Philipp Kaiser has departed Marian Goodman Gallery, where he is president and one of the gallery’s five partners, after more than six years. His last day at the gallery will be on May 2 and he will serve “as a curatorial consultant to the Gallery, as needed,” Marian Goodman Gallery confirmed to ARTnews in a statement.
“Following the recent events in L.A., Philipp Kaiser has made the decision to leave the Gallery after more than six years and return to independent curatorial practice,” the gallery’s statement continued, referring to the recent wildfires in the city. “We are grateful to Philipp for his vision and for his many contributions to the Gallery, which include the successful launches of our new spaces in New York and LA.”
Kaiser joined the gallery in 2019 in a move that shocked many insiders in the art world. Kaiser had never worked at a commercial gallery before. Instead, his background was in the museum world, having been a curator at both the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and then briefly serving as director of Museum Ludwig in Cologne. After departing the Ludwig, Kaiser worked independently, curating the Swiss Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale and several exhibitions at LA’s Marciano Art Foundation, founded by blue-chip collectors Paul and Maurice Marciano.
His high-level position, first as chief executive director of artists and programs, also meant that he had a major role in plotting out the strategy for the gallery in terms of his exhibition program and its institutional relationships.
Then in 2021, Marian Goodman, the founder, announced she would step away from daily operations of the gallery, entrusting it instead to a partnership, led by Kaiser and rounded out by Rose Lord, Emily-Jane Kirwan, Leslie Nolen, and Junette Teng.
Since the leadership transition of the gallery to the partners, it has undergone significant changes, most notably its departure from its Midtown space on 57th Street to 385 Broadway in Tribeca, which opened last October. (Since its founding in 1977, the gallery had avoided following trends in gallery neighborhoods, staying on 57th instead of heading to SoHo or Chelsea.)
While the gallery has had an international presence, with an outpost in Paris since 1995 and a former one in London that closed in 2020, the gallery has been firmly a New York operation within the US. That changed in September 2023 when it opened an LA branch, which was likely due to Kaiser’s influence given his prominence in the city’s art community.
And the gallery has also lost three major artists from its roster. In December 2022, Gerhard Richter, who had been with the gallery for more than 30 years, left for David Zwirner. Nan Goldin decamped for Gagosian a few months later. And in March 2024, William Kentridge joined Hauser & Wirth.
