Paula Cooper Gallery

The Paula Cooper Gallery is an art gallery in New York City founded in 1968.

The gallery is primarily known for the Minimalist and Conceptual artists it has represented and whose careers it helped launch. Such artists include: Carl Andre, Jennifer Bartlett, Lynda Benglis, Mark di Suvero, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Sophie Calle, Meg Webster among others.

According to The New York Observer, "The history of Paula Cooper Gallery is, in many ways, the history of the New York art world." Cooper opened the first gallery in lower New York City, below Houston Street, in 1968. “I didn’t like uptown,” Ms. Cooper told The Observer. “I thought it was just little shops. I looked downtown. And people told me that I was crazy to open there. That no one would go there.” The gallery opened with an exhibition to benefit the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, working alongside Veterans Against the War. The exhibition featured LeWitt’s first wall drawing, and included works by Andre, Flavin, and Judd. That show is now widely recognized as seminal in the development of a new generation of rigorous and challenging work.

By 1975, the neighborhood had been renamed SoHo, and included 83 other art galleries. Cooper relocated the gallery to Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood in 1996. Critic Michael Kimmelman, reviewing a Carl Andre exhibition, wrote in The New York Times, "The news here is how good Paula Cooper's new gallery looks: the main room is like a big chapel. Too bad for SoHo, which Ms. Cooper, one of its pioneering dealers, recently abandoned to the hordes of retail stores."

In 2013, the gallery opened two pop-up spaces, in a former auto parts shop at 197 10th Avenue, near 22nd Street, as well as on the ground floor of 521 West 21st Street.

In February 2011, Christian Marclay's twenty-four-hour multi-visual exhibit the The Clock was exhibited in the gallery space. The Clock had recently received The Golden Lion award at the 54th Venice Biennale. Critic Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times, "It is ensconced in a theaterlike installation at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea, where it should not be missed...The presentation at the Paula Cooper gallery reiterates the synthetic nature of 'The Clock.' The combination of carpeted floors, walls hung with velvet curtains and a dozen long couches lined up in four rows, with the screen high and large on the wall, evocatively conflates living room, screening room and movie theater, while even hinting at drive-in movies (the couches as parked cars)." In The New York Observer, Michael H. Miller wrote, "[When] Ms. Cooper exhibited Christian Marclay’s 24-hour paean to cinematic history, The Clock, for several weekends, the gallery stayed open 24/7 and a line stretched around the corner into the early hours of morning...Models mingled with art handlers. Reporters and rival dealers waited patiently amongst the late-night swell of people."

...
Wikipedia