Gagosian Gallery’s new space in London’s Grosvenor Hill brings the total size of its permanent galleries to more than 170,000 sq. ft—more than four times the planned extension of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The Art Newspaper calculates that the total square footage of Gagosian worldwide is 172,163 sq. ft. This new gallery will be the 15th in an empire that spans four continents.
Larry Gagosian began his career with a small business selling posters from a patio in Los Angeles in 1975. The first gallery proper was opened in 1980 in Los Angeles, with a New York outpost established four years later.
London is now a major hub for Gagosian, though he did not launch a gallery there until 2000, the same year that Tate Modern opened. In 2004, the small original space on Heddon Street was replaced with the much larger gallery on Britannia Street. The following year, Gagosian opened a boutique gallery in Mayfair. The third space in London will be designed by the architects Caruso St John, who were responsible for the Britannia Street gallery and those in Paris and Rome.
The opening exhibition at the new Grosvenor Hill space will be dedicated to the late artist Cy Twombly, whose works have inaugurated several Gagosian galleries. The show, which will include previously unseen paintings from the Bacchus series, is organised in collaboration with the Cy Twombly Foundation. It is scheduled to open on 8 October (until 12 December), ahead of the Frieze Art Fair.
