Gagosian Gallery will open its 14th location in April, as per Carol Vogel of The New York Times, right here in Manhattan in a ground floor space at 75th Street and Park Avenue, just a few blocks from the gallery’s Madison Avenue hub. Sculptures by Urs Fischer will be the subject of “Last Supper,” the first show in the space, which opens April 3. Perhaps more interestingly, that same day, Gagosian will open a pop-up shop in a former Chase Manhattan Bank on Delancey Street on the Lower East Side, also featuring sculpture by Fischer. Does this signal the demise of the Lower East Side gallery scene?

“I’m excited that gallery and artist have a presence not only in the neighborhood but on this street,” said art dealer James Fuentes who has a gallery at 55 Delancey, “and potentially why an artist like Urs Fischer was attracted to it in the first place.” Fischer had been in Fuentes’s gallery for the summer show of artist Daniel Subkoff.

Fuentes, whose upcoming exhibition”The Real Estate” opens the day after Gagosian’s April 3 opening, will deal with 123 Delancey Street in 1980, when artists rallied together to fend off what they believed was a real estate crisis for artists. Fuentes also noted an impending development in the area called Essex Crossing that is going to change the atmosphere of the LES. “Basically the neighborhood is about to undergo a really seismic shift. In about ten years, this neighborhood will not be recognizable. The extreme-ness of a Gagosian presence on Delancey street in light of all these things that are on the way, I’m not even surprised that this is occurring.”

 Rozalia Jovanovic