A tale of two galleries

A recent trip to New York City, a large part of which was devoted to trawling the city’s art scene, gave me the opportunity to experience some of the major-league contemporary galleries.

While a direct comparison with the main galleries in SA would be misplaced, given the difference in the scale of the market and artists’ reach in New York, there are still some interesting overlaps and cross-pollinations. These provide evidence not only of the persistent globalisation of the contemporary art scene, driven as it is by international fairs and festival-type group exhibitions, but also of the persistently curious and engaged nature of many contemporary artists.

Soho and Chelsea traditionally have been the go-to neighbourhoods for contemporary gallery spaces in Manhattan. While they still house many art spaces and vital smaller galleries, one of the most influential larger private gallery spaces, the Marian Goodman Gallery, recently moved from its long-term Manhattan address to a fully refurbished and custom-designed five-storey building in Tribeca, itself becoming something of a new centre for enterprising smaller gallery spaces.

Not that Marian Goodman is small! Until recently, it had a strong South African connection as William Kentridge’s international gallery and opened its new headquarters in October 2024 with a massive archival group show, “Your Patience Is Appreciated: An Inaugural Show”. Featuring some 75 works across media, including new and recent installations, sound and video work, sculpture, and painting, the group exhibition was presented across three exhibition floors of the newly restored Grosvenor Building at 385 Broadway.

The exhibition pays tribute to the gallery’s history as a champion of sparse European conceptual work and its focus on a range of film, video, sound, and installation works, none of which is particularly well-served in the SA contemporary gallery world. Some household names in the massive group show included Christian Boltanski, Marcel Broodthaers, James Coleman, Tacita Dean, Steve McQueen, and Julie Mehretu. Another Goodman Gallery (no relation, incidentally) connection, apart from Kentridge, cropped up in the show with the presence of Tavares Strachan, who recently showed at Goodman in Joburg. A point of interest was a more substantial work by Maurizio Cattelan, the Italian conceptual prankster whose recent duct-taped banana has been causing waves of contempt, misunderstanding, and consternation around the world. McQueen, who was a visual artist working primarily in video before he moved into feature films as a prominent auteur director, showed one of his only photographic lightbox installations, The Lynching Tree, at the same time as his new feature, Blitz, was showing across the city.   

Not too far away, in Chelsea, is mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth. The differences in scale and art-world reach are immediately apparent in this sprawling, multinational, multi-venue contemporary space. The exhibition in its main street-level space in West Chelsea in Manhattan was “Earth & Sky”, by respected multimedia artist Lorna Simpson. Born in Brooklyn, Simpson came to prominence in the 1990s with her pioneering approach to conceptual photography. Her early work — particularly her striking juxtapositions of text and staged images — raised questions about the nature of representation, identity, gender, race, and history that were beautifully evident in this show. The exhibition comprises a series of massive paintings inspired by a 1929 textbook, Minerals from Earth and Sky. The incredible and massive paintings on show are mostly views of a reimagined meteorite that fell to Earth in the 1920s in a story related in the book. The paintings are accompanied by a new text-based wall sculpture referencing the story, describing the astonishment of an unnamed Black sharecropper when a meteorite falls from the sky and lands at his feet, still warm to the touch from its dark flight. The confluence of race and class relations with the estranged and beautiful painterly representations of this alien object was entirely captivating.

As if that wasn’t enough, the upper floor of the gallery featured a capsule retrospective of the work of one of the most famous photographic artists in the world, Annie Leibovitz. Running until the new year, “Annie Leibovitz: Stream of Consciousness” presents a group of works — landscapes, still lifes, and portraits –– made by the distinguished US artist over the past two decades. The exhibition includes more familiar celebrity portraits such as those of Salman Rushdie and Stephen Hawking, with considered images of interiors and historical ephemera such as Elvis Presley’s bullet-riddled television.

While the galleries impress with their grandeur and scale, as well as the star power of artists such as Leibovitz, there is still much attention to detail in both curatorial decisions and presentation, which humanises and deepens the experience.