Marian Goodman Gallery opens sprawling Tribeca headquarters

Marian Goodman Gallery opened its new flagship space on the main strip of Manhattan’s Tribeca gallery district on Saturday (26 October). It is renting the Grovesnor Building at 385 Broadway, a former warehouse with a cast-iron façade that dates from 1875, which has been extensively restored by the architecture firm StudioMDA. It gives the gallery 35,000 sq. ft of space in all, spread over five storeys, plus a basement with large, light-filled galleries and private viewing rooms, offices, archives, a library, a photography studio, storage and more.

At a preview of the space on 24 October, Rose Lord, a managing partner at the gallery, framed the 47-year-old gallery’s new headquarters as first and foremost a space in support of its artists. “The gallery’s mission has always been and will continue to be our commitment to our artists,” she said.

The new complex is not only very large, but a very big change from the gallery’s former Manhattan headquarters on an upper floor of a building on 57th Street. That location featured two main spaces, a north gallery and a south gallery. The gallery’s new home “is vertical rather than horizontal”, gallery partner and president Philipp Kaiser said during the preview.

In homage to the gallery’s home of the last several decades, the conceptual artist Pierre Huyghe cut a circular section from the walls of the north and south galleries at 24 West 57th Street, and sanded through the layers of paint to create tree-ring-like records of Marian Goodman’s history in that building. One of those pieces is now displayed in the street-facing ground-floor room at 385 Broadway, while the other is on the third floor, reflecting the gallery’s vertical “reorientation”, as Kaiser put it.

The two Huyghe works—both titled Timekeeper Drill Core (MGG 57th Street) (2024)—serve as bookends of sorts in Your Patience Is Appreciated: An Inaugural Show (until 14 December), which Kaiser led the curation of and includes a mix of recent and historical works by 50 artists spread across the building’s three levels of galleries. Part of the challenge in organising the inaugural show was “how do you create a meaningful exhibition that doesn’t look like an art fair booth”.

The show includes many works that would not fare well in the context of a fair stand—video pieces, conceptual art, institution critique, performance art and more—but benefit from the spacious, light-filled environment at 385 Broadway.

“The exhibition title is an ironic comment,” Kaiser said. “You need patience to build up a roster over 47 years. You also need to spend the time to understand these works.”

Spending time with the exhibition, numerous connecting threads do emerge—motifs related to trees and time, and works that have a very strong sense of place. From the Maurizio Cattelan piece that greets visitors as they enter (with its “I ❤ NY” message and perched pigeons), to a Thomas Struth snapshot of a Tribeca streetscape in 1978 and An-My Lê’s large landscape photograph of last summer’s solar eclipse at Niagara Falls.

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And, not unlike the new complex itself, the gallery’s inaugural show is something of a flex. There are brand new works by star artists from Marian Goodman’s roster including Julie Mehretu, Gabriel Orozco, Tacita Dean, Tavares Strachan and Anri Sala; historic pieces by Marcel Broodthaers, Chantal Akerman, Giuseppe Penone, Dan Graham and Robert Smithson; and unconventional inclusions like a print of Andrea Fraser’s 2018 data visualisation project charting the campaign contributions of US museums’ board members in the 2016 US presidential election, and an intimate performance piece by Tino Sehgal (This Ornation, 2018).

Taken as a whole, the show offers a view—and, with Huyghe’s works, a material record—of where the gallery is coming from and where it is headed. As Kaiser put it: “It’s always worth looking back to see where you’re going.”

• Your Patience Is Appreciated: An Inaugural Show, until 14 December, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York