Larry Gagosian moved his gallery here from SoHo in 1999 into a 25,000-square-foot industrial space designed by architect Richard Gluckman, built to hold Richard Serra-scale steel.
The Chelsea space is essentially one large open warehouse floor, so shows lean toward big installation and sculpture rather than intimate viewing.
The room behind the West 24th Street front is the point of the place. Richard Gluckman, who has spent much of his career converting Manhattan industrial stock for art, raised the roof over one gallery to make a column-free hall of roughly 6,000 square feet, built to carry weight rather than simply enclose space, and ran a polycarbonate clerestory above it that lights the room by day and glows over the block at night. The gallery opened in September 1999; Richard Serra’s Switch went in that November and stayed until the following February.
Gagosian started a long way from Chelsea. Larry Gagosian opened his first gallery in Los Angeles in 1980, showing artists then at the start of their careers, among them Jean-Michel Basquiat and Eric Fischl. New York came in 1989 with a space on Madison Avenue that opened with Jasper Johns’s map paintings, followed by a downtown gallery in 1991. By 2024 the business ran nineteen exhibition spaces across the Americas, Europe and Asia, which puts it closer in scale to a small museum chain than to the single-room dealership the word gallery still suggests.
If you have never been inside a commercial gallery, the mechanics are simpler than the architecture implies. You walk in. There is no ticket and no turnstile, only a desk where a printed list of the works usually sits, and nobody will ask what you want. The difference from a museum is that everything on the walls is for sale, which shapes what you get: almost no wall text, sparse labels, and no attempt to explain the work to a general audience.
What that buys you is access. In 2026 the space held new bronzes by Giuseppe Penone in a show curated by Adam D. Weinberg, director emeritus of the Whitney, an exhibition of a kind most institutions would charge admission for.
555 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011 · Official site ↗
Gagosian Gallery is a modern and contemporary art gallery owned and directed by Larry Gagosian. The gallery exhibits some of the most well-known artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. As of 2024, Gagosian employs 300 people at 19 exhibition spaces – including New York City, London, Paris, Basel, Beverly Hills, San Francisco, Rome, Athens, Geneva, and Hong Kong – designed by architects such as Caruso St John, Richard Gluckman, Richard Meier, Jean Nouvel, and Annabelle Selldorf.
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