Marian Goodman is Hollywood-bound.
The venerable dealer’s gallery announced today that it would open its first West Coast outpost in Los Angeles next year, adding to spaces in New York, London, and Paris.
The gallery is the latest in a wave of East Coast dealers to set up shop in L.A., including Albertz Benda, Sean Kelly, Lisson, Pace, The Hole, and Sargent’s Daughters. Efforts to expand westward have been in the works for a long time, Marian Goodman president Philipp Kaiser told Artnet News.
“It looks like we’re coming late to the game but we’ve been talking about it for years,” he said. “Many of our artists—Gabriel Orozco, for example, [and] Julie Mehretu—don’t have galleries on the West Coast. And L.A. has an amazing art audience—the art schools, the collectors, the institutions.”
The news is particularly notable since Marian Goodman has resisted the urge to expand at the pace of some of its peers. In 2020, the gallery announced that it would shutter its gallery space in London, opting to maintain an office and pursue flexible projects in the city.
In L.A., Goodman will set up shop in a 13,000-square-foot warehouse, soon to be renovated by the local architecture firm Johnston Marklee. The gallery’s new spot will boast 5,000 square feet of exhibition space—most of it illuminated via skylight—as well as viewing rooms, offices, a garden, dedicated parking, and maybe a book store down the line, too.
It’s Highland Corridor location puts it near numerous other galleries—Regen Projects, Tanya Bonakdar, and Jeffrey Deitch among them. This proximity was a big part of why Goodman settled on its new location, noted Kaiser, who’s partly based in L.A.
“We don’t really believe in the trailblazer system, that you open in an underdeveloped neighborhood and claim your presence,” he said. “L.A.’s a big city and many New Yorkers who move there make that mistake because they don’t fully understand how the city functions, how much you drive—and how many shows you miss because of that.”
“It’s not that we’re trying to open next to someone else because, as Marian Goodman, we don’t really need to do that,” Kaiser continued. “But we also don’t need to claim that we’re super independent. In the end, we want to make sure people see the shows.”
For Goodman herself, now 94, the expansion symbolizes something of a full-circle moment. The dealer’s career began in the mid-1960s when she launched the print company Multiples, Inc., publishing work by stalwart West Coast artists like Larry Bell, Bruce Nauman, and John Baldessari. The company briefly operated an adjunct space on La Cienega Boulevard in L.A.
Goodman’s new branch is expected to open in February 2023. Details about the gallery’s inaugural L.A. show will be announced in the coming months.