During 35 years in the art world, Paul Schimmel has watched Los Angeles get discovered and rediscovered, and discovered and rediscovered again. If the global art community’s renewed attention seems more permanent this time around, the wave of established galleries moving into town from the East Coast and Europe has a lot to do with it.
Schimmel, formerly the chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MoCA), is a new name partner in the Hauser Wirth & Schimmel gallery’s huge exhibition centre, now under construction in the downtown Arts District. A few minutes’ drive away, across the Los Angeles River in Boyle Heights, the Maccarone gallery will establish its first presence outside Manhattan in a comparably large-scale space, with an inaugural show by the Los Angeles-based artist Alex Hubbard due to open in September. Already operating in Berlin, Cologne and London, the Sprüth Magers gallery, which represents such Los Angeles-based luminaries as Barbara Kruger and John Baldessari, will make its US debut in the city later this year.
“I wanted my artists to have a gallery, a place to hang their hat, in the amazing community that is Los Angeles,” says Michele Maccarone, whose initial gallery space in New York was one of the first to open in the now art-crowded Lower East Side in 2001.
Both Schimmel and Maccarone say their LA galleries will offer fewer, longer shows than their counterparts in other cities. “I suspect the biggest surprise may be a kind of curatorial hybrid that’s almost unheard of here in LA,” Schimmel says. His gallery plans “museum-quality historical and non-selling exhibitions” that will include work by artists not on its own roster.
Maccarone, by contrast, envisions her gallery as a place for artists she already represents “to get introduced to a new audience” or “to exhibit a new body of work in this beautiful space with less anxiety” than is generated by a New York show.
These highly anticipated openings are the latest, and most prominent, in a spate of gallery moves into the Los Angeles art scene. After transferring his operations from Munich to New York’s Chelsea district in 1999, Thomas von Lintel again relocated the Von Lintel Gallery, to Culver City, Los Angeles, in 2014. Sarah Gavlak, a Palm Beach dealer who worked at MoCA and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in Hollywood for most of the 1990s, opened the second Gavlak Gallery on North Highland Avenue, another notable gallery district, around the same time.
“One of the greatest things,” Von Lintel says, “is how welcoming and friendly the people here have been: not just the artists and collectors, but also people from the other galleries.” Like many others, he enthuses about how much more space there is than in New York. “This is the first time I’ve had the flexibility to configure the gallery the way I’ve really wanted.”
Gavlak, whose main curatorial interest is supporting female and LGBT artists, credits the galleries that were already active when she first lived in Los Angeles with laying “fertile ground… galleries like Blum & Poe and Regen Projects that have been here for the past 20 years developing the careers of their artists internationally—in addition to the schools and museums—are the ones who’ve made the city such an important art destination.”
Sprüth Magers’s Los Angeles co-director Sarah Watson believes that, by showing great artists, her gallery will have “real impact”. She adds: “The LA art world is growing, and our reasons for being here are primarily artist-
centred. It’s less market-oriented, though of course that plays a part. But it’s not about world domination.”
• Click here for our interview with Michele Maccarone