Wixted always hangs the largest, boldest piece on the part of the floating wall to the right of the pole, where people can see it from the street, and a smaller piece to the left. Having put the largest of Ms. Kahn’s paintings in the first-place spot, for the moment using screws in the wall from the previous show, he started to move the smaller paintings around the room.

He works by trial-and-error, he said –– “just like how I paint. I stick a nail in the wall and see how it looks, then I move it.” (Like many galleries, Lohin Geduld has walls with a layer of plywood below the Sheetrock, which means that Mr. Wixted can screw in anywhere he wants, then spackle over the old holes.)

While he experimented, Ms. Lohin’s assistant, Emily Sessions, went around the room taking digital pictures of the paintings. “We might have 30 or 40 pieces coming or going in any given month, so we have to keep close track of inventory,” she said. For each show Ms. Sessions also makes a sheet with images, titles, and prices of all the works, which can be handed out to potential buyers, since Lohin Geduld doesn’t use wall labels.

With Mr. Wixted’s help, Ms. Lohin and her partner, the trader E.E.”Buzzy” Geduld (“He brings his people from the trading world, which is nice,” Ms. Lohin said), have successfully shown a wide variety of artists. Mr. Wixted has built shelves to display ceramics and false walls in which to embed an artist’s limestone relief sculptures.

By 3 p.m., Mr. Wixted was almost finished. As Ms. Lohin had promised, he had found a good balance and flow between larger and smaller, and vertical and horizontal canvases. From the front entrance, you could see the two paintings on the floating wall, two paintings in full view on each of the side walls, and then two more in the back area, beckoning you to come further in.

Now that he’d found his perfect arrangement, Mr. Wixted knew what came next. “Basically, when I get it all set, then Ro tells me what’s wrong with it,” he said.

Ms. Lohin laughed. “If I move a painting, I’m in trouble.” But, of course, she couldn’t help raising just a few issues: For instance, was he sure that small, dark painting was right in the front corner? Didn’t it draw attention from the lighter-colored works on that wall?

Mr. Wixted fixed her with a look of affectionate exasperation. “I call that the anchor,” he said in a tone that ended the discussion.

Before the next evening’s opening, Mr. Wixted still had to set the lighting. Lohin Geduld has four tracks of lights, which can be moved and rotated, can take bulbs for spots (sharp, focused light) or washes (gentle light on a broad area), and are adjusted by eight different rheostats. After doing the lights, Mr. Wixted would repaint the walls and the front desk. In spite of the time pressure, he and Ms. Lohin seemed to enjoy the process, spousal teasing included.

“The nice thing for us is getting to spend a lot of time with work we couldn’t necessarily afford,” Mr. Wixted said.

Ms. Lohin agreed.”I mean, as a member of the art-viewing public, you don’t usually get to spend 30 days with a work of art. Your eye develops. I keep seeing new things in them.”