The San Francisco art scene is losing one of its most prominent galleries, Altman Siegel, which will close on 22 November after 16 years in business. Claudia Altman-Siegel, who founded the gallery in 2009 in the downtown gallery building 49 Geary, announced her decision to close up shop on Wednesday (15 October).
“As it has become too difficult for a gallery this size to scale in this climate, I have made the incredibly tough decision to close rather than diminish either the space or the commitment to exhibit conceptually uncompromising work,” she wrote in a statement. Recounting the gallery’s expansion into a 5,000-sq.-ft space in the Minnesota Street Project complex and an outpost in the Presidio Heights neighbourhood, she concluded: “Each chapter allowed the gallery to take risks, experiment and keep pace with the evolving practices of our artists. Now, 213 exhibitions and art fairs later, the project is coming to a close.”
Altman Siegel has long worked with multi-disciplinary and conceptual artists who make challenging, boundary-pushing works. It has staged three solo shows by the new-media artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, the last of which closed earlier this month. It has also staged five solo shows by Trevor Paglen, whose work often deals with the bleeding edge of surveillance and technology. The gallery represents many prominent artists who exhibit widely in the US and beyond including Richard Mosse, Simon Denny, Kiyan Williams, Sara VanDerBeek, Didier William and Koak.
Installation view of Lynn Hershman Leeson: About Time (2025), at Altman Siegel, San Francisco Photo by Chris Grunder
The gallery’s final exhibition will be its eighth solo show with the Japanese painter Shinpei Kusanagi (until 15 November).
"Over the past 16 years, Altman Siegel has been proud to cultivate a programme of prominent Bay Area artists and introduce international artists to San Francisco for the first time," Altman-Siegel continued in her statement. "The artists amplified by the gallery programme create radical moments in art history. Whether they highlight social issues, respond to difficult questions about society or rethink traditional subjects and mediums, Altman Siegel has strived to exhibit artists who ask urgent questions and force the viewer to think in a new way."
The gallery has been a prolific participant in art fairs, showing at five US fairs this year—most recently the inaugural Untitled Art Houston. In February, it was one of a handful of galleries that sold all the works on its stand in the opening hours of Frieze Los Angeles.
Altman Siegel’s shuttering comes as the US-gallery ecosystem shrinks amid a broader art-market downturn following the pandemic-era bubble of 2021. This trend has seen a string of closures in recent months, stretching from Los Angeles—where Blum shuttered abruptly, LA Louver revealed plans to gradually sunset its programme, and the New York galleries Tanya Bonakdar and Sean Kelly opted to close their West Coast outposts—to Manhattan, where Tilton, Clearing (which also has a Los Angeles space) and Venus Over Manhattan have wound down operations.
