Marian Goodman Gallery has finalised the opening date and the inaugural exhibition for its new flagship location in Tribeca, New York. On 26 October, the dealership will debut an as-yet-untitled group show encompassing work by around 50 of the artists it represents. The exhibition, which will be on view until 21 December, is intended as both a celebration of the gallery’s nearly half-century history and a launch point for a new era under its nascent leadership.
“We want to make the exhibition very lively, in that it’s a new beginning. It’s looking back and looking forward at the same time,” Philipp Kaiser, the gallery's president and one of the five partners appointed by founder Marian Goodman to oversee daily operations in 2021, tells The Art Newspaper.
The gallery’s new headquarters will occupy all five storeys of the historic Grosvenor Building, a late 19th-century industrial warehouse located at 385 Broadway. Renovated by the architecture firm StudioMDA, the 30,000 sq. ft site will include two floors of public exhibition space, one floor of private viewing rooms, a library and an archive in addition to art storage and office space.
Those distinctions between spaces within the building, however, may not apply for the inaugural exhibition, according to Kaiser and Rose Lord, a managing partner of the gallery. Lord says that, after many conversations with the gallery’s artists, a group show going beyond traditional boundaries “seemed like the most democratic way” to christen the new headquarters. “If we use all the viewing rooms and spaces that won’t necessarily be open to the public during normal exhibitions, then we can figure out a good way to accommodate all the artists,” she says, adding: “It’s been a while since the whole stable of the gallery has been shown at one time.”
Marian Goodman’s most recent exhibition of this kind was in 2007: the two-part 30/40, curated by Benjamin H.D. Bucloh to mark the gallery's 30th anniversary. It included works by 40 of the gallery’s artists. The inaugural Tribeca show will provide an even more ambitious survey of its aesthetic sensibility. New works will share space with historical works, the younger artists on the roster will be contextualised alongside the elder statesmen, and objects will be curated alongside time-based media, installations and performances.
Kaiser, however, is quick to emphasise that the end result will transcend what weary art world travellers often see in convention centres around the globe. “It’s not going to look like an art fair booth,” he says. “We’re trying to have meaningful pairings, combinations and platforms.”
Although the checklist is still being finalised, some tentative exhibition highlights include a new photographic work by An-My Lê; a large hand-painted photograph by Tacita Dean; a new single-channel video piece by Eija-Liisa Ahtila addressing ecological issues; and a poignant addition to Pierre Huyghe’s long-running Timekeeper series, in which the artist carefully sanded down—using a circular sander—sections of walls in exhibition spaces, revealing the many layers of paint beneath their outermost surface. Huyghe often extracts these sections, and in this case, will present one in which his raw material is one of the walls of Goodman’s soon-to-be-former headquarters on 57th Street—making the gallery’s history visible and literal at its new flagship location. Marcel Broodthaers, the first artist to show with Goodman after she founded the gallery in 1977, will also have “a big presence” in the exhibition, Kaiser says.
Marian Goodman Gallery’s leadership team, from left: managing partner Rose Lord, partner Leslie Nolen, president and partner Philipp Kaiser, chief executive and founder Marian Goodman, partner Junette Teng and managing partner Emily-Jane Kirwan.
Photo: Alex Yudzon, courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery
Searching for home
Marian Goodman Gallery now operates permanent locations in New York, Paris and Los Angeles. The LA space, which opened in 2023, bolstered the nucleus of high-level dealerships surrounding Highland Avenue in Hollywood. The Paris gallery, established in 1998 in the Marais district, expanded in 2017 by adding a neighbouring space that was originally dedicated to books and editions; the latter has since been converted into an exhibition space. The London outpost of the firm closed in 2022 after eight years.
A departure from the Upper East Side had long been debated within the company. “I’ve worked at the gallery for 22 years. Certainly for the first ten years, there was a conversation with Marian and the directors every week about whether we should move the gallery—to Chelsea, at that time,” Lord says. But other priorities loomed larger, until sometime after Goodman—fresh off her 93rd birthday—transitioned the management of the gallery to Kaiser, Lord, her fellow managing partner Emily-Jane Kirwan and the partners Leslie Nolen and Junette Teng. (Goodman herself retains the title of chief executive.)
Yet the new leadership’s attempts to find a large, suitable space on the Upper East Side came up empty, and a similar effort in Chelsea met with the same result. Then, around a year after the search began, a realtor notified the gallery about the Grosvenor Building before it went on the market.
“It just felt like the right place for us,” Lord says. “We’re really happy to be joining a community in Tribeca, because the community around 57th Street has slowly dissipated, really.” Nearby the new flagship is a slew of notable art venues, ranging from 52 Walker, the kunsthalle directed by Ebony L. Haynes and operated by David Zwirner; and 125 Newbury, Pace Gallery founder Arne Glimcher’s project space; to PPOW Gallery, Andrew Kreps and Mendes Wood DM.
Aside from the enthusiastic responses the Grosvenor Building received from many of Marian Goodman’s artists, its other draws included the opportunity to operate a ground-floor gallery in a vibrant neighbourhood, as opposed to an upper-storey gallery in a more demure one. “We’re interested in having as wide an audience as possible for the works that we show,” Lord says. “It’s also great not to have to rig in heavy sculptures to the fourth floor.”
The partners were similarly taken with having the capacity to consolidate the office space onto one level—unlike at 57th Street, where the staff’s distribution across different floors meant that “people would email each other all day, so we weren’t as connected”, Kaiser says.
The gallery’s presence on the Upper East Side will conclude imminently. The New York-based employees’ final day at 57th Street is 12 July; they will then work remotely until early September, at which point they will begin phasing into the new headquarters in preparation for the grand opening on 26 October.
“Our program is really embedded with art history,” Kaiser says when asked what he hopes visitors take away from the inaugural Tribeca exhibition. “Marian, when she started, was one of the first to bring European artists to the US when no one was interested in European or German or Italian art after the war.” This interest “grew into a global vision” in the 1990s, he adds, and has continued to evolve in the 2020s. Across these past few years, the gallery has focused on championing a fresh wave of artists, such as Tavares Strachan and Delcy Morelos, even as established blue-chippers such as Gerhard Richter and Nan Goldin have exited for the mega-galleries.
“When people ask what connects all the artists—because they make very different work—I always say they’re connected by a sensibility and an interest in social history,” Lord adds. “All the artists we show have a strong voice in leading us forward in difficult and challenging times.”