Gagosian Gallery

Gagosian Gallery is a contemporary art gallery owned and directed by Larry Gagosian. There are sixteen gallery spaces: five in New York; three in London; two in Paris; one each in Beverly Hills, San Francisco, Rome, Athens, Geneva and Hong Kong.

Larry Gagosian opened his first gallery in Los Angeles in 1980. In the 1980s, the Los Angeles gallery showed the work of young contemporary artists such as Eric Fischl, Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Salle, as the New York City space mounted exhibitions dedicated to the history of The New York School, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art by showing the earlier work of Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and Willem de Kooning. In 1985, the business expanded from Los Angeles to New York. In 1986, Gagosian opened a second space on West 23rd Street in Manhattan.

In 1989, a new and more spacious gallery opened in New York City at 980 Madison Avenue with the inaugural exhibition: "The Maps of Jasper Johns." During its first two years, the Madison Avenue space, once used by Sotheby's, presented work by Yves Klein, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly and Jackson Pollock. Shortly after, artists such as Walter de Maria, Philip Taaffe, Francesco Clemente, and Peter Halley joined the gallery. Gagosian Gallery’s second New York City location opened in the neighborhood of SoHo, then the heart of the New York art scene, in 1991. Shortly before, the gallery had wooed David Salle and Philip Taaffe from long-term relationships with the Mary Boone Gallery. The new venue served to show large-scale works by artists such as Richard Serra, Mark di Suvero, Barnett Newman, and Chris Burden. The downtown location showed younger artists such as Ellen Gallagher, Jenny Saville, Douglas Gordon and Cecily Brown. The uptown gallery maintained its commitment to historical exhibitions by showing monumental sculptures by Miró, Calder and Moore.