Larry Gagosian doesn’t do a lot of interviews, but one supposes when Elle Decor asks to do a glossy profile on the rocket-ship trajectory of his eponymous gallery, you say yes.
Speaking on the occasion of a new gallery opening at 980 Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side this spring, Gagosian reflected on his many successes—and two notable failures.
His short-lived San Francisco gallery, which opened in 2016 near SFMoMA and closed in 2021, was one such failure. At the time, a spokesperson framed the closing as an effort to “consolidate and strengthen Gagosian’s presence in California.” In the interview with Elle Decor, the mega-dealer was quite a bit blunter.
“It just failed,” Gagosian said. “I mean, nobody showed up. It was so depressing. I’d fly up there for an opening, and there’s nobody there. I’d go, What the f— am I doing here?”
While the Bay Area is home to many ARTnews Top 200 collectors, including Laurene Powell Jobs, billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreesen and Laura Arillaga-Andreesen, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, former Gap Inc. chairman Robert Fisher, and tech power couple Komal Shah and Gaurav Garg, among others, the art market there has stayed shaky. Pace too tried its hand there, opening a Palo Alto outpost in 2014, before relocating to a smaller space in 2018, and then closing in 2022.
Last October, Altman Siegel, one of the cornerstones of the San Francisco art scene, announced that it was closing after 16 years in business, citing the difficulty of operating in the current market. That same month. Rena Bransten Gallery, another Bay Area mainstay, said it was closing its Dogpatch space and would adopt a “nomadic model” in response to declining sales and rising rent; Bransten died at 92 in February. Art nonprofit Kadist also announced that it was closing last year.
Still, its not all doom and gloom. Hauser & Wirth is set to open in Palo Alto this year, with a new 2,600-square-foot space at 201-225 Hamilton Avenue, a short walk from the Stanford University campus.
Gagosian’s other mistake, by the way, was the gallery’s Geneva outspot, which opened in 2010, and last held an exhibition in 2020.
“I didn’t fully get the Swiss,” he said bluntly, noting that the space is now closed.
