Marian Goodman is one of the best galleries in the world. The gallery announced the expansion of its presence in Los Angeles early next year. The move follows a wave of New York galleries announcing last winter that they will open a store in Southern California.
The gallery’s new location will be a 1920s Hollywood warehouse campus located at 1120 Seward Street. It’s just above Santa Monica Boulevard. It will be integrated into a single space by Los Angeles-based architectural firm Johnston Marklee. The inaugural program will be announced in the fall.
While several galleries have recently announced upcoming LA openings, including David Zwirner, Lisson Gallery, Sean Kelly, and Pace’s merger with Kayne Griffin, Philip Kaiser, the gallery’s president and partner, said their LA expansion was long overdue.
Kaiser who was previously a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles before joining the gallery in 2019 Los Angeles said that many New York galleries are opening here now, but in their case, there is an inherent logic to opening here. He also noted that they did not wait for others to open – they just took a little longer.
Kaiser added that Marian Goodman, the gallery’s founder, once ran a space on Westside’s La Cienega Boulevard for two years in the 1970s. The Los Angeles space joins other galleries operating in New York and Paris. In 2020, the gallery closed its office in London, and now it is implementing a project program in the British capital.
In the coming months, the gallery’s top management – Goodman, Kaiser and four other partners: Emily-Jane Kirwan, Rose Lord, Leslie Nolen and Junette Teng – will try to build a team in Los Angeles. Among those artists living in Los Angeles that the gallery represents are Paul Sitzema, Maria Nordmann, Tacitha Deen, and the late artist John Baldessari.
Many gallery artists have participated in major institutional exhibitions at Los Angeles museums, including Julie Meretu at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2019, Pierre Hugues at LACMA in 2014, Dan Graham at MOCA in 2009, Robert Smithson at MOCA in 2004, and Gabriel Orozco at MOCA in 2000.
Kaiser said that it is very important for them to have a platform to deepen the presence of these artists in Los Angeles. Kaiser expressed his desire to introduce them to a wider audience, to create and offer meaningful shows for the Los Angeles community, not to recycle New York shows, but to develop unique projects.
The 13,000-square-foot gallery complex will include 5,000 square feet of exhibition space, viewing rooms, office space, and parking. The space will be divided into two main galleries and one smaller gallery with 26-foot high ceilings. The complex will include a landscaped garden with native plants and an open-air art space.
Although the gallery will take up an impressively large space in Los Angeles, Kaiser says it will blend in with other spaces.
