Art dealers Larry Gagosian and John Berggruen have recently announced plans of opening adjacent galleries in San Francisco. Conveniently, their newest locations are across the street from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

For Gagosian, this new space joins his global network of galleries as his sixteenth location, with others in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Rome, Athens, Geneva, and Hong Kong.

The San Francisco Gate reports that the space will open on May 18, a few days after the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is slated to hold its grand re-opening. Gagosian reportedly signed an open-ended lease for the 4,000-square-foot street-level property in the Crown Point Press building at 657 Howard Street as soon as it became available. City-Data lists the assessed property value for the entire building as $5,378,608.

“If I didn’t find the right space, I wouldn’t have done it. I wasn’t going to force it,” Gagosian told SF Gate. He continued, “This makes sense with the new museum opening and with the emerging collector base in Silicon Valley.”

His first show will display works by Cy Twombly, Richard Serra, Jasper Johns, and Pablo Picasso.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Photo: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Berggruen, who is opening his adjacent gallery on the corner of Howard and Hawthorne, reportedly signed a ten-year lease on the 10,000 square-foot building. “The two galleries establishes a small but significant critical mass,” Berggruen told SF Gate.

While these moves may be motivated to capitalize on the Golden Gate City’s burgeoning blue-chip collecting scene, how their galleries will perform is yet to be determined—especially given the population’s relatively unorthodox taste in art. But, as Gagosian told the Financial Times in a rare 2010 interview: “Art’s been around a long time: I can’t screw it up too much!”

Gagosian Gallery and the Berggruen Gallery did not respond to artnet News’ requests for comment.