Barbara Gladstone, the art dealer behind one of New York’s most influential galleries, died on Sunday at 89. Her eponymous gallery confirmed her passing in Paris “after a brief illness” via an email and Instagram post.
“Barbara was a visionary leader who had an indelible impact on the artists she worked with, her colleagues at the gallery, her many friends, and the entire art world,” her partners Max Falkenstein, Caroline Luce, Paula Tsai, and Gavin Brown wrote on Instagram. “Barbara valued her relationships with artists above all else and remained their advocate up until the end. She championed artists who are breaking new ground with their work and stood with them as they developed their practices, noting that ‘you have to sense in someone’s work the possibility of longevity.’”
Gladstone retired from her profession as an art history professor at Hofstra University in 1980 to open Gladstone Gallery in a small space on 57th Street in New York City. There, she presented shows from emerging stars like Keith Haring and Robert Mapplethorpe.
In the early ’90s, she pivoted to a larger SoHo space, where she presented shows such as Matthew Barney’s first New York solo exhibition in 1991. Then, in 1996, she became one of the first gallerists to move to Chelsea, occupying a space in a 29,000-square-foot building alongside Matthew Marks Gallery and Metro Pictures.
Unlike her contemporaries, Gladstone took a more measured approach to growing her gallery. The gallerist opened her second Chelsea space in 2008, coinciding with her first international space in Brussels. The gallery also operates spaces in New York’s Upper East Side, Rome, and Seoul, which it opened in 2022. Today, it represents more than 70 artists and estates, including Thomas Hirshhorn, Sarah Lucas, Wangechi Mutu, and Robert Rauschenberg.
In recent years, Gladstone Gallery has focused on several early-career artists, including Rachel Rose and Ed Atkins. Carrying Gladstone’s nearly five-decade-long legacy, the gallery will continue to operate with its four partners, with Falkenstein at the helm.
